2600 Magazine presents The Next HOPE, the eighth conference in the 16 year history of the Hackers On Planet Earth series. It will happen at the Hotel Pennsylvania in the middle of New York City from July 16-18, 2010, and will be the largest creative technology conference on the U.S. East Coast.

The Next HOPE will feature a wide variety of tech art installations, but the submission deadline for participation in Artspace at The Next HOPE will be end of day on June 10th.

We invite artists, local and beyond, who have a vision of the future expressed as installation art. Installations must be technology-based. They can range from electrical experiments to computer-controlled machines, to data and information processing visualizations. They can be static or interactive, and they could be visual or musical, this is a very open field. This is an unpaid exhibition, but the selected installation artists will be given free admission to the conference, and inclusion in an online gallery with artist biographies which will be set up for promotional purposes.

If you have already submitted work for consideration, you will be contacted shortly.

What are your space, power, time, and data connection requirements? Contact the curator with that information as soon as possible.

2600 Magazine presents The Next HOPE, the eighth conference in the 16 year history of the Hackers On Planet Earth series. It will happen at the Hotel Pennsylvania in the middle of New York City from July 16-18, 2010, and will be the largest creative technology conference on the U.S. East Coast.

Personal privacy will be the focus of a key project at The Next HOPE, when hackers unveil the next generation of a technology that could send privacy advocates into panic mode, and enforcer-types into nirvana.

[press release]

[click here to view or download this video in high definition]

Conference attendees will see first hand where human tracking by commercial and government interests may be headed when they are offered an active RFID conference badge.

Participation in RFID tracking is completely voluntary. If you wish, you can request an electronics-free “unpopulated” badge at registration, or simply remove the battery from your “populated” RFID badge at any time. There will be a limited number of the full-featured badges, so register early to be guaranteed to receive one.

RFID devices are increasingly being embedded into new clothing, handbags, footwear, mobile phones, credit cards, passports, and even tires. Some say this technology is only for “inventory control” and “security” –but The Next HOPE will give you an opportunity to decide for yourself, as you play with uses, abuses, and countermeasures in the OpenAMD system.

OpenAMD will also show the promise and the dark side of familiar social media sites and how they fit into theme of personal privacy when combined with other database and tracking technologies.

The entire project is Open Source, and developers worldwide are invited to create their own apps before and during the conference with the newly released Public API. The possibilities are endless, and all attendees will be part of the fun in this hacker version of massive scale installation art.

For more information, including API documentation, visit http://amd.hope.net or contact the OpenAMD team via amd@hope.net

2600 Magazine presents The Next HOPE, the eighth conference in the 16 year history of the Hackers On Planet Earth series. It will happen at the Hotel Pennsylvania in the middle of New York City from July 16-18, 2010, and will be the largest creative technology conference on the U.S. East Coast.

Traditionally HOPE conferences have been more about the talks than the physical projects, but with the 2008 conference that started to change, and this time organizers are pushing for an even stronger showing of projects and tech art. This call for projects goes out to hackers, makers, technologists, artists, and free thinkers around the world. Come share your passions and ideas with 3,000+ of your soon-to-be closest friends.

If you want to pitch in and you don’t know what to do…

• Lounge/Hang-Out Spaces
  • HOPE usually has work spaces, seminar spaces, and crash spaces. Can you organize more chill zones for simple conversation?
• Games
  • You have 3,000+ people, three floors of a massive hotel, an RFID tracking system, and The City of New York. What can you do with that? Teach, play, explore.
• Art
  • What’s your vision of the future?  Show us using hardware, software, electricity and imagination.
• Night Life
  • The talks usually stop around midnight. What else could be going on between midnight and 9am? Plan it, make it interesting, make it happen.

The main visual theme of the conference is visions of the future from the past, so things that reference The World’s Fairs, The Jetsons, flying cars, DaVinci, Asimov, and so forth would be very appropriate. However, projects are not required to carry the central theme in any way. Some projects, such as OpenAMD, are already being planned to be simply visions of the future from the present, rather than referencing any futurist thoughts from antiquity.

Some projects already in the works include…

• The Attendee Meta-Data Project (“OpenAMD”)
  • An expansion of the RFID crowd tracking project from The Last Hope.
  • Needs programmers and hardware hackers, and is prime for spinoff projects.
  • Many possibilities exist for the development of games, data mining, and visualizations.
  • Ask about the OpenAMD API.
  • http://amd.hope.net/
  • contact: amd@hope.net
• Radio Statler!
  • Streaming 24 hours a day live from the expo floor.
  • Needs people to do shows, experienced engineers, reporters, and people with interesting audio gear.
  • Needs a large isolation booth.
  • http://radio.hope.net/
  • contact: radio@hope.net
• Art Space
  • The Next HOPE invites artists, local and beyond, who have a vision of the future expressed as installation art.
  • Installations must be technology-based. They can range from electrical experiments to computer-controlled machines, to data and information processing visualizations, they can be static or interactive, and they could be visual or musical, this is a very open field.
  • This is an unpaid exhibition, but the selected installation artists will be given free admission to the conference, and an online gallery with artist biographies will be set up for promotional purposes.
  • What are your space, power, time, and data connection requirements?
  • contact the curator: artspace@hope.net
• The Hackerspace and Hardware Hacking Village
  • A 24 hour gathering point for the hackerspace community, a hardware hacking workshop area, and a supply post for hardware hacking tools and expendables.
  • Are you involved with a hackerspace? Reserve a special area for your group to chill and show off projects!
  • Looking for hardware hackers and hackerspaces from all around the world to come together and share ideas.
  • contact: hackerspace@hope.net

If you need help with your project, you can find a lot of people on our forum before the conference starts, at talk.hope.net. The HOPE wiki is also available for your use, wiki.hope.net.

Contact the projects coordinator with a plan of action, along with your space, power, time, and data connection requirements: projects@hope.net.