Will participate in a contemporary arts talk series at the Mimar Sinan University Department of Sociology on Thursday, April 17.

Will be presenting MYPOCKET and Meta-Markets in the context of the new generation of media and networked arts.

Keywords include immaterial labor, distributed power, open web services, networked conceptual art, complex systems.

This post acts as my Twitter, each paragraph is limited to 140 character.

Read more at Dugumkume.org (in Turkish only).

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New generation of finance entrepreneurs will be gathering tomorrow (April 12) at the BarCampMoneyNYC 2008 event. It will be an ad-hoc gathering for the people who work in, cover or seek to change the finance industry to share and learn in an open environment. There is sure something about Paul Kedrosky’s signal as New York City being a financial tech startup hub.

I will talk about my recent project MYPOCKET, the personal spending prediction software, and Meta-Markets, an experimental stock market for trading socially networked creative products.

BarCampMoneyNYC Event Details:
Date: April 12, 2008
Time: 9am - 5pm
Venue: Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati, 1301 Avenue of the Americas (between 52nd & 53rd street), 40th Floor.

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This weak leads to two Creative Networking Workshops, tomorrow (March 19) at the MIT Visual Arts Program (VAP) and Thursday (March 20) at RISD. With Amber Frid-Jimenez we will run the workshops during her course Participatory Networks.

Creative Networking Workshops focus on the the design of network protocols as a creative activity and expanding the individual’s thinking about the network medium. Emphasis on network elements, network topology, protocols, and information design. Participants learn the most through observing and creating many examples of networks, sketching diagrams, and authoring protocols. Networked systems in this workshop are not limited to the web or the Internet, but participants are required to design diagrams for running systems; running with animal power, social capital, radio waves or any other model depending on the participants’ concepts.

This workshop is designed based on the experimental work we’ve started to do in the Physical Language Workshop at MIT. We’ve been creating and running experimental infrastructures for the past three years. We extract best practices and best concepts, turn them into recipes and teach them in the workshops and courses. Our goal is to support the development of creative infrastructures, to flourish artist run systems, and to develop critical view on contemporary complex networks.

The first Creative Networking Workshop was done in Istanbul, November 2007.
http://teaching.burak-arikan.com/creative-networking/workshop-itu

* Top image is “G8″ by Bora Akaydin. Created at the first Creative Networking Workshop in Istanbul.

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I will do a presentation at Dorkbot-NYC on Wednesday (March 5). I will talk about my recent projects MYPOCKET, the personal spending prediction software (earlier post), and Meta-Markets, an experimental stock market for trading socially networked creative products.
http://transition.turbulence.org/Works/mypocket
http://meta-markets.com

Other presenter Noel Hidalgo will talk about his amazing project the Luck of Seven, an open-source journey around the world documenting free culture, social innovators & global change. I am quiet interested in the discussion on what he says 21st century anthropological view of the personalities in physical / digital world.
http://luckofseven.com

Marie Evelyn will present the Analogous initiative, an organization that seeks to support complexity-driven art and artists. She calls it a sort of “Santa Fe Institute” for the arts.
http://analogousprojects.org

See you if you are around. It is Wednesday 7pm at Location One in Soho.

* The image on top is the stamp I use to mark the predicted receipts of MYPOCKET.

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Yesterday I participated in the Intel/IFTF Humans, Sensors and Sensemaking workshop in Palo Alto California. It was a day-long expert brainstorming workshop to create a roadmap of 5-6 year opportunities in ‘Sensemaking’ assuming humans interacting with sensors using non-trivial amounts of computation. I had a chance to interact with visionary researchers such as Eric Paulos, Jeff Burke, Anthony LaMarca, David Pescovitz, Andy Greenhalgh, and our Dave Merrill from the MIT Media Lab. We discussed the future applications, enabling technologies, and opportunities.

All the invitees were asked to bring an Artifact from the Future. My artifact was an “Entertaining Virus” from 2015. This virus lives on the servers. It messes with your online profile on social networks. It sends itself to your friend list. It copies your photographs from Flickr to MySpace, it copies your MySpace videos to YouTube, it picks up your YouTube video tags and copies them to your other account on some other future web service. The future generations will enjoy this virus. This social network profile messing virus is the new entertainment in 2015.

After these artifacts, we did Pecha Kucha style short presentations about our current research. I showed Open I/O, how it works, its architecture, creating networked compositions, and protocol authoring as an artistic process.

We had a put-the-idea-on-the-timeline session. Among the other ideas I also placed micro-contracts of Brent Fitzgerald’s Promiserver on the timeline as one of the enabling technologies in 2015.

Overall the most striking thing for me was the graphic artist who sketched the entire session in real-time, and with a consistent graphic language. When I was describing my artifact from the future, it was being visualized in real-time on the white board.

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Murat Germen and I will be presenting some work at Upgrade! Istanbul Meeting in Istanbul Bilgi University. The discussion will go around re-construction of informational space. If you are around Istanbul, please come over.

Feb 22 (today) 6pm
Istanbul Bilgi University, Dolapdere, Z-08.

Here is the announcement at the Upgrade! website:

Space is usually defined / experienced as a physical entity; yet, we recently began to observe that the notion of ‘space’ can exist / be perceived / used as a non-physical organism by means of interactive media and virtual environment applications in the computer platform. Such creations bring new definitions of “space” and can be named as “informational space” or “cognitive space”. As a result, it is possible to talk about a process of re-constructing space. While Burak Arikan pursues this process by creating pieces involving computer networks and using the concepts of connectivity, collectivity; Murat Germen follows a similar path within the realm of digital photography and also computational design studies that he conducts with colleagues from Sabanci University.

Upgrade! Istanbul is a monthly gathering for new media artists, academicians, practitioners, curators and for all of the other actors of digital culture, organized by NOMAD and hosted by SantralIstanbul.

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A gif animation instance of my new work Arb.

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I will be talking about Open I/O at the Pecha Kucha inspired event called 400 seconds in Istanbul. It will start tomorrow (Dec 21) at 7pm at Seksek Taksim Sakizaga Cad. Yogurtcu is merkezi no:19 k:4. Please come around and say hi if you’re around!

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I recently taught a 3 day computational design workshop at ITU Architecture Department. This was an introduction to the fundamentals of computer programming within the context of dynamic visual compositions. Undergraduate students particularly explored abstract macro compositions with details at the micro level.

Participants will show their final work at ITU’s amazing Taskisla campus. After the show, I will present selected works in the context of systems design.

See the columns… Romans were also living here in Istanbul.

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Next day in Ars Electronica, I presented three live software from the Real Time Rome project in the Pixelspaces session organized by Pascal Maresch. I presented with Carlo Ratti who showed the work of the Senseable City Lab at MIT. Other presenters were Toshio Iwai, Horst Hörtner from the Futurelab, and Andrew Shoben from Greyworld.org.

I call these software live because they constantly get data from a remote server while they are running. In the case of Real Time Rome software there are three machines connected to each other: the laptop that presents the visual work, the MIT server where the database and the parsed data lives, and the Telecom Italia server in Rome that spits out the data from the Rome GSM network. Because this type of software is hard to maintain, we show movies from the software in the Ars Electronica Center exhibition.

When I left the Ars Electronica Center, I came accross this romantic view of the Linz Kunstmuseum from the bridge.

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