During last year’s Conflux festival in New York, Mushon Zer-Aviv presented the collaborative project “You Are Not Here,” an “urban tourism mash-up” allowing participants to explore Bagdad while walking around the streets of New York City. Now, he’s working with Kati London, Thomas Duc, and Dan Phiffer (some of the original collaborators on “You Are Not Here”) to put together a similar experience for two cities that are geographically much closer. Participants will be able to walk through the streets of Gaza while physically in Tel-Aviv.
He has also been collaborating with Dan Phiffer on ShiftSpace, an open source project that attempts to do with the web, what “You Are Not Here” does with New York. They have built (are building) tools to allow a second layer to be created on top of the current world wide wibe that we see with our regular web browsers. Inspired in part by the democracy of Wikipedia, they want to give the entire web a layer that is editable by anyone. This project arose from their
[concern] about the main paradigm of the web, namely privatization. While the discourse about the web is full of superlatives implying freedom and sharing, we find ourselves constantly bouncing into new walls and boundaries online. The web is built as a huge set of private spaces - while the internet protocol is indeed distributed, the DNS (Domain Name System) protocol is totally centralized - meaning the control of the page content (no matter how interactive or web 2.0-ish it is) always in the hands of a single private power holder.We are trying to challenge this approach and make a point by not just questioning the web’s power structures, but prove that we can build an interesting and useful tool. ShiftSpace is an open source platform for the social extensions of websites. It is if you will, a transparent layer above any website where users can leave notes, discuss, protest, create art, and deeply explore the interactive potential of the web. (via an interview with Regine Debatty)
