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Email PageEyebeam hosts a digital celebrity salon honoring media and technology visionaries
May 17, 7:00 pm - 11:00 pm
Eyebeam Art & Technology Center
540 W 21st StSince 1997, Eyebeam has provided emerging artists and independent researchers with unparalleled access to technical tools and resources to artists, creative technologists and students. On Thursday, May 17, 2007, a decade and more than 200 artists later, Eyebeam hosts a digital celebrity salon honoring media and technology visionaries who embody the institution's ethos of free expression.
Arianna Huffington and Lawrence Lessig will be honored for their commitment to freedom of speech and information, and for contesting corporate control of intellectual property in the interest of democratic ideals and the innovation that results from shared knowledge.
* Arianna Huffington is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of news and blog site The Huffington Post. She is also a nationally syndicated columnist, and author of eleven books, most recently, On Becoming Fearless...in Love, Work and Life (2006). She is co-host of Left, Right & Center, public radio's popular political roundtable program, and in 2006 was named to Time Magazine's list of the world's 100 most influential people.
* Lawrence Lessig is a professor of law at Stanford Law School, founder of its Center for Internet and Society, and author of numerous publications including, most recently, Code 2.0 (2006) and Free Culture (2004), challenged Congress in the ground-breaking 1998 Supreme Court case on the recent restrictive extension of copyright law.
Recognizing the potential of new media for creative expression and communication, the celebration will poke fun at the never-ending news-cycle and the sensational prattle that it produces. Brought to you by NYC nightlife impresario and Eyebeam friend Serge Becker, the Celebrity Media Mashup, is inspired by the cult of celebrity and influence of new technologies on the worlds of media, politics, entertainment and fashion. Eyebeam's 15,000-square-foot Chelsea space will be transformed into a freewheeling playground in which everything will be recorded, re-mixed by a team of blogging pundits culled from the ranks of sites including Gawker and CNN, and transformed into constantly evolving, large-scale visuals throughout the room.
Committee members John Cusack, Liev Schreiber, and Naomi Watts, among others, will lend their star-power to the night's capers, whose crowning event will be the worldwide launch of the Famous Machine(tm), a unique tool for amplifying recognition, produced in Eyebeam's labs.
Performances and installations by past and current Eyebeam artists will amp up the buzz-factor, with digital social networking specialists nTag and Dirt Party tracking partygoers' movements and minglings in real-time. Projected throughout the room as entertaining info-graphics, the gathered data will make everyone a player.
Special guests The Yes Men - Officers of Identity Correction and media provocateurs will lampoon corporate power though their signature form of pastiche. A silent auction of subversive art and gadgets created in Eyebeam's Research and Development OpenLab will give partygoers a chance to acquire hi-tech tools not available in stores or galleries. Beats by DJ Spooky, rap phenomenon Juice Boxxx and party VJs and DJs Eclectic Method and N-Ron Hubbard will bring the crowd to their feet.
Proceeds from the evening will benefit the 10-year-old art and technology non-profit, which runs residency and fellowship programs that support more than 30 artists each year, and dozens more through educational initiatives, exhibition, and access to equipment and resources. "Not only will the Celebrity Media Mashup be a blast," said Eyebeam Executive Director and veteran new media curator Amanda McDonald Crowley, "it will be a source of direct assistance to artists and will help maintain and expand Eyebeam's vibrant calendar of exhibitions and public programming."
Eyebeam was formed in 1997 by cultural pathfinder and philanthropist John S. Johnson, the founder of several arts non-profits including the Screenwriters Colony, a retreat and workshop for emerging writers and game designers and the Filmmakers Collaborative, and more recently co-founded Buzzfeed, a new contagious media and blogging venture.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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