NYAB Event - "Betaville on the Bowery" Exhibition

"Betaville on the Bowery" Exhibition

WHITE BOX

This event has ended.

MAPS (Media Arts Performance Sound) at White Box directed by Susie Lim, presents BETAVILLE ON THE BOWERY as a part of the New Museum of Contemporary Art Festival of Ideas for a New City. Betaville, an online platform for collaborative public art and urban design, allows users to create their own model of a future Bowery. Guides will assist visitors to White Box, whose facade will be draped in projected camouflage netting and transformed into a Betaville demonstration kiosk. BETAVILLE ON THE BOWERY is designed and developed by Carl Skelton in collaboration with architect Jee Won Kim, and curated by Carl Skelton and Juan Puntes.

Betaville is a massively participatory online platform for collaborative public art and urban design/development applications. Presenting initially as a "mirror world" online avatar of a district, or an entire city, any place or object in a Betaville can be altered or added to by anyone with an internet connection and the will to share. Users can upload their own models at will, as proposals, accessible through auto-generated "flags" hovering over a particular location. Others can comment, leading to an ongoing dialog of chat and design iterations.

For the BETAVILLE ON THE BOWERY project, we will set up staffed workstations to guide festival participants through a purpose-built Bowery, with some proposals already in place. Participants may choose to get involved on the spot, or when they get back home or to their studio, and can use their favored model-building application, from Google Sketchup to Autodesk Maya.

Contributions can range from the pragmatic to psychedelic to political (e.g. real estate brutal development as it relates to gentrification of a neighborhood). So far, Betaville has seen everything from subway entrance remodeling to mixed-use development plans, commuter-policed fish farms, Astroturf Mega-text, and a section of Constant's New Babylon ported to the Brooklyn waterfront. We can hardly wait to get started on the Bowery! An esplanade, terraced for the future Second Avenue subway entrances, new works of art sprouting out of buildings, sustainable architecture, vertical gardens or video embedded in sidewalks: neighbors, experts, and artists can get involved in the days leading up to the festival, and in the years beyond.

Betaville is a joint open-source project of the Brooklyn Experimental Media Center (BxmC) at the Polytechnic Institute of NYU and the Media2Culture (M2C) Institute for Applied Media Research at the Technical University of Bremen.

Please consider donating to Kickstarter to help fund the installation of BETAVILLE ON THE BOWERY: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/465953108/maps-presents-betaville-on-the-bowery-0

PROJECT LINKS:
www.whiteboxny.org
http://betaville.net/
http://bxmc.poly.edu/betaville