On the eve of the 10th anniversary of the Seattle World Trade Organization protests, please join us:

This Is What Democracy Looks Like (2000) and Battle in Seattle (2007)

Screenings, Drinking and Discussion
With Rick and Jacquie of Big Noise Films
Sunday, November 29, 6pm - 10pm

The Change You Want To See Gallery
http://www.thechangeyouwanttosee.org
84 Havemeyer St @ Metropolitan Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11211

Recommended reading: "Copenhagen: Seattle Grows Up" by Naomi Klein for The Nation

The early 90s were a low point for the Americas. NAFTA had passed, the guerrilla had been murdered in the mountains, the unions were being broken. . . history had ended.

But 10 years ago, we opened a tear in the fabric of that political reality. Suddenly it was possible to imagine futures that we had not allowed ourselves to see, and remember pasts we had been trained to forget.

On the 10th Anniversary of the protests that shut down the WTO in Seattle, join your friends from Big Noise Films and Not An Alternative as we reflect back and look forward. Celebrate the anniversary of our victory, hang out and play drinking games while we laugh at Ray Liotta playing Mayor Paul Schell with a bit too much eyeliner, and Andre 3000 cribbing lines from Hop Hopkins. Join Seattle vets and the Copenhagen-bound as we trace the trajectory from then to now, and beyond.

BYOB encouraged, popcorn provided.

Monday, November 23, 7:30pm (free/by donation)
The Change You Want To See Gallery
84 Havemeyer St, at Metropolitan Ave, Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Branding is a complex communications system of signifiers that leverages psychoanalytical principals of irrationality and desire. While products are made in a factory, brands are created in our minds. A typical response to the persuasion industries on the part of the Left has been to reject them as manipulative, or servicing an unsustainable system of consumption.

Baudrillard defines consumption as “an active mode of relations…a systematic mode of activity and a global response on which our whole cultural system is founded.” This consumption refers not only to material goods in the classical sense, but also to concepts, images and messages. We are surrounded by systems of language and exchange.

In this series we’ve explored the history and mechanics of branding and advertising, multi-billion dollar industries that seek to expand influence over culture. We have also raised the question: are the tools the problem, or is it the ends to which they are employed? What might it look like to sell something beyond propaganda or products?

In this final installment, consultant Loid Der, former creative director of the world’s largest branding agency, will present the tricks of the trade. From research and design, branding briefs to implementation and analysis, Loid will walk us through the methodologies and processes he’s used in developing brands.

This is an A to Z curriculum, customized for our crowd (like a pro market researcher Loid has attended every event in the series). We’ll unpack case studies from corporations, non-profits, and the political world. Don’t miss this rare opportunity to peek under the hood and arm yourself with the tools of persuasion.

ABOUT LOID DER
Loid Der is creative consultant specializing in developing and managing strategic brand solutions for corporations and non-profit organizations. Until he began his own practice, he was a creative director at the world's largest branding agency, Interbrand for the last four years, leading creative teams from strategy, concept, design through implementation, and was responsible for creating the brand identities for AT&T, Microsoft and Xerox. His non-profit clients and projects include Feeding America (formerly America's Second Harvest), the Nelson Mandela Foundation, the Yes Men, Alternet and Not An Alternative. and He has collaborated with artists and writers on book and installation projects to explore issues of surveillance, security and seduction, female interrogation and torture techniques , kitsch and death. He has won numerous awards from Communication Arts, Graphis, Art Directors Club New York, Critique, Type Directors Club, and Idea Magazine. His work has been included in the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Design.

Please join us for two NYC events curated by Dara Greenwald, with artists Waldemar Fydrych aka Major and Agnieszka Kubas of the Orange Alternative in Poland. This will be the first time they have presented this work in the US.

Each event will include a presentation, film/video screening, and discussion. Different films will be screened each night.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009, 7:00 pm
Bluestockings Bookstore
172 Allen Street @ Stanton, NY, NY

Films:
The Orange Alternative, 1989, Mirosław Dembiński (21 min.)
Dwarves go to Ukraine, 2005, Mirosław Dembińskim (on the OA action in the Orange Revolution in 2004)

Thursday, November 19, 2009, 7:30 pm
The Change You Want to See Gallery
http://thechangeyouwanttosee.org
84 Havemeyer Street @ Metropolitan Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11211

Films:
Major or the Revolution of Dwarves, 1989, Maria Zmarz-Koczanowicz (40 min.)
Dwarf for the Mayor, 2003, Mirosław Dembiński (36 min.) (on the OA's election campaign for the City Council in Warsaw)

About the Orange Alternative
The Orange Alternative is an underground anarchic movement, which was started in 1981 in Wroclaw, south-west Poland, by Waldemar Fydrych aka “Major.” Somewhat inspired by Provos, and strongly influenced by Dadaism and Surrealism, it painted absurd graffiti dwarfs on city walls, which became its symbol and organized massive happenings oftentimes with participation of thousands of people wearing dwarf hats. It was one of the more picturesque elements of Eastern European opposition against communism.

Wednesday, November 11, 7:30pm
Live-streamed for remote participation at http://livestream.com/notanalternative

Within activist and creative practice there is a range of models for mobilizing the labor and creativity of the crowd (aka "crowdsourcing"). Both practices experiment with a spectrum of autonomy and control within those models. From distributed design to distributed fundraising, MoveOn to Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcer issues a call and creates structure for participation. What role do individual motivations and collective goals play within these structures? What are the ethical, social and political implications of distributed labor?

Moderated by Mushon Zer-Aviv, panelists include xtine, artist, educator and creator of the Mechanical Olympics; Jeff Crouse, artist, technologist and creator of the Invisible Threads virtual jeans factory; and Beka Economopoulos, online organizer, consultant and curator at The Change You Want To See Gallery.

This event is an installment of the monthly Upgrade NY! series on open source as it relates to activist and creative practice, co-produced by Eyebeam and Not An Alternative. It is presented as a prelude to "The Internet as Playground and Factory", a conference organized by Trebor Scholz to take place at The New School University November 12-14.

Upgrade NY: http://upgradeny.net
Internet as Playground and Factory: http://digitallabor.org

About the Presenters

   
Monday, November 2, 7:30pm (free /by donation)
Live-streamed for remote participants at http://livestream.com/notanalternative

Please join us this Monday as we continue our exploration of symbols, branding and persuasion as they relate to activist and creative practice.

At the intersection of semiotics and psychoanalysis lies advertising, most often deployed in service of selling stuff.  For this installment of our series, author Carrie McClaren and artist Steve Lambert will present projects that engage a sense of play as they leverage principles of the persuasion industries, to both critique consumer culture and question the power structures at work in our daily lives.

ABOUT STEVE LAMBERT
Steve Lambert is currently a Senior Fellow at Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in New York and teaches at Parsons/The New School and Hunter College. He founded the outdoor, guerilla art gallery, the Budget Gallery, in 1999 and the Anti-Advertising Agency in 2004. Steve's projects and art works have won awards from Rhizome/The New Museum, the Creative Work Fund, Adbusters Media Foundation, the California Arts Council, the Belle Foundation, and others. He earned the Best Public Art award from the San Francisco Weekly in 2008. His work has been shown nationally in cities like Detroit, New York, and throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as internationally in Havana, Canada, Barcelona, and Rotterdam. Writings about his work have appeared in multiple publications such as the New York Times, Punk Planet, Artweek, and Newsweek magazine and featured on National Public Radio.

ABOUT CARRIE MCLAREN
Carrie McLaren is the founder of the now defunct Stay Free! magazine, and editor of Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture, a compendium of new and previously published material on the impact of consumer culture on our lives (June, 2009). A longtime blogger, she is currently at Consumerist, a website owned by the publishers of Consumer Reports. She is the curator of Adult Education, a "useless lecture series" based in Brooklyn, New York. In a previous life, she organized the Illegal Art Exhibit, a traveling multimedia art show and website devoted to copyright reform. A former advertising columnist for the Village Voice, her writing has also appeared in Newsday, Mother Jones, Time Out NY, and SPIN magazine, among others. Carrie lives in Brooklyn with one each of husband, son and cat.

Monday, October 26, 7:30pm (free /by donation)
Live-streamed for remote participants at http://livestream.com/notanalternative

Please join us this Monday, October 26th as we continue our series on Symbols, Branding and Persuasion with an exploration of branding in the context of electoral and legislative politics. We'll start with a presentation by media theorist Stephen Duncombe, author of Dream: Reimagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy and the forthcoming Branding the New Deal. Afterward Jessica Teal, design manager for the Obama 2008 presidential campaign will join Duncombe for a conversation via video skype.

Like it or not, propaganda and mass persuasion are part of modern democratic politics. Many progressives today have an adverse reaction to propaganda: ours is a politics based in reason and rationality, not symbols and fantasy. Given our last administration's fondness for selling fantasies as reality, this aversion to branding, marketing and propaganda is understandable. But it is also naive. Mass persuasion is a necessary part of democratic politics, the real issue is what ethics it embodies and which values it expresses.

Looking critically at how the Roosevelt Administration tried to "brand" the New Deal and how the Obama campaign leveraged principles of marketing and advertising gives us an opportunity to think about different models of political persuasion.

Monday, October 12, 7:30pm (free/by donation)
Live-streamed for remote participants at http://livestream.com/notanalternative

Join us this Monday as we continue our exploration of symbols, branding and persuasion as they relate to activist and creative practice. This lecture series examines the mechanics of the branding industry; it’s principles, and tricks of the trade. To see what lessons we might learn. How might activists and cultural producers leverage the tools of advertising, marketing, public relations and spectacle production?

For this installment of the series design research expert and consultant JooYoung Oh will offer a lecture and workshop on the techniques of her industry. Participatory design research is a combination of psychology and design. It is about understanding people and their ideal experiences in order to inform and inspire design (of products, systems, environments, and brands). How do you know your brand will resonate with your target audience?

JooYoung will discuss design research theory, and will present a hands-on exercise that will demonstrate methodologies for capturing the current and ideal experience. Come prepared to participate!

HOMEWORK: FOR BONUS POINTS

Please join us this Thursday, October 1 for a presentation by author, historian, and media/culture theorist Stuart Ewen.

The intersection of semiotics and psychoanalysis has proven fruitful terrain for PR professionals, advertisers, politicians, and other types of leaders. Over the course of a century those whose job it is to persuade the public have increasingly abandoned appeals to rationale in favor of appeals to emotion. Instead of trying to persuade with text and reason, they use imagery and symbols to appeal to instinct and emotion.

Ewen will tour us through the history of "spin", propaganda, and the role of images in consumerism, mass psychology, politics, social movements, cultural attitudes, and consumption. PR is a battle to define reality, and how people see and understand that reality. In this presentation, we will explore what it means to do battle armed with the tools of persuasion.

Thursday, October 1, 7:30pm (free / by donation)
@ The Change You Want To See Gallery
And live-streamed at http://livestream.com/notanalternative for remote participants

The Untold History of Controlling the Masses Through the Manipulation of Unconscious Desires

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized." - Edward Bernays



Sunday, September 27, 4pm - 9pm
Screening Parts 1-4 of "The Century of Self"
The Change You Want To See Gallery
http://thechangeyouwanttosee.org

Thursday, September 24, 7:30-9:30pm
@ The Change You Want To See Gallery
and live-streamed for remote participants at http://livestream.com/notanalternative

Please join us this Thursday for a talk by award-winning writer, documentary filmmaker, and scholar Douglas Rushkoff. This event kicks off our Fall series on Symbols, Branding, and Persuasion. Rushkoff will discuss concepts he explores in the PBS Frontline series The Persuaders and Merchants of Cool, as well as his latest book Life Inc.. We’ll also screen clips from Life Inc. the Movie.

Corporatism didn’t evolve naturally. The landscape on which we are living – the operating system on which we are now running our social software – was invented by people, sold to us as a better way of life, supported by myths, and ultimately allowed to develop into a self-sustaining reality. It is a map that has replaced the territory.

Each year, legions of ad people, copywriters, market researchers, pollsters, consultants, and even linguists spend billions of dollars and millions of man-hours trying to determine how to persuade consumers what to buy, whom to trust, and what to think. We are swimming in a sea of messages.