What constitutes the "urban" today? How can it be described? Urban life has become increasingly entangled with mobile, embedded, and networked media, communications and information technologies. Yet we often refer to these conditions in terms of social interactions mediated by an immaterial informatic space overlaid onto a physical, material network of buildings, sidewalks, streets and public squares. Doing so not only maintains established dichotomies (between virtual and actual, material and immaterial, social and physical), but also elides some of the more subtle and nuanced modes of encounter and relationality that make up a contemporary urban experience composed of actors, practices and situations that are recurrently performed and enacted. How does a situation matter? What action does it call for? How are its priorities revealed?

From Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, technology has played an important role in shaping contemporary resistance and the representation of these events in the media. What new tools of protest and occupation have emerged over the past year? How does their use help to shape tomorrow’s democracies? The Urban Research Group @ Eyebeam and The Public School New York have invited activists, technologists, artists, designers, and community organizers who have a working prototype of an activist technology to occupy a worktable at Eyebeam and share their work with the public. Drawn from proposals submitted through an open call, we have selected a group of projects and communities that extend the creative use of technology and its social implications. Our interest is in creating a platform for encounter, conversation and collaboration. Visit http://demo-day.org/projects for participating project information.

Video artist, performer, and Eyebeam alum Angie Eng, along with Maïté Colin and Michael Egger, of the [ a n y m a ] collective, will discuss new works and the VideoBass: a project commissioned by Eng. In this talk, Egger will present some of his past audio/visual inventions and multimedia installations. In addition, he and Colin will demo Egger's newest invention. Eng will perform her VideoBass for the first time ever on October 9th, in conjunction with the closing of the New York Electronic Music Festival. At Eyebeam, she will discuss her upcoming performance and its development. Schedule: Doors: 6:00PM Talk with Eng + [ a n y m a ] : 6:30PM Performance: 7:00PM Q & A : 7:45PM Read more about VideoBass here.

Presenters: Eyebeam Fellow Taeyoon Choi and Red Channels collective. In Spring of 2011, Taeyoon Choi collaborated with Red Channels, an open collective that organizes screenings and produces films, to present ideas about 'Crowds in cinema' at a social studies symposium in Chicago. Another manifestation of this collaboration was to produce a single channel video As a Crowd Gathers which was presented at the Whitney ISP exhibition in May 2011.