and | mark shepard

Off to RISD to give a talk on sound, architecture, urban space and participation. The lecture takes place Wednesday October 22nd 2008 at 11 am (CIT/Mason Building 413). This is a public lecture - all are welcome. The lecture is part of the seminar Sound, Media & Urban Space and is sponsored by Digital+Media. Thanks to Frauke Behrendt for the invitation!

It's September, and that means Conflux again... This year's festival is moving back across the East River from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and is hosted by the Center for Architecture. I'm moderating a panel discussion bringing together Natalie Jeremijenko (xClinic) and David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang (The Living) to consider new interaction partners for environmental governance and different approaches to working with (and within) urban ecosystems assembled by both human and non-human social networks.

Off to Copenhagen for a pair of talks. The first is on Thursday, June 26 at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, for the EAAE/ARCC 2008 Conference on changing paradigms in architectural research. I'll be speaking about Situated Technologies together with my colleague Omar Khan.

The second talk is on Saturday at Thinking Metropolis, part of Copenhagen International Theatre's ambitious decade-long program aimed at creating an international platform where artists, architects, city planners and theoreticians can meet a common challenge: how to create more living, fair, inspiring and cohesive cities.

I'm looking forward to being in Manchester, UK, this May for the Social Technologies Summit. Part of this year's Futuresonic Urban Festival of Art, Music & Ideas, the conference "brings opinion formers, futurologists, artists, researchers, technologists and scientists from the digital culture, music and art communities together around shared issues to do with technology, society, art and the city." I'll be talking about what I call "propagative urbanism", a way of thinking about shaping the experience of urban space in terms of a bottom-up, participatory approach to the evolution of cities.

I'll be returning to Weimar for this year's MediaCity Conference, where I've been invited to give a talk in the "Situations" session. The conference will investigate how the social settings and spaces of the city are created, experienced and practiced through the use and presence of new media.

This fall the Architectural League of New York launches a nine-part publication series to be published over the next three years. Born out of the three-day symposium, organized by Omar Khan, Trebor Scholz and I, and presented by the League, the Center for Virtual Architecture, and the Institute for Distributed Creativity in October 2006, the Situated Technologies Pamphlet series explores the implications of ubiquitous computing for architecture and urbanism: How is our experience of the city and the choices we make in it affected by mobile communications, pervasive media, embedded computing, ambient informatics, and other "situated" technologies? How will the ability to design increasingly responsive environments alter the way architects conceive of space? What do architects need to know about urban computing and what do technologists need to know about cities? How are these issues themselves situated within larger social, cultural, environmental and political concerns?

Adam Greenfield and myself, co-authors of Situated Technologies Pamphlet 1: Urban Computing and Its Discontents, together with Eric Paulos, director of the Urban Atmospheres group at Intel Research will consider these and other questions at a panel discussion and reception celebrating the launch of the series, to be held on Friday, December 14 at 7pm at The Urban Center, 457 Madison Avenue, New York City.

I'll be delivering an artist talk, conducting a workshop, and installing a version of the Tactical Sound Garden [TSG] at this year's Arte.Mov festival for mobile media. This year's festival focuses on a commitment to the social use of technology for mapping public life and reinforcing a concern for aspects of the social fabric of cities pervaded by mobile technologies.

Here's a link to an interview by Carol Colletta of Smart City Radio where I talk about the TSG and the influence of mobile and pervasive media on architecture and urbanism.

I'm organizing a panel discussion with Adam Greenfield and Janet Abrams for this year's Conflux Festival. Titled "Toward a Schizogeographic Society?", the panel will attempt to re-evaluate the psychogeographic in terms of contemporary conditions of technology, subjectivity and urban space. 2pm, Luna Lounge, 361 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn, NY

I'll be presenting a paper on "Locative Media as Critical Urbanism" at the at the Locative Media Summer Conference, organized by the "Media Upheavals" research center at Universität Siegen and held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Siegen.

Bill Duckworth and Nora Farrel are deploying the Tactical Sound Garden [TSG] as part of their transmedia performance iOrpheus in Brisbane, Australia. iOrpheus is a public opera based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and written for and with South Bank Precinct in Brisbane, Australia. Performed on iPods, mobile phones, and laptops, along with interactive installations and live performers, iOrpheus will take place on Friday, August 31, 2007 in the streets, parks, and promenades of South Bank.

FILE 2007, the Electronic Language International Festival, is holding its annual event this year at Cultural Center of SESI, in Sao Paulo City. FILE's mission is to promote, motivate and disseminate recent research and work in electronic languages, with a special emphasis on collective creativity, art-science collaborations, and networked language experiments. They've selected the Tactical Sound Garden [TSG] to be part of this year's exhibition.

Look for the Tactical Sound Garden [TSG] at this year's SIGGRAPH conference in San Diego, CA. I'll be presenting documentation of the project as part of the Art Gallery and holding gardening hours for curious sound enthusiasts wanting to try it out!

I'm giving a lecture at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Zurich [HGKZ] and presenting the Tactical Sound Garden [TSG] Toolkit at dorkbot.swiss on Friday. On Saturday, I'm conducting a workshop on setting up a Sound Garden at the Kunstraum Walcheturm. All organized by the lovely and talented Monya Pletsch and Martin Feuz!

The Tactical Sound Garden [TSG] Toolkit is being exhibited at the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, as part of CELL PHONE: Art and the Mobile Phone. I'll also be conducting a workshop on how to "grow your own" Sound Garden on April 14.

Being an avid reader of her blog for years, I was flattered when Régine Debatty asked me for an interview. I was doubly flattered when a friend told me it was also posted to worldchanging.com. She also mentioned the Tactical Sound Garden [TSG] Toolkit in her review of this past September's Conflux Festival, published in the January issue of Art Review, a London-based art mag. Thanks Régine! Best of luck in Berlin!

I'll be presenting a *digest* of sorts on the Situated Technologies symposium and participating on a panel discussion at the MEDIACITY conference at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany. The conference attempts a transfer of experiences and theoretical knowledge about opportunities to implement information and media technologies in an urban environment. MEDIACITY is an inter-disciplinary project shared across the departments of Architecture, Media and Urban Sociology, and is funded by the Marie Curie mobility programme "Transfer of Knowledge" of the European Commission.

I'll be presenting the TSG Toolkit at the Performing Places seminar organized by the m-cult center for new media culture, Helsinki, Finland. The seminar brings together researchers, artists and developers whose work touches on the experiential, affective and political aspects of urban and technological life, and who share an interest in inventive artistic and technical practices of the urban environment.

I'm organizing a symposium on the confluence of Architecture and Situated Technologies together with Omar Khan and Trebor Scholz. We're bringing together a fairly diverse and interdisciplinary group of people - including architects, artists, historians, sociologists, technologists and theorists (some wearing more than one of these hats) - to examine, explore and enact ideas for a near-future world of networked "things" and other "situated" technologies.

I'll be conducting a workshop demonstrating how to "grow your own" TSG at this year's Conflux festival, organized by Glowlab. Conflux is the annual New York festival for contemporary psychogeography, the investigation of everyday urban life through emerging artistic, technological and social practice.

Look for the Tactical Sound Garden [TSG] Toolkit in its first city-wide incarnation this summer at the ZeroOne San Jose / ISEA 2006 festival and symposium. More than 150 artists from more than 50 countries will present cutting edge work in more than a dozen exhibitions throughout San Jose and the surrounding Greater Bay Area.

Futuresonic, an Urban Festival of Electronic Music and Arts, is held in Manchester, UK. Organized by Drew Hemment, Futuresonic is now in its 10th year. The Tactical Sound Garden [TSG] Toolkit is being exhibited as part of the Off The Map exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry. Off The Map is presented in association with PLAN (The Pervasive and Locative Arts Network), and supported by EPSRC and University of Nottingham.

The current issue of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA) is a special edition focusing on Locative Media. The Tactical Sound Garden [TSG] Toolkit is part of the online gallery Locative Media, on and off the beaten track.

The Sonar Festival in Barcelona is one of Spain's largest music and media arts festivals. The Tactical Sound Garden [TSG] Toolkit is being exhibited as part of the Always On exhibit, dedicated to mobile culture and location-based projects.

Subtle Technologies is a four-day multidisciplinary event exploring the complex and subtle relationships between art and science. This year's theme for Subtle Technologies is Responsive Architectures, and will investigate how environments and systems can interact and respond to their occupants. I'll be presenting the Tactical Sound Garden [TSG] Toolkit at one of the panels.

I'll be part of a panel session for this two-day event aiming to "bring together new media scholars and practitioners to exhibit and discuss the roles of audiences, activists, and producers in maturing networked media ecologies." The event is organized by the Networked Publics fellowship program at the University of Southern California's Annenberg Center for Communication.

I'm giving a lecture on recent work at Purchase College in the School of Art and Design.

The Third International Mobile Music Workshop explores how devices such as mobile phones, walkmans and iPods have aleady brought music to the ever-changing social and geographic locations of their users and reshaped their experience of the urban landscape. The Tactical Sound Garden [TSG] Toolkit will be presented as a work-in-progress as part of the Soundscapes & Mobile Music Listening theme.

Volume 9 of 306090, an architecture journal published by Princeton Architectural Press, contains an essay situating the Tactical Sound Garden [TSG] Toolkit within the social and historical contexts of sound in public space. 306090 09: Regarding Public Space explores the conception, production, and operation of contemporary public space in the city from the vantage of its design, development, construction, and use.

Industrian Pilz examines the culture of industrialization through the lens of mycology - the botanical study of fungi. The film explores the flotsam and jetsam drifting in the wake of West Germany's absorption of a decaying East German state.

Screening April 20th, 6 PM, at Anthology Film Archives as part of the New Filmmakers Series.