During this three-part workshop, former Tech Residents Ed Bear and Mani Nilchiani will guide participants step-by-step as we communally create our own open source streaming media platform from a traditional “online” group video chat like Skype, Hangouts, or Facetime. Each session will focus on a layer of the platform (text, audio, and video feeds), and enable participants to engage with the social, economic, environmental, and cultural ramifications of pervasive and invisible “cloud” computing infrastructure firsthand.

Date: The workshop meets in-person on March 15 from 12-6PM. The remaining sessions will be held remotely on March 22 and March 29 from 2-4PM.

Price: Free with RSVP. ($10 Suggested Donation)

Audience: Open to all.

Materials: Participants are required to bring their own laptops and must have a working debit or credit card.

Ed Bear is an American performing artist, educator, and engineer. His work with robotics, sound, video, transmission, and collective improvisation investigates the questionable calibration of social relationships with material technology. As an educator and designer committed to an equitable, open source world, he researches and practices material reuse as a civil and professional responsibility. He has toured extensively in the Americas, Asia, and Europe as a musician, technologist, and teacher, and is currently working with littleBits, Inc. to revolutionize modular electronics.

Mani Nilchiani is an artist, technologist, and musician. His work explores displacement, memory, and diasporic psyche. Nilchiani holds a masters from the Parsons School of Design’s Design and Technology Program. He is from Tehran, Iran and is currently based in Brooklyn.

About Fruits of the Pluralist

Encouraging non-binary perception and embracing contradiction broadens communication to the world and to ourselves. Would it be possible for the real and the imaginary, start and finish, the articulate and the inarticulable, to not be oppositional?

Fruits of the Pluralist is a program series that explores technological systems and practices that recognize many different kinds of identities, structures, and forms of communication. The series will showcase workshops and activations centered in spatiality and non-binary complexity.

For more information, readings, and related materials, please visit https://www.are.na/fruits-of-the-pluralist.

Please note, this class is held on our second floor. At this time, we do not have an elevator. Please email education@pioneerworks.org with any questions or concerns regarding accessibility, or any other questions regarding this workshop.