Saturday April 29, 2006
Opening of NFO XPO, New Trends in Chicago Photography
Location: Version Kuntshalle Iron Studios 3636 S Iron St 1st and 4th floors
Hours: Noon to 2am
Admission: $10/$5

On April 29 all 45,000 Sq ft of exhibition and performance space of the Version Kuntshalle will be open to the public. For two days we will host the NFO XPO and the Version Conference. Also opening is the New Trends in Chicago Photography exhibition. The Group Group Show and the Urban Gardening and Exterior Decorating exhibition will be open during this special weekend program. An extensive performance program and other special programs will take place this Saturday and Sunday. This is our most anticipated event of the festival.

NFO XPO
Opens April 29 noon.
Location: Version Kuntshalle 3636 S Iron St 4th floor
The NFO EXPO (pronounced "info expo") brings art groups, activists, spaces, individual artists and community projects together to exchange information and ideas as well as provide a public platform for each group/individual to present themselves. Through the simple presentation format of a booth or table, based on a science fair model, we will facilitate straight-forward exchanges about what is going on locally in various communities, from disparate neighborhoods in Chicago, to others from around the world. Artist projects and installations will also be exhibited in the space.

Exhibitors, Installations and Participants
PublicActs, Stop Trashing Houston, Chicago Art Department, Uphues Projects Williamsburg, Anti-Advertising Agency, Charles H. Kerr Publishing, Sensory Habitation, Chicago Tapes Project, Heaven Gallery, European Green Card Lottery project, Corpus Corpus, Dino Zora, Rua Minx and Friends (Houston), Bureau of Workplace Interruptions, Co-Op Image, Booster and Seven, Structures Without Integrities, Bike Escorts, Country Club, Rock Paper Scissors (Oakland), IPF Collective, Mule (Knoxville), House of Payne, The Lottery Project, Who Gets the Privilege of Disappointing Me Next?, Research & Development, Art Shanties Project, Working Bikes, Fraction Workspace, Yes Duffy, Three Walls, Cat Jams, Busker Chicago, CWLU, Elastic Arts 3030, Sebastien Oliviet, Chicago Underground Library, Jessica Mac Cormack, Ministry of Walking, WPBR, Map Hub, PlaceKraft, Anti-gravity Surprise, All Rise Gallery, Jessica Mac Cormack, Imaginary Cities, Protest Songbook, Michael Rea, Black Box, and many others. See NFO XPO programs page for details.

New Trends in Chicago Photography
Version Kunsthalle 3636 S Iron St 4th Fl.
Opens Saturday April 29, 2006 7pm
Panel Discussion Dunk Tank 6pm

New Trends in Chicago Photography a compendium of photography curated by Greg Stimac and Brian Ulrich

Featuring the work of:
Paul D’Amato, Mary Farmilant, Matt Siber, Anna Shteynshleyger, Jen Davis, New Catalog, Howard Henry Chen, Jason Lazarus, Deborah Guzman, Nate Baker, Colleen Plumb, Jon Gitelson, Ken Fandell, Geoffrey Carr, Bill Guy, Ross Geesman, Cecil McDonald, JJ Sulin, Anna Cerniglia, Sabrina Raaf, Brian Sorg, Brandon Sorg, Johanna Wawro, Angela Watters, Nate Larson, Curtis Mann, John Zychowski, Marta Sasinowska, Alice Wells, Pieter Ombregt, Jack Edinger, Ben Pier, Christy Karpinski, Chase Browder, Willow Trischetta, Matt Cassel, Bryan Lear, Alyce McQueen, Justin Schmitz, Gideon Barnett, Erik Schubert, Shin Lim, Jason Reblando, Nick Feder, Jennifer Kowalewski.

Panel Discussion Dunk Tank
Hours: 6pm

For more info check out New Trends microsite.

Free University Program Version Conference
In the Urban Gardening Lounge (4th floor) ot the Version Kuntshalle Dock (1st floor)

1pm (4th floor) Understanding the World through Wonder: educating youth on the magic of advertising
Black Wonder + Be Unique
Exploiting a naive belief in magic or wonder, the practice of advertising relies on what cultural theorists call the “magic system” where goods are held to have incredible power. Advertisers are experts at crafting fantastic mythologies about the experience, knowledge, and insight the marketed products promise. Elite advertising firms create allegory or wonder, open-ended communications specifically designed to capture the attention of a particular individual. What impact do commercial messages have on culture and what type of system do they engender and then reiterate? What is the responsibility of the designer when referencing the common beliefs and identity configurations of their audience? Can an audience generate the ability to “overlook” interpretive forms that do not contribute seamlessly to their definition of self?

2pm (4th floor) The Center for Getting Ugly
Rozalinda Borcila
What does it mean to say that our collective body “lacks abilities” relevant to systemic critique and revolutionary change? In biological terms, it means lacking the requisite plasticity in terms of available repertoire, prior experience, and modifiability to develop revolutionary functions. The process by which the available physical and functional characteristics of an organism become expandable, modifiable and, arguably, perfectable through experience is referred to as encephalization. Think of it in simple terms: your cortex can learn to develop a different way of smelling. The Center for Getting Ugly is dedicated to the research and sustained experimentation of social conflict as essential political activity, with the goal of encephalizing collective organs and social technologies for the production of radical politics. Here C.G.U. proposes an extended skill-sharing experimental workshop specifically focused on walking practices – and, given the ways in which mobility is structured around consumption and other forms of subjectivation - on practices of not walking: standing, stopping, pausing, staying and occasionally lying down. The workshop invites walking and non-walking practitioners to elaborate and test out methods for increasing collective radical capability through experience.

3pm (4th floor) Archisuit
Sara Ross
During our lifetimes urban buildings and other public-space architectural elements have began to incorporate details specifically designed to repel people from using them "incorrectly" - three unnecessary armrests across a bus stop bench, odd masonry outcroppings on otherwise perfectly skatable retaining walls, etc. Archisuit is an in-progress project that examines "defensible space" in US cities, taking the form of comical yet comfortable sport suits which help accommodate the human body to the bollards, spikes, studs and other architectural innovations of today while uncovering the nature of national programs like "Design out Crime." Ross presents her work in L.A. and current research in Chicago.

3pm united states of dissillusion (1st floor)
Diamond Jack
Longtime Lumpen contributor Diamond Jack returns with a workshop on how to TURN ON / TUNE IN / DROP OUT (and don't drop back in). He's done it for decades and now you can, too. Radicalize yourself - have knowledge of the illusion and manufactured desires of the corporate state. Personality assimilation as a learned response to advertising. The reward of work as well-being rather than money. Fulfillment in life can't come from fulfilling desires manufactured outside of yourself thru advertising. Turn your life (for its own sake) in the direction of self-worth, maximum personal self-reliance and creative leisure. Now then, will it be the red pill or blue?

4pm (4th floor) Possibility Space - What does your future look like?
JCookson
Climate destabilization. Peak Oil. ChIndia: your future slanguage and cultural leaders. The U.S. McJobs of tomorrow. Overpopulation. Oceanic dead zones. The approaching mass extinction of species. While we party, while we sleep, while we worry about what we'll do to just get by, "scenario planning" is informing the way that probabilities are being strategically leveraged by various power holders in the world. Who is investing in these potential futures? And what do they want from us as unwitting participants?

This presentation is a primer on scenario planning. Most of us have trouble knowing where next month's rent will come from let alone what our planet might look like in the year 2030. But in the same sense, most governments have trouble knowing where their next election base will come from, how they are going to keep the lights on, or who they will have to cede to or takeover to stay in power. The intention of this presentation is to stimulate a discussion on strategies which tactical media projects could proactively apply in the struggle to manifest our visions of the future.

4:30pm (1st floor) : UTR Dev. Corp. - Bridgeport
Jennifer Malloy
During Select Media Festival 4 Malloy worked as a local liaison with Norway's Husbanken Initiative, investigating housing problems in Chicago's Bridgeport neighborhood & proposing potential solutions. She here updates her research with a lecture on developing the community of the future (if the future is the apocalypse).

6pm Temporary Travel Office: Parking Public
Ryan Griffis
Parking lots - one of the most visible yet overlooked artifacts of American mobility - reveal the concrete space required to store the supposed tools of utopian ideals. Parking Public is a mapping of these literally concrete spaces in an attempt to locate the utopia they serve. Underneath both the empty spaces of parking and the empty promises of utopia are real economies and structures of power. The Temporary Travel Office has created tours of parking lots in Hollywood, historic downtown Los Angeles and Champaign, IL. These tours are augmented with surveys recording users' utopian desires. Do these desires match up with the reality being constructed for us?
temporarytraveloffice.net

Performance Program:
Hours: 8pm
Slow Jams Band (New York NY)
Cry Blood Apache (Austin TX)
Rich Porter's "Bug Sized Mind" (Providence)
Mudboy (Providence)
This Is My Condition (Kansas City MO)
Obelisk & MC Cat Genius (Columbia MO)
Cave (Columbia MO)
Skarekrau Radio (Saint Louis MO)
Juiceboxxx/Frankie Martin (Milwaukee WI)
Carpet of Sexy
Mildew (Milwaukee WI)
DJ Liz Armstrong

Public Projects
Public Projects are picnics, tours, public interventions, site specific performances, creative disturbances in public space, and initiatives by space invaders and hijackers.

Street Art Walking Tour by Elisa Harkins
Location: Iron Studios 3636 S Iron St (1st floor dock)
Time: TBA
Elisa Harkins will give a tour of recent street art activity within then neighborhood of Bridgeport.Cracks and Maps: Making

Some Space by Ayelet Even-Nur
Location: Corner of 31st and Morgan St
Hours: 1-4pm
Us urban dwellers experience a life of lines in the metropolis, negotiating streets and sidewalks, the architectural lines of buildings and interiors, train lines, lines of cyber and print text, ETC., not to mention the social borderlines of income, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, and political beliefs by which we define and delineate ourselves. Too often the urban grid becomes its own spider web, an organic geometry of sticky lines with frightening potential. What we need is SPACE, air and area that allow us to escape this mess of modern borders. Must we move to Wyoming? How else can we find it, or make it, or use it to make things better for ourselves and everybody else? Witness an attempt to embody one answer through the outdoor performance installation Make Some Space, as artist Ayelet Even-Nur uses wheel thrown ceramic pieces and the sidewalk to map a parallel city.

Discarded Landscape by Erica Mott
Location: The Art Chicago In The Park art fair in Butler Field
Hours:1 pm
A second performance will take place at Version Kuntshalle during the openings.
Discarded Landscape is a radical re-visioning of the urban landscape through the creative reuse of urban waste. Discarded Landscape endeavors to examine the intersection between natural and synthetic environment by activating the imagination of Chicago citizens, pedestrians and passer-bys, Each sculptural, movement based performance contains and manipulates thousands of common, discarded objects collected from Chicago streets and alleyways.

Touched By Jessica Mac Cormack
Location: TBA
Hours: TBA
Touched is an installation and intervention. Influenced by the semantics of fingerprints in art and forensic science

Artist Brunch and Dinner
Available for pass holders visitors and participating artists. (free for pass holders, $2-3 otherwise) There will also be vendors providing other yummies.

Version 06 @ Art Chicago in the Park
Location: Butler Field
Hours: Noon - 6pm
Version 06 is pleased to partner up with Art Chicago this year. At our booth we will present some of our favorite artist's work, share some news and information about our projects and festival. We also will distribute literature and instructions about Version's NFO XPO and everything else that we are putting on the same weekend. Art Chicago Exhibitors are invited to visit any of our Version events and shows for free. Art Chicago ticket holders can go tot Version events and shows at half price. And Version pass holders can go tot Art Chicago at half price. Check out Art Chicago website for more info.

Artists Exhibiting at our booth include:
Cody Hudson
John Duda
Michael T Rea
Elisa Harkins
Brian Ulrich
And others tba