Burtynsky’s work is a powerful indictment of capitalism’s effects on our planet. With striking compositions of mass production, strip-mining and congested highways, taken from a aerial point-of-view, his photographs are both disgusting and aesthetically beautiful.

In his TED talk here, he speaks about the tension between the depressing content and the sheet beauty of his work, directing the viewer away from a didactic dialogue about human effect on the planet and instead infiltrating our artistic sensibilities with environmental issues.

As part of the Postgravity Art: Synaptiens* event which invites hour-long interventions into a 50-hour performance cycle, I will be enacting a two-person performance: Space Age Love.

Stephanie Rothenberg & Jeff Crouse - Invisible Threads

Upgrade! NY continues its series on open source as it relates to activism and creative practice.

Within activist and creative practice there is a range of models for mobilizing the labor and creativity of the crowd (aka “crowdsourcing”). Both practices experiment with a spectrum of autonomy and control within those models. From distributed design to distributed fundraising, MoveOn to Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcer issues a call and creates structure for participation.

What do we mean by ‘freedom’? Should Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) necessarily be powered by radical politics of ownership and collaboration? Or is the latching of “Free Software” ideological baggage limiting the full transformative power of “Open Source”. How are these questions informed by licenses? Are some licenses more open than others? More ethical than others? This emotional debate has been in the heart of FLOSS from its early days and has created camps and animosities within the community.

Upgrade! NY continues its program series on open source as it relates to activism and creative practice. Join us for a discussion and debate on what constitutes freedom within the Open Source and Free Culture movements. We will examine the strong ideological differences through a provocative panel discussion with Gabriella Coleman and Zachary Lieberman.