My online collaborators Mushon-Zer Aviv and Jonah Bossewitch and I are leading off a day of workshops on online collaboration. I love that Jonah and I will be meeting in person for the first time, and that Mushon will be joining us via Skype. How online-collaborative is that!

ElectroSmog SkillShare: Tools and Models for Online Collaboration

Saturday, March 20, 2010 | 10AM – 5PM

Free with RSVP

Limit of 30 participants (in New York).

This SkillShare was conceived as part of the ElectroSmog Festival, a new, three-day, international festival that will introduce and explore of concept of “Sustainable Immobility”: a critique of current systems of hyper mobility of people and products in travel and transport, and their ecological unsustainability.

10:30AM: Michael Mandiberg, Jonah Bossewitch, and Mushon Zer-Aviv (online) will present current models and challenges of online collaboration:

• What is and is not collaboration? What are the advantages and disadvantages of different models?
• Distributed Collaboration as promsing new model of group online development and collaboration
• Online collaboration methods as a way to bridge cultural as well as geographic distance
• Discussion of their work together in Berlin on Collaborative Futures

More here

Pre-Order – for pick up $12.00 Pre-Order – US mail $17.00 Pre-Order – international mail $21.00

March 4th @ 730PM, at EYEBEAM, 540 W 21st St, NYC

Upgrade! NY presents the Collaborative Futures book Launch and talk. Collaborative Futures is a book about free collaboration written collaboratively over five days during the 2010 Transmediale Festival. TM10 locked six writers and one programmer in a Berlin hotel room (pix) to collaboratively write a book about the future of free collaboration; the authors started with only the title, and ended the week with a book. Transmediale artistic director Stephen Kovats will be on hand to join Eybeam senior fellow Michael Mandiberg and Eyebeam honorary resident Mushon Zer-Aviv will discuss the process of writing this book and some of their discoveries throughout the collaborative process. Stephen Kovatz will also talk about the “Futurity Now” concept of Transmediale10 in general and particularly in the context of the Collaborative Futures book sprint.

This event will be your first chance to get your hands on a dead-tree version of Collaborative Futures. Books will be for sale for $15 at the event, but you can pre-order now for $12.

The “Collaborative Futures” book sprint was facilitated by Adam Hyde (FlossManuals.net) and authored by Mike Linksvayer, Michael Mandiberg, Marta Peirano, Alan Toner, Mushon Zer-Aviv and several additional collaborators using the Booki software (booki.cc) by Aleksandar Erkalovic.

RSVP on Facebook

Pre-order here

Somehow I didn’t blog this image.  This is the range of colors for the Bright Bike DIY Kits (http://brightthread.com). These are 3M Scotchlite 680 retroreflective vinyl kits that are solid colors in daylight and super bright in headlights at night.

Right now, I have a campaign going on Kickstarter.com to scale the project up. If you are coming to this post after March 2nd, when that campaign ends, you can get the kits at http://brightthread.com

My solo show “The Great Recession” at PNCA in Portland, OR is a little over one month out. The listing just appeared on the PNCA website. Now I just have to finish making the work! The biiiiig work is mostly done, but there are a number of smaller works that have to be made, or finished, or framed-just-so.

BTW, I am from PDX, so this is officially a homecoming…

Exciting!

This is 16 minutes long animated film of logos and and advertising characters produced by a serious 3D house in France, and nominated for an Oscar, but yet in dire threat of lawsuits for use of corporate logos. At least this is according to the blogs, which, are… well… contradictory. But it is a hell of a great 13 minutes. Great villains, chase scenes, and a surreal vision of contemporary corporate life. It helps if you know Los Angeles.

Great fun. Sad truths. Fantastical visions.

A site called Vintage Ad Browser has over 100,000 categorized advertisements from today all the way back to the 1840s. Categorized by type and date. A great resource for research. (tx @twhid)

Thursday, February 11, 8:00 PM–10:30 PM

Grand EF, Gold Level, East Tower, Hyatt Regency Chicago
Chair: Patrick Lichty, Columbia College Chicago

Inferences to the Atomization of the Artistic System beyond Institutional Spaces
M. Elena Ubeda, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Art in the Age of Dispersion: Snacks, Niche Culture, and the High End of the Long Tail
Patrick Lichty, Columbia College Chicago

Giving Things Away Is Hard Work: Three Creative Commons Case Studies on DIY
Michael Mandiberg, College of Staten Island, City University of New York

Professional Surfers: Contemporary Internet Art and the Montage of Conspicuous Consumption
Marisa Olson, Rhizome

Using Software (Art) to See the World
Warren Sack, University of California, Santa Cruz

I am running a Kickstarter Campaign for the Bright Bike DIY Kits. Even though all the promotion I have done is email this list a little over two months ago, response to the Bright Bike DIY Kits has been larger than anticipated. So much larger than anticipated that I cannot keep up with demand: my assistants and I are making these things by hand. I am actually worried that a big blog might pick it up, as I will not be able to handle the flood. I have to scale the project up, or it is going to eat up all my time (or die.) I am running a Kickstareter.com campaign to raise $2000 to fabricate a jig to cut the kits, buy a whole bunch of vinyl in bulk, and hire an assistant to fabricate the kits.

Please contribute to the campaign to make the Bright Bike kits a stable project. You will get cool stuff in return — Kits! And other special things.

The German newspaper Taz.de has covered our Collaborative Futures booksprint. (English translation here) There has apparently been a lot of buzz about the book during Transmediale. I have received a lot of emails about it, mostly from people who think I am still there and want to pick up copies.

The US release will be March 4th at Eyebeam. Pre-order a copy now.

Is there a word for the irrational and/or rational fear of becoming the target of direct marketers?

Advertisaphobia? Adverphobia? Adphobia? Ad-phobia?