The Eclectic Tech Carnival (/ETC) is taking place this year in Berlin, and Helen Varley Jamieson will give an UpStage UpDate on Friday 7 June, 14:30 CET.

The /ETC is a gathering of feminists who critically explore and develop everyday skills and information technologies in the context of free and open source software and hardware. It’s a self-organised event that happens when and where people are motivated and able to organise it. UpStage has been presented at /ETCs since 2004, when we used UpStage’s motion-jpeg feature to stream live images from the festival to the world. UpStage had only just been born at that time, and didn’t yet have full audio-visual streaming, but it was still great to be able to demonstrate it.

Twenty years later, UpStage is still going strong and so is the /ETC, and we have given UpStage presentations and workshops and performances at many of the /ETCs. The /ETC has been a supportive space where both developers and artists can learn about UpStage and support its ongoing development with all kinds of input. Our current lead developer, Gloria, first came into contact with UpStage at the 2007 /ETC in Linz, Austria, and met us again in 2015 at Calafou in Catalonia before joining our development team in 2020.

The UpStage UpDate presentation will introduce the rebuilt platform to the /ETC community, present the Mobilise/Demobilise project and invite interested people to get involved in the development, or to use the platform for their creative work.