and | mark shepard

Presenting the Survival Kit as a talk for this year's Subtle Technologies symposium, June 11-14, 2009, in Toronto.

Concept sketches for preliminary items in the Sentient City Survival Kit are included in the exhibition The Global Polis: Interactive Infrastructures, curated by Nader Vossoughian and organized by the Center for Architecture.

Opening: Friday, May 15 @ 6pm at the Center for Architecture, 536 LaGuardia Place, New York City. I'll also be participating in a workshop that afternoon from 1-4pm on Energy Infrastructures with what looks to be a great group of people.

Eyebeam's quarterly event series dedicated to showcasing leading artists in the fields of live audiovisual performance, interactive and participatory art, will present its fifth iteration on Friday, March 6 - Saturday, March 7, 2009 from 9pm–2am @ Eyebeam: 540 W. 21st, NYC. Using the World's Fair as the framework, Eyebeam will transform its rugged warehouse space into a temporary village of utopian pavilions for a two-night extravaganza called MIXER: EXPO. (Tickets are available here).

I'll be presenting a new project called Hertzian Rain, a variable event structure designed to raise awareness of issues surrounding the wireless topography of urban environments through telematic conversations based on sound and bodily movement. This iteration will be performed in collaboration with G. Douglas Barrett, Al Laufeld, Dan Perlin, Craig Shepard and others.

I'll be participating on a panel discussion Thursday, March 5, 6:30pm @ Studio X reassessing the idea of the Commons in light of contemporary economic conditions. Panelists include Nora Libertun De Duren, Director Of Planning, New York City Parks And Recreation Department; Olympia Kazi, Executive Director, Institute For Urban Design; Michael Mandiberg, Artist and Senior Fellow, Eyebeam; and Brooke Singer, Artist and Assistant Professor, Purchase College. Moderated by Gavin Browning, programming coordinator, Studio X.

The panel is organized by Studio X and Eyebeam as a prelude to the performance of Hertzian Rain at Eyebeam's MIXER: EXPO, March 6-7, 2009.

Studio X is located at 180 Varick Street, Suite 1610, New York, NY.

Now here's something exciting from Mimi Zeiger that I'm (peripherally) involved in, thanks to Kazys:

A Few Zines: Dispatches from the Edge of Architectural Production is an exhibition that examines '90s architecture "zine" culture and its relation to contemporary architectural publishing. To launch this exhibit, curator Mimi Zeiger has published a new issue of her zine loud paper and organized a party and panel discussion on Thursday, January 8, 2009, 6:30 pm @ Studio-X, 180 Varick Street, Suite 1610, New York, NY. Free and open to the public.

The Tactical Sound Garden [TSG] is included in Tourism: Spaces of Fiction, the inaugural exhibition at the new Design Museum in Barcelona. The exhibition explores the relationship between design and tourism and is on view from December 3, 2008 - May 24, 2009.

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.