Kick off your day with a creative culinary exchange of ideas and initiatives on open systems and the political, technological and artistic aspects of these systems. Part hang out, part culinary experiment, the Open_Brunch intends to caress the palate, open the mind, and festively wake up the mood.

Introduced and moderated by Nat Muller (NL) and Stephen Kovats (CA)
Guests: Michelle Kasprzak (CA), artist and writer, Friedemann Derschmidt (AT), artist and filmmaker, initiator of Permanent Breakfast and Petr Kazil (NL), urban adventurer.
Food design by Inge Gregoire (NL), food artist

The urban fabric is becoming more and more of a regulated closed system with restrictions on immigration, gated communities, and increased surveillance. As a result, the notion of public space is shifting. Interventionist practices such as urban climbing, breakfast as a public event or making psychogeographic walks, reappropriate the public domain in a playful manner for a significant and critical instant...

Presentations

Permanent Breakfast
The public spaces where these breakfast meetings are held take on a different face in accordance with the needs of those breakfasting. The breakfasters, without much effort on their part, simply by their presence, start to communicate with their surroundings; they start to become their own medium, they gain ground, take up space, literally take possession of it and occupy it by themselves or by their concerns. People reveal their thoughts, tell things, have breakfast again. As long as someone picks up the thread, the game will go on.
As a matter of fact, public breakfasting increasingly became a cult activity, and people were seen more and more frequently gathering around a pleasant breakfast table, in squares and in parks, in empty fountains and vacant parking spaces; people who also understood their action as a form of surreal staged production. In addition to a multitude of breakfasts of which the news spread by word of mouth, hundreds of postal messages, together with photographs, give evidence of breakfasts in Prague, Berlin, Oslo, Taichung and New York, among others.
Announcing ever-new (breakfast) experiments in the public sphere on an ongoing basis, the website www.permantentbreakfast.org. (now a 10-language project) has increasingly also become a platform for discussion of content. Permanent Breakfast is an open-source project.
Permanent breakfast is simultaneously: a brainstorming generator; an "art - making - machine"; a think tank; a label under which various occupations of the public space occur.
New breakfast features are being developed on an ongoing basis, which venture into different hot spots of the social discourse, or are just plain fun.

Michelle Kasprzak
The Mobile Digital Commons Network (MDCN) is a joint research project launched by Concordia University and the Banff New Media Institute. The Network is made up of five interrelated wireless projects; GlobalHeartRate, DigitalCities, CitySpeak, SonicScene and the Mobile Cartographic Command Centre (MC Cubed), located in Montreal and Banff. An interdisciplinary group of researchers has been assembled,  made up of artists, computer scientists and communication scholars exploring wireless communications in the context of urban studies, commercial applications,
art installations, participatory public authoring, and social interventions.  Linking each of the projects that make up the MDCN will be the implementation of a permanent wireless commons in the city of Montreal and Banff National Park. Each of the network projects will utilize the wireless commons to explore new ways of distributing culture, information and commercial applications on cell phones, wireless PDAs, and laptops.