screenshot of Indeterminate Hikes+

Founded by Leila Christine Nadir and Cary Peppermint, EcoArtTech is a postdisciplinary collaborative whose work spans art, music, performance, theory, criticism, and creative writing. Their projects like bascamp.exe and eclipse “investigate the overlapping terrain between “nature”, built environments, mobility, and electronic spaces.”

EcoArtTech’s research has received awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, as well as numerous university fellowships. Their performances, exhibitions, and lectures have taken place at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Postmasters Gallery, and 319 Scholes. And their work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum, the Walker Art Center, Rhizome.org at the New Museum.

As part of the New Museum’s IDEAS CITY Street Festival, EcoArtTech will unveil a new version of the participatory performance piece and mobile application Indeterminate Hikes+, in collaboration with #ArtsTech. Through a series of walking tour performances staged for IDEAS CITY, EcoArtTech will renew the public’s connection to our city’s intertwining biological, cultural, and media ecologies by slowing down tour participants and asking them to see Manhattan in a new light. The walking tour will traverse the pristine industrial landscape of the Bowery, transforming its busy sidewalks into sites of ecological exploration.

Join #ArtsTech Indeterminate Hikes+ Walking Tours:

Tour 1: starts at 2PM

Tour 2: starts at 4PM

Participants should meet at the ARTSTECH Booth #19 on the corner of Stanton & Bowery.

Saturday’s First ever ArtsTech UnConference was a huge success with no small thanks to ever impressive featured session presenters and our amazing members who kept the conversations and spontaneous sessions going. The attendees got into the swing of things and added sessions on the spot to the schedule, in addition to our featured sessions that the ArtsTech team profiled on Tumblr leading up to the Conference. At the end, there were 36 sessions that we had on the official schedule! If you missed any of the write-ups on our impressive line-up of speakers, a previously posted breakdown of who was featured is found here. Sylvia Heisel should get a special shout-out for her endurance, hanging out for the entire day, to showcase all the innovations in Wearable Tech materials, and letting Conference goers stop by and try on some of the fabrics for themselves. The Twitter conversations were flowing, and some members even used it as a way to follow the conversation on what they were missing in one session while in another… 

Just missed the Visceral/Behavioral/Reflective #ArtsTech panel, @kelaninichole & @sunrarx need to redo for me now now instagram.com/p/YnzzRzyptT/

— Marina Galperina (@mfortki) April 27, 2013

We wanted to offer another sincere thank you to our sponsors food and beverage sponsors, Plated and Dark Horse, to Marius Waltz for designing our totes, and of course to our hosts and supporters Solo Foundation, Wix, and AOL, for which all of this was possible. We’re looking forward to next year, and we’d love to hear feedback that we can use to make 2014 even better.

To relive some of the action, be sure to check out our photos and a storify post highlighting some of Saturday’s most memorable moments.

Miriam Simun, a research-based artist investigating the implications of socio-technical and environmental change through the creation of participatory experiences will be at the #ArtsTech UnConference this Saturday conducting a public online/offline/3rdline hacking workshop she calls - VINE-POPS.

Vine - a video sharing mobile app owned by Twitter, where people create 6 second videos and can share them and embed them across different social networks.

POPS - Privately Owned Public Spaces that are legally open and available to public use but owned and maintained by private entities. Created as a zoning concession program by the City of New York, developers design, build, and manage these spaces all over the city in exchange for being allowed to build higher than the zoning laws allow. The result is a space dedicated to the public but monitored by private security, and designed by corporate interests and aesthetics. Example: Zuccotti Park

Miriam’s workshop will seek to mobilize conference goers to establish our public rights to the POPs spaces in Astor place by performing private and playful acts that demonstrate the public access and public utilization of these spaces, for the explicit purpose of capturing these activities using Vine videos.  The workshop will include a short presentation on the history of POPS, ‘how-to-tips’ on making compelling VINE videos, and then a 20-minute sojourn into the three POPS in Astor Place, where participants will make their own VINE-POPS. Props will be provided for people to explore and have fun ‘laying claim’ to Privately Owned Public Spaces.

The 6 second summary - Attendees will hack POPS by exploiting developer legal loopholes for the public good, hack VINE to make art, and hack life to make video.

The session will bring together different social media professionals in a roundtable discussion of best practices and strategies for managing time-sensitive art world happenings. From press conferences to live performances to public art to high-profile parties—topics will touch on planning techniques, tools of the trade, managing participation, post-event tips and how to be a live tweeting pro. From the initial discussion, participants will compile a useful guide to planning and executing timely social media campaigns.

With all that happens in an art world calendar year it’s impossible to experience everything without it being shared through social media. Conversely, if something that’s happening isn’t shared on social media, it can easily slip through the cracks. From a strategic standpoint it gets even more specific, because without a plan, the long-term benefits that come from promoting and capturing real-time participation can be lost. This session will give people a chance to talk to, and learn from industry professionals that are setting the standard for social media “in the scene” and “on the screen.”

Susi Kenna, FITZ & CO’s Account Executive for Social Media, is responsible for developing social media strategies and directing new digital initiatives for both the firm and its clients. Prior to FITZ & CO, Susi held positions at Christie’s auction house and interdisciplinary design firm C&G Partners before independently consulting on marketing and social media strategy for contemporary art ventures. Kenna holds a Bachelor’s of Business and Administration in Design Management from Parsons The New School for Design. She is a Co-Chair of the Junior Associates of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and a member of the New Art Dealer’s Alliance (NADA).

Lucy Redoglia (aka @meteveryday) is a former blogger—after visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art more than 150 times in a single year and writing about what she learned, she was hired by the Museum in 2009. In her role in the Online Marketing and Website group, she is responsible for visually representing the Museum across all social media channels and through email and online marketing campaigns. Also the social media manager for Art Privée in a freelance capacity, Lucy manages the fledgling art website’s social media content on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Flickr.

Susi and Lucy will host the discussion with Todd Florio, CreativeTimeNYC; Jennette Mullaney, The Highline; and one or two more surprise guests.

Zeeshan Lakhani will be leading our featured session on Beautiful Code - this workshop is about movies & coding styles, patterns, and kickass abstractions. Finshed products, apps, and prototypes are what we use, read about, and teethe over, but the day-to-day making/building/running/testing of a project is, at times, frustrating, tedious, and vacuous (sometimes all at once). For some, including myself, coding was thought of as a means to an end… an assumption that was wrong.

Zeeshan will also talk about pattern-matching, macros, types, closures, refactoring, and really making code open-source.

Code by itself almost rots and it’s gotta be rewritten. Even when nothing has changed, for some reason it rots.

-Ken Thompson

Zeeshan originally started out as a filmmaker, who became a musician, who became a coder, who then actually began to really love coding. Programming made sense to Zeeshan, who moved from science center to startup to a gig at the New York Public Library Labs, he accrued tons of necessary and needless information, and is a polyglot who will dive into anything related to Python, Javascript, Go, Clojure, Ruby, Processing, Circuits, Machine Learning, and MATH!

Participants in this session will learn how to write better code for collaboration (how to really do open-source) and that even though there may be a vast set of languages and low-level complexities involved in coding (one of my previous fears), there are some elegant abstractions and paradigms that are generalized across the board.

Artists, creative technologists and their collaborators engage their audiences, not just as recipients or participants, but also as users. With art mediated through digital systems, considering user behavior is no longer a luxury but a necessity. Methods from a user-centered design approach can help test and refine your vision—before you slog through its development—to ensure that it opens the dialogue you want to explore with your audience. This overview will provide a framework to think about your process, and help you identify what techniques will advance your work and when to put them into action. This is not your grandmother’s usability testing.

Highlights of this presentation include:

• Understanding your audience as users
• How user-centered design works
• Planning what methods to use
• Developing a test plan
• Demonstrations of directed storytelling and bodystorming 

Ben Elgart is a strategist and interaction designer at G2. He bring insight from psychology and human behavior to plan, design and evaluate experiences that connect businesses with consumers.

Unconference Featured Session Spotlight

Photo from flickr.

(photo from inside Sleep No More, one example of multimedia storytelling, courtesy of Vanity Fair)

Brendan Schlagel is currently writing a book about multimedia storytelling, a broad piece of terminology that refers to using various formats and technologies to communicate via narrative—this can be for all sorts of purposes, from entertainment to marketing to journalism. He will be leading this interactive discussion group because he is very curious to hear ideas from other artists, technologists, and thinkers on everything from specific creative techniques and the pragmatics of telling an engaging story to the fundamental principles that will guide this field forward. He will show a range of examples of multimedia storytelling from performances like Sleep No More to Paul Salopek’s “Out of Eden” project to help spark discussion. He will also give a free copy of his book to all attendees once it has reached completion!

Potential topics for discussion include:

• Basic mediums from which stories are crafted (written text, visual design, time, audio, video)

• Theoretical concepts surrounding narrative creation (authorship, truth and ethics, evolution, potentiality, nonlinearity, networks and systems)

• Metamediums and transmedium spaces (performance and theatrics, the build environment, the Internet, games and storyworlds)

• The creative process (practical aspects of creating a multimedia story, from ideation to construction to editing to distribution)

Questions to address:

• How does multimedia change our approach to creating for business, marketing, art, entertainment, and other uses? What does this allow us to do that “traditional” storytelling does not?

• How do “mediums” relate to more general narrative concepts; what’s the best way to frame the process of creating multimedia works and discussion/analysis of what results?

• Who is doing innovative work in multimedia storytelling, and what makes such work particularly effective?

• Going forward, what challenges and possibilities must we keep in mind when crafting the future of storytelling technologies?

Artist Carla Gannis brings together this round table discussion where thought leaders in the #ArtsTech community will discuss the work of art/tech practitioners generating critically and socially engaged content. The panel will analyze and debate the current trends in digital art that may preclude it from analysis for substantive content outside of its own processes.

Gannis is a transmedia artist who lives and works in Brooklyn. Her solo exhibitions include “The Multiversal Hippozoonomadon & Prismenagerie” at Pablo’s Birthday Gallery, New York, NY; “Jezebel” at The Boulder Museum of Art, Boulder, CO; and forthcoming “”<legend>   </legend>”” at Transfer Gallery, Brooklyn, NY. At the Unconference, she is looking forward to a day of demonstrations, performances, talks and presentations that remind her of why “it’s really exciting to be alive at this particular moment in history.”

Michael Feld is a sound designer and music producer, specializing in live and recorded sound for theater, media, poetry, ethnography and experimental performance. He utilizes live sampling, foley art collage and digital production techniques in his work, composing soundscapes from a wide variety of sources from the organic to the synthetic. His approach to using organic materials as a source for digital media will be of interest to anyone looking for innovative performance techniques. Michael has created sound and music for the Bushwick Starr, the Manhattan Rep, the Metropolitan, Brooklyn Arts Exchange among others.

Michael will be at the UnConference, conducting a workshop on using every day sounds and objects as instruments as a source for digital music and sonic possibilities. This session will introduce the intuitive nature and performance qualities of digital music.

This session will demystify techniques of digital sound manipulation who are new to the form, while giving conference goers hands-on experience working with electronic instruments, and working together as an ensemble. An emphasis will be placed on performance techniques using effects and control surfaces to combine the organic and the synthetic. All attendees will receive materials for using this art form as a teaching tool.