Aaron Swartz Day co-founder Lisa Rein talks about about her work with the annual hackathon. Founded in 2013 after the death of activist and programming wunderkind Aaron Swartz, the event draws attention to Aaron’s story in hopes of protecting others from similar circumstances and offers a yearly showcase of the many projects initiated by Aaron as well as new projects inspired directly by him and his work.
Lisa also talks about her background as archivist for Chelsea Manning: “When I learned more about Chelsea, without getting into whether you agree with what she did or what she didn’t do, she definitely followed her heart and wanted to improve the world and that’s an Aaron Swartz Day thing.”
Produced by Michal Wisniowski and The Kitchen Sisters
Lisa Rein, Co-Founder, Aaron Swartz Day. Chelsea Manning’s Archivist, Dr. Timothy Leary’s Digital Librarian (Photo: Kevin Footer – Art Design/Concept: Kenneth Bryan Smith)
Projects to Hack On at the Conference (so far – as people can invent their own projects at any time over the course of the weekend!) (Including projects for non-programmers!)
VR Faire (new page coming soon), featuring:
-The EFF’s “Spot the Surveillance” –Noisebridge‘s BCI (Brain Computer Interface) Application,
(new page coming soon)
–GameBridge‘s VR Tour of Noisebridge
These Early Bird Passes are only available until midnight on August 15th.
Hello everyone in Aaron Swartz Day-land. We are expecting a full house this year for our San Francisco Hackathon and subsequent Reception & Evening Event. This will be our largest event to date, and many of our speakers are flying in from out of town.
For these reasons, in order to supplement our finances for this year’s grand extravaganza, we have decided to sell some “Early Bird All Access” Passes.
So, until midnight on August 15th, you can buy an “Early Bird All AccessPass” for only $20! (For up to 100 passes, while they last.)
Each “Early Bird All Access Pass” Includes:
1) Admission to both days of the Hackathon ($25 value) (Don’t panic. No one will be turned away for lack of funds. See the note at the bottom of this announcement :)
2) Admission to Reception and Evening Event ($50 Value)
3) Admission to After Party – 10:30 pm-2am ($20 Value) – Location TBD
8pm – Evening Event – Special Guests Speaking or Performing (or both):
As always, please write aaronswartzday@gmail.com if you need a free ticket. There are student discounts too, but you need to write us first to get the code.
From “The History of Aaron Swartz Day” Museum/Art Gallery Installation. By Lisa Rein, Ryan Sternlicht, Bernice Chua, Alex Peake, Tracey Jaquith & Matteo Borri. Border Artwork: Kenneth Bryan Smith. Pixelated Aaron Artwork: Ryan Junell.
At the end of last year’s annual event (Fifth Annual Aaron Swartz Day – 2017) we decided collectively to keep the momentum going on all of our hackathon projects. Some of us had experimented with VR that weekend, and a group of us decided to keep going with our VR project.
As a result, a small team (Ryan Sternlicht, Bernice Chua, Alex Peake, Tracey Jaquith, Matteo Borri, Kenneth Bryan Smith & Ryan Junell) has been working closely with me on the first exhibit of what will be “The Swartz-Manning VR Museum, Art Gallery, and Fun House.”
We are building everything using the Unity gaming engine, and incorporating 3D art, gaming, history, and storytelling into an interactive virtual reality environment.
We will teach history and technology, while helping folks get acquainted with the basics of being in a Virtual Reality environment. We can help “newbies” get acquainted with VR, while providing entertaining and educational content.
Our hope is to become a premiere location – for artists, historians, educators and VR newbies, as VR gradually becomes more popular and enters into the mainstream – by providing an accessible, educational VR destination, and development platform, that can serve as an example to others.
The Swartz-Manning’s first exhibit will provide a detailed history of Aaron Swartz Day, including the story of how I worked with the Aaron Swartz Day community to provide friendship and support to Chelsea Manning, before she was released from military prison, in May 2017.
Noah Swartz (Aaron’s Brother) and his letter to Chelsea Manning, July 2016. From “The History of Aaron Swartz Day” Museum/Art Gallery Installation. By Lisa Rein, Ryan Sternlicht, Bernice Chua, Alex Peake, Tracey Jaquith & Matteo Borri. Border Art: Kenneth Bryan Smith.
The second set of exhibits, displayed in their own “Leary Wing” of the museum, will eventually provide a complete timeline of Dr. Timothy Leary’s life, starting with his birth in 1920. For these exhibits, we are collaborating directly with Dr. Leary’s son, Zach Leary and his Personal Archivist, Michael Horowitz.
From the “Folsom Prison Dr. Timothy Installation” By Lisa Rein, Ryan Sternlicht, Bernice Chua, Alex Peake, Tracey Jaquith & Matteo Borri. Floor Artwork: Kenneth Bryan Smith.
There will be numerous other museum and art gallery exhibits to follow, including historical artifacts such as letters, photographs, and audio/video recordings, merged with artistic installations; paintings you can step into and walk around in, to re-creations of historical rooms and locations, journals you can read through, so you can peer into the minds and thoughts of these three inspirational icons.
The Swartz-Manning VR Museum, Art Gallery, and Fun House will include four different types of installations:
1) A “traditional” kind of museum, in Virtual Reality.
“Traditional” museum exhibits (essentially, artifacts presented on walls and displays). (It seems kind of like a waste of VR to us, but we can do it, easily, and there seems to be a demand for it :-)
2) A “Fun House” version of the museum’s archival content.
The Fun House is a VR game that teaches about history while you wander around in different environments made up of the the same art and historical artifacts as the traditional version, all woven into a game, using animations and visually stimulating content and characters to create an ever-expanding game-like learning environment.
You can explore completely anonymously, or keep track of your trip, and share with others as a “flashback.” There is literally a trivia game that can be played with the “TimBot” robot character, or the player can watch videos, look through pictures, or just keep walking around looking at stuff in the house.
3) Art Gallery Installations, Platform & Templates to enable artists to create their own VR worlds.
An experimental Art Gallery platform and installations with “educational zones.” This Art Gallery platform will provide templates to enable artists to exhibit their own creations in VR easily. Artists may wish to exhibit in our gallery or greate a gallery of their own and we encourage derivative galleries – and make our templates freely available for use under a Creative Commons license.
Users can frequent our “Educational Zones” to learn how to quickly build their own VR spaces using CAD templates.These educational areas will explain and teach how the museum itself was built, step-by-step. (Complete with CAD templates.)
A focus on teaching “Solar Survival Technologies” – using VR and special inventions by our team members, to help teach folks that might be temporarily homeless (after a natural disaster, or just from being displaced) how to build devices such as solar cell phone chargers, or a freshly-invented “Vampire Charger,” that actually enables a cell phone to be charged safely from whatever random batteries happen to be lying around after a disaster, while protecting the phone from blowing up from a sudden power burst – for use by the homeless or after a natural disaster. (Technology courtesy of Advisory Board member Matteo Borri, who has just built a chlorophyll detector for NASA’s next MARS rover-like robot.)
We will most likely make the project available for download from the Internet Archive, and will have versions running on all platforms. Ideally, we will have multiple implementations going at first, while we conduct user testing and build out the first version of a framework.
Dr. Timothy Leary, Chelsea Manning and Aaron Swartz have more in common than you might think. All three of these people risked their freedom and their lives to make a positive difference in the world (whether they realized it at the time, or not :-) We will tell these stories, and others, while also creating an experimental art and teaching everyone VR development basics.
We are also experimenting with photogrammetry and 3D scanners, to construct 3-D models of many interesting objects from several historical archives, and also locations in nature, such as the desert.
The goal is to use a 3D scanner for some objects, and use photogrammetry “in the wild” for taking pictures of living objects. (I have a team member in the Imperial Desert, for instance, capturing wild flowers and insects there.) We are looking to partner with 3-D scanning companies and VR haptics companies, and various hardware accessory companies of all kinds. (Contact: Lisa Rein: lisa[at]lisarein.com)
See you there, if you’d like to learn more or contribute. Or email lisa[at]lisarein.com.
Thanks for taking a look and giving me your ideas.
Lisa Rein
Founder, The Swartz-Manning Museum, Art Gallery, and Fun House
Lisa Rein, Founder, Swartz-Manning VR Museum, Art Gallery, and Fun House, Co-founder of Aaron Swartz Day, Chelsea Manning’s Archivist, Co-founder, Creative Commons (Photo: Kevin Footer – Art Design/Concept: Kenneth Bryan Smith)
Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Chelsea Manning in Ann Arbor, MI
They spoke together in Ann Arbor, on March 15, at the University of Michigan, and in Pittsburg, on March 20, at the Carnegie Mellon School of Art.
Heather and Chelsea, with illustrator Shoili Kanungo made a beautiful little comic book about Chelsea and Heather’s first collaboration, “Radical Love.” The last frame of the Supressed Images comic book has Chelsea out of prison and looking at her own self-portraits for the first time. It was an emotional moment when it came true, and Heather helps me take a walk down memory lane, so we can bring you all sides of this amazing story :-)
Top pic: #11 of their Supressed Images comic book, published January 17, 2017.
Bottom pic: Chelsea at the installation at the Fridman Gallery, in New York City, in August 2018.
Seriously folks. We are talking about a dream come true ending here.From “Probably Chelsea” at the Fridman Gallery, NYC.
Imagine how incredible this must have been; the first time someone “transformed” one object into another, like magic, with editing! :-)
A bat transforms into Mephistopheles in ‘The Devil’s Castle’ (1896) Considered the First Vampire Movie, directed by Georges Méliès pic.twitter.com/AHf0tgvcpC
Fridman Gallery is pleased to present A Becoming Resemblance, an exhibition by Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Chelsea E. Manning, investigating emerging technologies of genomic identity construction and our societal moment.
In 2015, Heather began to produce 3D printed portraits derived from the DNA extracted from cheek swabs and hair clippings Chelsea mailed out of prison. Incarcerated since her gender transition and subject to a strict policy on visitation, Chelsea’s image was suppressed from 2013 until her release from prison in May this year. The artistic collaboration with Heather gave Chelsea back a form of visibility, a human face she had been denied.
As Chelsea described the collaboration: “Prisons try very hard to make us inhuman and unreal by denying our image, and thus our existence, to the rest of the world. Imagery has become a kind of proof of existence. The use of DNA in art provides a cutting edge and a very post-modern—almost ‘post-post-modern’—analysis of thought, identity, and expression. It combines chemistry, biology, information, and our ideas of beauty and identity.”
