not an alternative blogs

Saturday: Props Production & Presentations

beka — Fri, 11 May 2012 14:17:44 -0700

This Saturday, May 12 we're hosting props production hours from 2pm - 6pm at Exit Art. We've built our production studio inside the gallery, and will be making sleeping bag socks for sidewalk occupations. They are waterproof and breathable "socks" that slide over sleeping bags, with stenciled lettering that says Occupy Wall Street and We Are the 99%. The aim is to make our sleeping occupations more legible as collective protest. Please feel free to come join, get your hands dirty, make stuff!

Earlier in the day from 12-2pm there will be a couple of presentations pertaining to anonymous interventions on public/private space, one with artist John Hawke and the other with Daniel Latorre from Occupy Town Square.

Occupied Real Estate is part of Collective/Performative, the final exhibition of Exit Art’s influential 30 years as a non-profit gallery and cultural center. Don't miss it!

John Hawke’s work began in on-site landscape painting practice. The performative nature of the artist in public space and the insufficiency of an optical approach in representing the landscape led to a practice that instead sees landscape as a snarled network of vectors of interest with the artist having an special capability in rupturing existing spatial conditions.

Using the principle of productive confusion developed through the collaborative platform Orange Work, for the past seven years he has made architecture and sign interventions into urban environments as well as maintaining a studio practice in painting attempting to create pictorial metaphors for the restriction and partition of public spaces.

Hawke studied classics in college, and went to Pratt for graduate school in 2002, writing his art history Master’s thesis on Robert Smithson’s anti-environmentalism. He participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2006, and is currently a resident in the Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts: Art and Law Residency Program. His work has been widely exhibited, presented and reviewed.

Self Organizing in The Commons
with Occupy Town Square collaborator Daniel Latorre
In the U.S. public space, the commons, has been increasingly encapsulated by entities and ideas of privatization. At the same time social movements have become highly networked and decentralized. How does an autonomous network of protest visually represent worthiness, unity, numbers, and its claims in public space? How does public space work as a platform to shape and ground the performance of new modes of association? What are the social and symbolic challenges in activist event management in public space?

Since the eviction from Liberty Park, Occupy Town Square formed and began organizing an iterative series of pop-up events in public spaces with an aim to make its strategy and tactics replicable. Daniel Latorre, an Occupy Town Square collaborator and public space advocate, will talk about the process and experiences to date and suggest visions of where collaboration can go in this context.

Occupied Real Estate: Installation & Workshops @ Exit Art

beka — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 06:47:28 -0800

Not An Alternative is pleased to participate in Collective/Performative, the final exhibition of Exit Art’s influential 30 years as a non-profit gallery and cultural center. Please join us May 8th -12th for Occupied Real Estate, an installation and series of workshops.

Occupied Real Estate
Tuesday May 8 - Saturday May 12
@ Exit Art
475 10th Avenue
New York, New York

* Installation: 10am - 6pm daily

* Workshops: 2pm - 6pm daily
Production hours with Occupied Real Estate agents

* Presentations: 12pm - 2pm Saturday
With artist John Hawke and Occupy Town Square organizer Daniel Latorre

OCCUPIED REAL ESTATE
The contemporary city is contested: the boundaries of public and private are blurred; the interests of the 99% and 1% in conflict. The battleground of contestation takes place in the streets, in the media and in public consciousness. As Occupiers capture imaginations and attention around the world, they enter the battleground in a forceful way, destabilizing ideas about ownership and use of space. This new class of ‘real estate agents’ comes equipped with the tools of their trade: those of media production and material construction. From foreclosed homes to public/private parks, to warehoused buildings and bank-owned lots, the movement reveals invisible spaces, exposing exclusions and power relations. Through anonymous acts, interventions and appropriations, they activate these spaces, building a new world in the shell of the old.

The Occupied Real Estate workshop is an architectural set that puts the production of this world on display. It is both a workshop and a studio set. Agents converge at assembly-line workstations to manufacture tools for the movement and document their practice along the way. In turning the lens on themselves, they perform a material function with an awareness of its immaterial implications.

PROGRAM SCHEDULE
Tuesday through Friday
* 2pm - 6pm = production hours. Join other Occupied Real Estate agents in the production of props and tools for the movement. Materials will be used in support of Occupy Wall Street’s May 10-15 Week of Action.

Saturday
* 12pm - 2pm = presentations by artist John Hawke and Occupy Town Square organizer Daniel Latorre. (Description below).

* 2pm - 6pm = production workshop. Join other Occupied Real Estate agents in the production of props and tools for the movement. Materials will be used in support of Occupy Wall Street’s sidewalk sleeping occupations in front of Wall Street and banks across the city.

SATURDAY PRESENTATIONS, 12pm - 2pm

John Hawke - artist talk
John Hawke’s work began in on-site landscape painting practice. The performative nature of the artist in public space and the insufficiency of an optical approach in representing the landscape led to a practice that instead sees landscape as a snarled network of vectors of interest with the artist having an special capability in rupturing existing spatial conditions.

Occupy Ninjas Take Manhattan

beka — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 15:15:39 -0800

Coming soon to a bank near you...

Kickstarting No↔Space: 48 hrs left!

beka — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:29:33 -0800

For the last 7 years No↔Space, managed by Not An Alternative, has functioned as a base for art and activism in NYC. A few months ago, a staggering rent increase (240%) forced us out of our Williamsburg home. But that didn’t slow us down: we’ve happily found a new space in Greenpoint, and in the midst of the Occupy Wall Street movement we’re busier than we’ve ever been!

It's true we suffered a blow in losing our home base, we're starting over with a raw space, building it out from scratch. But we couldn’t be more excited about this new chapter. We’ve launched a Kickstarter fundraising campaign to help fund the new No↔Space, and our next year of events and projects.

Thanks to the support of our amazing community, we've just reached our goal of $10,000 this week! But why stop there? Now we're aiming to raise another $5,000 to cover upcoming projects related to Occupy Wall Street. And we have 2 days left to do it!

The $10,000 ensures that we can cover the costs of the move, the build-out, and core space-related expenses for a year. But anything we raise above that amount will go directly to new projects.

Occupy Wall Street has captured the public imagination like nothing  in recent memory. This is the opportunity we have been waiting for: a  chance to transform the existing social political landscape and build a mass  movement for economic justice.  For years Not An Alternative has collaborated with activists, artists, and community groups to produce aesthetics that function tactically and symbolically, and actions that serve to frame a message in a compelling and visual way.

We've got some mischief up our sleeves: interventions on privately owned public spaces, projects relating to eviction defense and home re-occupations, collaborations community groups like Picture The Homeless, Organizing for Occupation, and Take Back the Land and with artists and designers like John Hawke, DSGN AGNC, The Yes Lab, and others, and national level coordination and interventions with other #occupy cities.

While $5000 won't get us all the way there, it will allow us to roll out some of the ideas we've been cooking up immediately. Can you help make it happen?

Please watch our Kickstarter video, donate what you can, and spread the word!

When we opened the space years ago (then called The Change You Want To See Gallery) we imagined a laboratory and a factory: on one side a space for theory, presentation and discussion, and on the other a space for production where we could turn ideas into action.

Over the years we’ve hosted hundreds of artist talks, film screenings, panel discussions, workshops, and festivals. And we’ve produced dozens of actions, installations and interventions, from within art institutions like London’s Tate Modern and Mexico City’s Museo Del Arte Moderno, and in the public sphere, staging actions like a homeless building occupation in East Harlem and architecting a tent city take-over of a vacant bank-owned lot.

Now we find ourselves in the midst of a crisis and an opportunity: an economic meltdown of unprecedented proportions and the beginning of a new global movement. It’s against this backdrop that we situate our upcoming year of programming.

We have a big year ahead of us and a shiny new space to fill with experiments and explorations. As always, our work is made possible through the support of our audiences, and we’re proud to run on lean no-nonsense budgets, which means that donations of any size can make a big impact.

Thanks to the generosity of our community we've reached our goal of $10,000. Now we're setting out sights higher: an additional $5000 will allow us to implement some of the creative activist projects we've been incubating, to leverage this historic moment and help build a mass movement. Can you help us blow our goals out of the water and take our work to the next level? Please watch the video and give today, then share it on Facebook and Twitter!

Thanks for your support,
xoxo

Not An Alternative

Kickstarter Video: Introducing...The New NO↔SPACE

beka — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 02:48:05 -0800

http://kickstarter.com/projects/naa/nospace

Hi friends, as you may know, we recently lost the Williamsburg space that we've been in for the last decade. A 240% rent increase forced us to shut our doors. But we're excited to say we have a new space in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. A 1500 sq ft space in a beautiful industrial building on the waterfront. And we've been busy building it out so we can get ready to open our doors for public programming, and start producing the #OccupyWallStreet and related projects we've had up our sleeves.

To launch the new space and upcoming year of programming and projects we need your help! We're raising money from individual contributions via the fundraising platform Kickstarter.com. We've uploaded a video to the platform that tours you through the new NO↔SPACE, our ideas about the intersection of media and space, and our plans for the upcoming year.

How you can help:

1) Please watch our Kickstarter video! And donate if you can, every bit helps.
2) Please share! On Facebook, Twitter, and/or emails to friends or appropriate listservs.

Thanks!

Mili-tents on the scene!

beka — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 02:32:24 -0800

Pics from a candlelight march on Sunday, November 20, with Occupy Faith NYC, a network of 1500 clergy from different faiths throughout the city, as well as the Council of the Elders -- leaders from the civil rights movement. Together we marched from Judson Memorial Church to a vacant lot on 6th and Canal that's owned by Trinity Church. The clergy and the Elders are calling on Trinity to give Occupy Wall Street the vacant lot as a new space from which folks can organize.

Additional mili-tent pics are from an installation above a bank on the facade of a building at the New School in NYC, the site of a recent occupation.

#OccupyWallStreet Art Build -- Volunteer Sign-up

beka — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 06:35:11 -0700

Introducing #WhoOWNSpace

beka — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 13:33:12 -0700

#whOWNSpace is a collaborative started by DSGN AGNC with Not An Alternative and DoTank:Brooklyn, organizations that have been dealing with spatial politics. Other groups, organizations, and individuals will be joining soon, contact us if you are interested. Our goal is to gain many other collaborators and together learn from what has happened at Zuccotti Park (aka Liberty Square)-- using design and art as an advocacy tool so that community groups and activists can continue to use collectively owned and organized urban spaces to further their political, social, and economic agendas.

Project goals are:
1- TO REVEAL conflicting rules and ownerships in the increasingly privatized and commercialized spaces that make up the contemporary neoliberal urban condition
2- TO QUESTION those rules and the current state of our "public" space; discussing the intentions and conditions surrounding our open spaces
3- TO ADVOCATE FOR AND PROPOSE new uses and designs that encourage more public and open spaces for neighborhood uses in accordance to the Call to Action for the Rights of Neighborhoods

We Create Tools that Reveal Spatial Conflict / We Question Private Space / We Question Public Space / We Advocate for Change / We Conceive and Design Alternatives for Collective use

The 1% weOWNu map focuses on Privately-Owned Public Spaces (POPS) as well as institutions of private funding, specifying financial institutions that received bail-out funds in 2008. The goal of doing so, is to direct attention to the constitutions that control the flow of capital. These funding institutions are essential in the transfer of ownership from the city to private interests.

The 99% weOWNu map focuses on publicly-owned open spaces and the city agencies that control those holdings.

Both maps provide a framework for a larger study to:
-Comparatively map POPS and publicly-owned open spaces, identify their intentions, and understand the political, corporate, and economic entities that control them
-Organize with community and activist groups so that designers can collaboratively strategize to advance the use of these spaces.

In the next steps we will use interactive tools to gather information from a multitude of partners (RESEARCH), lead an event with The Public School NYC to begin to make sense of the information (PEDAGOGY), and work with designers and community groups to reclaim public space for the public good (#OCCUPY ACTIONS).

Oct 20: Creative Activism + Occupations in Spain

beka — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 09:25:37 -0700

Please join us this Thursday, October 20 for the next installment of Creative Activism Thursdays: Revolutionaries Live, a series by the Yes Lab, Not An Alternative, and the Center for Artistic Activism.

This week Not An Alternative is hosting an artist talk and multi-media presentation by Spanish artist/activist Leonidas Martin. We'll get a visual tour of some of the most creative art/activist interventions performed in the context of the alter-globalization movement, and in contemporary urban struggles in Barcelona and beyond, including Las Agencias, Yomango, Pret a Revolter, and New Kids on the Black Bloc. Leo will also discuss his experiences as a participant/organizer in this Spring’s M-15 encampments in Spain, massive occupations that took hold throughout the country and lasted several months. These occupations were a direct inspiration for #OccupyWallStreet.

Leo will explore the relationship between art and activism, how creativity can be a powerful tool for social transformation, how we can have fun while fighting back, and why direct action is one of the fine arts.

Thursday, October 20, 7pm
@ NYU Department of Performance Studies
721 Broadway, 6th Floor
NY, NY 10003
(photo ID required)

P.S.: this programming series is hosted at NYU, as No↔Space recently got rentrified out of our Williamsburg home. Good news is we've lined up a new spot in Greenpoint, Brooklyn and we'll be ready for programming later this Fall. We just launched a Kickstarter fundraising campaign to help pay for the build-out and upcoming programming and projects. Please watch the video, share it on Facebook or Twitter, and make a contribution if you can, every bit helps!

Leonidas Martin is a Professor at Barcelona University where he teaches New Media and Political Art. For many years he has been developing collective projects between art and activism, some of them well known internationally (Las Agencias, Yomango, Pret a Revolter). He writes about art and politics for blogs, journals and newspapers, has created several documentaries and movies for television and internet, and is a member of the cultural collective Enmedio; (www.enmedio.info). Last but not least, he is an expert telling jokes, often using this divine gift to get free beers and avoid police arrest. Leo will tell stories about the current upheaval in Spain, among other things.

On #OWS, Co-optation, and the Growth Phases of a Social Movement

beka — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 23:53:39 -0700

PART 1: On #OWS, Co-optation, and the growth phases of social movements

Here's the thing: our messaging, our strategy, and our tactics must change based on the external landscape. When we become embraced by the Democratic Party and its allies, we must go further than what makes them comfortable. That's if we want to win more than concessions and easy reforms (that currently exist within the realm of possibility), and achieve game-changing substantive/structural reforms (that currently live in the realm of impossibility), that we didn't imagine we ever could see in our lifetimes).

We should aim for nothing less -- why aim for closing up shop soon when we have no idea what we're capable of?

Phase 1 = vanguard moves in, initiates occupation, largely dismissed, but staying power piques curiosity, and police misconduct/violence draws attention and wins sympathy.

Phase 2 = vanguards in other cities recognize potential, initiate occupations. At the same time, initial occupation gathers steam, grows, large membership orgs endorse and give legitimacy that wasn't present before, now the mainstream media start to change tune. Focus of coverage is human interest story of life in the park; and what do they want?

Phase 3 = mainstream media interest explodes, NGOs, labor, community, and establishment orgs engage supporters, connect existing campaigns to #occupy frame, amplify visibility and suggestion of social movement. Democratic leadership embrace movement, as do party-related and electorally focused orgs. Media coverage attributes power to movement, queries whether it's a Tea Party for the left, whether it will gain electoral power and legislative victories.

Phase 4 = ?

We currently find ourselves in Phase 3. Senior members of the White House administration, and the President himself, have expressed support for OWS. Democracy for America, a Howard Dean initiated group just sent an email blast to more than a million members tonight selling yard signs that say "We Are the 99%" with co-branded urls: OccupyWallSt.org and DemocracyforAmerica.org/occupy. OWS is embraced by the establishment as a means to amplify existing agendae.

Bloomberg gives tacit "permission" for our occupation, effectively rendering it non-threatening and normalizing it. Result is rise in media coverage of occupation as nuisance to neighbors.

This is a natural and necessary phase. So now what?

We're in this for the long haul. There are no "solutions" that can be presented quickly to make us go away. And so there will be moments where our presence is no longer an uncomfortable and unknown variable, but rather is normalized and integrated. It's in those moments that we have to push the envelop, pry open the space of possibility even farther. We go as far as we can to destabilize, but maintain momentum. And when that's the new "normal" then we go farther. That's how change happens, how we shift the terrain and the terms of the game.

From an actions perspective, that means getting tactical, and mobile, activating the rest of the city, executing higher-risk actions, civil disobedience and arrests.

From a media perspective, we have to get ahead of the game. We no longer need to legitimize. Or articulate the problem. Both are clearly established. So, given this new moment how can we use media strategically?

We must draw a line, disavow the Democrats explicitly, make our messaging a little uncomfortable. Yes, perhaps, split the support, lest we not be co-opted. This will be painful, internally, as it won't always achieve comfortable consensus. But to hold this space and expand the realm of possibility, we have to go farther than others are ready to go. It's how this started and we can't be too shy to be bold.

PART 2: Responses

On Oct 12, 2011, at 8:17 AM, Bailey Xxxxxx (name stricken) wrote:

It would seem that one of the most obvious ways to create the dividing line between OWS and groups like the DFA is to point out that they're seeking to profit off the movement. (AKA business as usual) I haven't seen anything saying that they'll be giving back any of that $14 to OWS or better yet, to any groups working with the disadvantaged.

I think if we just pointed this out, and highlighted the other orgs like MoveOn who are riding the wave without actually doing any heavy lifting, people are going to key into that. If we go further and force them to answer why they thought it was ok to profiteer off a campaign going after greed, that would be an interesting moment.

The moment you blanketly say we hate democrats, that becomes a divisive message and not really what everyone seems to be working at here. However, forcing the establishment democrats to answer why their go-to reaction was profiteering, that has some credibility.

Bailey

On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 9:44 AM, Will Xxxxx wrote:

+1001 (to Bailey's post)

Sent from my iPhone

PART 3: Emphasis on Democracy and Pluralism (99%) VS. Neoliberalism and Capitalism

Actually, many mainstream orgs, including MoveOn, have been doing heavy lifting to support this thing, and they truly don't want to co-opt the movement. But the reality is the movement has gone mainstream now, and it will get sucked in to establishment politics.

Astra Taylor, journalist and filmmaker said it concisely: "the Democrats would benefit from nothing more than the whole social and political playing field tilting left -- but that ain't gonna happen if they co-opt OWS! let them benefit inadvertently but that's it...we must push further".

I don't think saying publicly "DFA and other groups are profiting from the movement without giving back" gets us where we need to go. Quite the opposite: that's an invitation for more mainstream participation at the same time that internally we're watering our message down (being descriptive and reactive and celebrating OWS as being about a diversity of voices, democratic process, empowering the 99%), without maintaining the radical orientation this started with.

This occupation was initiated by, and remains largely organized by anti-capitalists. We don't need to say the "c" word, or the "n" word (neoliberalism - the agenda of the past 40 years: privatization, deregulation, financialization, and globalization, which has led to the concentration of wealth, corruption of the political process, and accelerated the destruction of all we hold dear.). But file in the back of our heads that after the 2008 economic crash, even mainstream media headlines did go there. And outlets like the Wall Street Journal / Market Watch, Crains, IBT, and other finance industry rags are going there now.

We can use softer, gentler terms: the free market, etc. But if we want accountability, regulation and restructuring of Wall Street and the finance industry we need to figure this out, and it has to play a much bigger role in OWS messaging. And an impending Eurozone crash if Greece defaults could result in a major economic crash here in the US, potentially soon. So there is an opening to push further.

This isn't a denunciation of establishment orgs, there are good people within them and they all want to see this succeed. But they can't lead us there. Now that we're in a new phase (of media coverage, of participation), we owe it to everyone to radicalize our message, go beyond what these groups can publicly say.

The Tea Party and radical right have always played this role. They make the establishment right uncomfortable, they divide and provoke, and they've been winning. The center moved to the right, and the republican party tows a much harder line, wielding greater influence in D.C. than they did before.

OWS needs to tow a harder line. Being more explicit about the finance industry, making clear that we're not calling for easy reforms, that both parties are the problem, our political process is poisoned by the influence of money, that this is an international movement, that Egypt, Tunisia, Greece, Italy, Spain and the UK are all popular uprisings, like ours, in response to the economic crisis, the cutting of social safety nets, budget cuts and privatization. That our economic system is broken. And we'll settle for nothing less than fundamental and structural change.

I just ask that we be as radical as the mainstream finance publications that understand this movement better than the rest of the mainstream press. Start saying what they are saying.

Enough focus on democracy. Talk about capitalism (/insert euphemism here).

Activists Barred from U.S., and #OccupyWallStreet

beka — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 09:37:39 -0700

We regret to inform you that this Wednesday's Yes Lab event, organized by Not An Alternative, with UK climate campaign campaigners John Stewart and Dan Glass has been postponed.

A few days ago, Stewart landed in JFK Airport for a month-long US speaking tour, only to be escorted off the plane by 6 police officers, interrogated for six hrs by the FBI, Secret Service, NY police, and Immigration, and put on a plane back to the UK. The other tour member, environmental activist Dan Glass, was also supposed to come but was stopped by the CIA on the UK side.

These guys are celebrated environmentalists, recognized by The Independent and the Guardian as the most effective and innovative green activists in the UK. They won support from direct action activists and even the Conservatives in Parliament, waging a successful campaign to reduce carbon emissions and stop the expansion of Heathrow airport. For some reason, however, our own government isn't keen on them coming here.

We're going to bring them to you anyway. Please save the date: on Thursday, November 3rd we'll host a special Skype session with these revered (and reviled?) climate revolutionaries. The best part...no transcontinental air emissions involved!

Thursday, November 3, 7pm
Department of Performance Studies
721 Broadway, 6th Floor
NY, NY 10003
(photo ID required)

And now that your Wednesday is freed up, consider joining us at #OccupyWallStreet! Wednesday is the biggest action yet, with labor unions and countless economic justice and community organizations taking part in a massive march to the Liberty Plaza encampment. Starts at 4:30pm at City Hall, 250 Broadway Ave.

Not An Alternative is coordinating a creative intervention there, an installation and action at the intersection of architecture and activism. That's all we can say about it, so come join us to get the full skinny!

Kickstarting NO↔SPACE: Fake NY Times or NY Post

beka — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 15:39:43 -0700

NY TIMES SPECIAL EDITION
A week after the historic presidential election that brought Barack Obama to the White House, Not An Alternative joined The Yes Men, artist Steve Lambert, and hundreds of independent writers, artists, and activists in an elaborate project, six months in the making, to release a "special edition" of the New York Times in cities across the U.S.

The papers, dated July 4th of next year, were headlined with long-awaited news: "IRAQ WAR ENDS". The edition, which bears the same look and feel as the real deal, includes stories describing what the future could hold, if we forced Obama to be the president we'd elected him to be: national health care, the abolition of corporate lobbying, a maximum wage for CEOs, etc.

"Is this true? I wish it were true!" said one reader. "It can be true, if we demand it."

"We wanted to experience what it would look like, and feel like, to read headlines we really want to read. It's about what's possible, if we think big and act collectively," said Steve Lambert, one of the project's organizers and an editor of the paper.

In response to the spoof, the New York Times said only, "We are looking into it." Alex S. Jones, former Times reporter who is an authority on the history of the paper, says: "I would say if you've got one, hold on to it. It will probably be a collector's item."

Bringing the much needed "good news" to a war weary public required the collaboration of hundreds of activists and volunteers, including the Anti-Advertising Agency, CODEPINK, United for Peace and Justice, Not An Alternative, May First/People Link, Improv Everywhere, Evil Twin, and Cultures of Resistance.

NY POST TELLS THE TRUTH
New York's favorite tabloid got a face-lift of sorts one day before the city hosted a major UN summit on climate change. Distributed by over 2000 volunteers throughout New York City, an eco-conscious but otherwise pitch-perfect replica of the New York Post, created by a coalition of activists, including the Yes Men and other Not An Alternative partners, was handed out across the city as a wake-up call to action on climate change.

Although the 32-page Post is a fake, everything in it is 100% true, with all facts carefully checked by a team of editors and climate change experts. The cover story ("We're Screwed") reports the frightening conclusions of a blue-ribbon panel of scientists commissioned by the mayor's office to determine the potential effects of climate change on the City. That report was released in February of this year, but received very little press at the time. Other lead articles describe the Pentagon's alarmed response to global warming ("Clear & Present Disaster"), the U.S. government's sadly minuscule response to the crisis ("Congress Cops Out on Climate"), China's alternative energy program ("China's Green Leap Forward Overtakes U.S."), and how if the US doesn't quickly pass a strong climate bill, the crucial Copenhagen climate talks in December could be a "Flopenhagen."

The paper made its debut on the same week that Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon was to push 100 world leaders to make serious commitments to reduce carbon emissions in the lead-up to the Copenhagen climate conference in December 2009. Ban has said that the world has "less than 10 years to halt (the) global rise in greenhouse gas emissions if we are to avoid catastrophic consequences for people and the planet," adding that Copenhagen is a "once-in-a-generation opportunity."

Kickstarting NO↔SPACE: Not An Alternative Product

beka — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 13:48:40 -0700

A sculptural and print series by Not An Alternative.

Tired of the same old same old?
The promise of transformation is built in to every product. Buy, and you, like the new product you consume, will be different. The kind of change that products offer however, doesn't actually match with what they suggest. The expectation of products is that they function only as approximations of what the consumer wants. They don't actually fulfill desire. Products are temporary or band-aid solutions. Soon after a product is consumed, desire will be re-manifest as either desire for the same product or for a new one. A gap between ideal and actual is always built in.

What we are really talking about is the capitalist cycle of perpetual consumption; a mechanic-like propulsion toward an end that forever returns.

But is it possible that a product exists that doesn't build in a dislocation between what it promises and what it delivers? A product that doesn't serve to propel the eternal drive for the next product?

If a product exists that could permanently fulfill the promises it makes to consumers, transforming them forever, what would it look like?

Introducing....

NOT AN ALTERNATIVE PRODUCT!!!!

NEW NEW NEW NEW NEW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (no but REALLY this time).
Not An Alternative Product really IS different.
With Not An Alternative Product you get what every other product only promises.
Believe it or not, Not An Alternative isn't just another version of the same.
Not An Alternative Product is exactly what it claims to be.
Not An Alternative Product promises nothing and to that end delivers the goods.
That's right! For the first time ever, a product that gives you NOTHING NEW!
Not An Alternative Product really IS different.
Not An Alternative Product is OUT OF THE CAPITALIST WORLD!
Now available in stores EVERYWHERE!

Kickstarting NO↔SPACE: Books by Not An Alternative Collaborators

beka — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 13:30:42 -0700

Dream: Reimagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy, by Steve Duncombe
What practical political lessons can we learn from corporate theme parks, ad campaigns, video games like Grand Theft Auto, celebrity culture, and Las Vegas? Stephen Duncombe proposes that such examples of popular fantasy can help us define and make possible a new political future.

Dream makes the case for a progressive political strategy that embraces a new set of tools. Although fantasy and spectacle have become the lingua franca of our time, Duncombe points out that liberals continue to depend upon sober reason to guide them. Instead, they need to learn how to communicate in today’s spectacular vernacular—not merely as a tactic but as a new way of thinking about and acting out politics. Learning from Las Vegas, however, does not mean adopting its values, as Duncombe demonstrates in laying out plans for what he calls “ethical spectacle.”

An electrifying new vision of progressive politics by a lifelong political activist and thinker, Dream is a twenty-first-century manifesto for the left, reclaiming the tools of hidden persuaders in the name of spectacular change.

Examined Life, by Astra Taylor
Examined Life boldly takes philosophy out of the dark corners of the academy and into the streets, reminding us that great ideas are born through profound engagement with the hustle and bustle of everyday life, not in isolation from it. A companion to Astra Taylor’s documentary film, the book features interviews with eight iconoclastic and influential philosophers, conducted while on the move through places that hold special resonance for them and their ideas. Featuring Cornel West, Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor.

Peter Singer’s thoughts on the ethics of consumption are amplified against the backdrop of Fifth Avenue’s posh boutiques. Michael Hardt ponders the nature of revolution while surrounded by symbols of wealth and leisure. Judith Butler and a friend stroll through San Francisco’s Mission District questioning our culture’s fixation on individualism. And while driving through Manhattan, Cornel West—perhaps America’s best-known public intellectual—compares philosophy to jazz and blues, reminding us how intense and invigorating the life of the mind can be.

Offering exclusive moments with great thinkers in fields ranging from moral philosophy to cultural theory, Examined Life reveals philosophy’s power to transform the way we see the world around us and imagine our place within it.

Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Trash, by Heather Rogers
America leads the world in garbage, and that is nothing to be proud of. A clear-thinking and peppery writer, Rogers presents a galvanizing expose of how we became the planet's trash monsters. Americans were ingeniously thrifty until industrialization ushered in consumer culture and the age of disposable goods and built-in obsolescence. But once the public was exhorted to buy stuff whether they needed it or not--and Rogers provides many eye-opening examples of corporate strategies and propaganda--new forms of garbage began to pile up and break down into toxic substances. Rogers details everything that is wrong with today's wasteful packaging, bogus recycling, and flawed landfills and incinerators.

Here, too, is the inside story of the plastic revolution and the irresponsibly wasteful beverage market, the Mafia's involvement in commercial waste, and the illegal overseas shipping of garbage, especially toxic e-waste--trashed computers and cell phones. Rogers exhibits black-belt precision in her assault on American corporations that succeed in "greenwashing" the public while remaining "hell-bent on ever-expanding production no matter what the ecological toll." Set this beside Elizabeth Royte's Garbage Land (2005), and contemplate Rogers' dictum: garbage "never really goes away."

Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, by Jodi Dean
Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies is an impassioned call for the realization of a progressive left politics in the United States. Through an assessment of the ideologies underlying contemporary political culture, Jodi Dean takes the left to task for its capitulations to conservatives and its failure to take responsibility for the extensive neoliberalization implemented during the Clinton presidency. She argues that the left’s ability to develop and defend a collective vision of equality and solidarity has been undermined by the ascendance of “communicative capitalism,” a constellation of consumerism, the privileging of the self over group interests, and the embrace of the language of victimization. As Dean explains, communicative capitalism is enabled and exacerbated by the Web and other networked communications media, which reduce political energies to the registration of opinion and the transmission of feelings. The result is a psychotic politics where certainty displaces credibility and the circulation of intense feeling trumps the exchange of reason.

Dean’s critique ranges from her argument that the term democracy has become a meaningless cipher invoked by the left and right alike to an analysis of the fantasy of free trade underlying neoliberalism, and from an examination of new theories of sovereignty advanced by politicians and left academics to a look at the changing meanings of “evil” in the speeches of U.S. presidents since the mid-twentieth century. She emphasizes the futility of a politics enacted by individuals determined not to offend anyone, and she examines questions of truth, knowledge, and power in relation to 9/11 conspiracy theories. Dean insists that any reestablishment of a vital and purposeful left politics will require shedding the mantle of victimization, confronting the marriage of neoliberalism and democracy, and mobilizing different terms to represent political strategies and goals.

Blog Theory, by Jodi Dean
Blog Theory offers a critical theory of contemporary media. Furthering her account of communicative capitalism, Jodi Dean explores the ways new media practices like blogging and texting capture their users in intensive networks of enjoyment, production, and surveillance. Her wide–ranging and theoretically rich analysis extends from her personal experiences as a blogger, through media histories, to newly emerging social network platforms and applications.

Set against the background of the economic crisis wrought by neoliberalism, the book engages with recent work in contemporary media theory as well as with thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, Jacques Lacan, and Slavoj Zizek. Through these engagements, Dean defends the provocative thesis that reflexivity in complex networks is best understood via the psychoanalytic notion of the drives. She contends, moreover, that reading networks in terms of the drives enables us to grasp their real, human dimension, that is, the feelings and affects that embed us in the system.

In remarkably clear and lucid prose, Dean links seemingly trivial and transitory updates from the new mass culture of the internet to more fundamental changes in subjectivity and politics. Everyday communicative exchanges from blog posts to text messages have widespread effects, effects that not only undermine capacities for democracy but also entrap us in circuits of domination.

Zizek's Politics, by Jodi Dean
A critical introduction to the political thought of one of the most important, original and enigmatic philosophers writing today. Zizek's Politics provides an original interpretation and defence of the Slovenian philosopher's radical critique of liberalism, democracy, and global capital.

Many readers both inside and outside of the academy have been intrigued by both Zizek and his writing yet, given the density of his prose and the radical views he often espouses, they have struggled to get a handle on his basic positions. He draws upon and makes continual reference to the challenging concepts of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Lacan, and Badiou. His prose is dense and frenetic and his dialectical twists and turns seem to make it impossible to attribute to him any specific position: he celebrates St. Paul and orthodox Christians even as he engages in a spirited defense of Lenin. Zizek's Politics synthesizes Zizek's myriad political writings into a systematic theory and put his theory into dialogue with key concepts and positions in contemporary political thought. It will provide readers with a much needed critical introduction to the political thought of one of the world's most widely known thinkers.

Kickstarting NO↔SPACE: Limited Edition Silkscreened T-Shirts

beka — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 13:27:51 -0700

2 different limited edition t-shirts to choose from! Designed and Silkscreened by Not An Alternative. Comes in a variety of sizes and t-shirt shapes.

Kickstarting NO↔SPACE: The Subsumption Machine

beka — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 13:21:03 -0700

The Subsumption Machine is a skeletal multi-level media tower hacked with video projections, TV monitors, billboards, stage sets, building models, live video feeds, and surveillance cameras. As the audience walks through the chaotic architectural structure the onstage and backstage merge. Participants are captured on camera and unwittingly inserted into the media stream. In a Warholian gesture, The Subsumption Machine flattens all hierarchy of representation to a common supersaturated image field, depicting the postmodern dystopian world as a biopolitical “prison house of language”.

In the age of interactive media and industries that manufacture desire, we find ourselves in increasingly manipulated social and political situations. Our condition is no longer defined by a lack of access to tools in an era of media monopolization. We no longer struggle for the opportunity or ability to represent our own stories and produce our own media. Instead, we find ourselves in an overly theatricalized world where participation is marketed as a cultural imperative. Turn on and tune in, but drop out is no longer an available option. Built for the purpose of manufacturing desire, this pavilion is propelled by converting human will for “other options” into its fuel. The lives of willing and unwilling participants provide content and give form to The Subsumption Machine.

The Façade Series

Not An Alternative @ Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City

beka — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 02:31:31 -0700

Encuentro de Espacios Culturales de Accion No Institucionalizada: September 29-30, 2011

Originally in Spanish, Translation from Google Translate:
The Museum of Modern Art of Mexico City is organizing this international meeting to reflect on the contributions of the cultural spaces of self-management. From Europe, U.S. and Latin America, twelve disparate spaces will discuss their strategies and activation platforms artistic and communicative, in conversation with other cultural agents in Mexico.

Among the guests who will share their spaces and programs are Capacete prospects Entertainment (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), Not An Alternative (New York, EUA), Project Ultraviolet (Ciudad de Guatemala, Guatemala), Faculty of Contemporary Art Foundation (Montevideo , Uruguay), doubt. Art and hesitations (Cali, Colombia), CRAC (Valparaiso, Chile), Beta-Local (San Juan, Puerto Rico), CIA. Artistic Research Center (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Off Limits (Madrid, Spain), SLanguage (Los Angeles, United States), The Tannery (Oaxaca, Oaxaca) and periphery (Merida, Yucatan). Through their business models and public insertion, these spaces generate other strategies and / or dynamic interrelation; to build bridges between producers and participants, through creative, critical and / or knowledge unpublished.

During these two days of discussion, the panel will be moderated in discussion with directors and / or promoters of similar spaces in the city of Mexico, Border Cultural Center, SOMA and house next door. These projects, with their work, are now the benchmark for contemporary national artistic production and remain open territories leaders in knowledge sharing.

These strategies allow us to rethink noninstitutionalized current exhibition platforms, communication and exchange through art, and generate more ductile models, vital and effective social participation in the network

Meeting of Cultural Spaces of Action noninstitutionalized *

Thurs 29-Fri 30 Sep 2011 | 10:00 to 15:00 17:00 to 18:30 hours and hours

Thu 29 Sep

9:30 | Register
10:00 to 10:15 | Opening

Panel 1

Fri 30 Sep
10:00 to 10:30 | Register

Creative Activism Thursdays: Revolutionaries Live!

beka — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 17:41:17 -0700

Dear friends, as Not An Alternative is busy readying the new NO↔SPACE for public events and programming, we're teaming up with The Yes Lab to present a series of lectures and workshops this Fall at NYU. We hope to see you there.

And stay tuned for info on our new home: a beautiful 1500 square foot space on the waterfront in Greenpoint where we'll have dedicated desks with studio mates and collaborators, space for light fabrication, and film screenings, artist talks, panel discussions, workshops and exhibitions. We have just a couple more desks to rent for October 1, if you or someone you know is interested in more info let us know!

Creative Activism Thursdays: Revolutionaries Live!
Fall 2011 Programming Series

Creative activism considers the relationship between representation and action, the material and immaterial. Contemporary activists employ traditional tactics as well as those that take into account our hyper-mediated world of signs and symbols, stories and spectacle.

This Fall, The Yes Lab, Not An Alternative, and the Center for Artistic Activism are teaming up to bring you “Creative Activism Thursdays” a series of lectures and workshops with theorists, activists and artists from around the world.

From the merry militants of Serbia’s Otpor movement to the the anarchic hacktivists of Anonymous, from Spain’s New Kids on the Black Bloc, to the AIDS activists of Act-Up, we’ll unpack cultural tactics and creative strategies from social movements, both current and historic.

• Sept. 22: Ivan Marovic, Otpor.
• Sept. 29: Srdja Popovic and Slobo Djinovic, Otpor.
* Oct 5: (POSTPONED)
• Oct. 13: (POSTPONED)
• Oct. 20: Leónidas Martín Saura from Las Agencias, Yomango, and En Medio.
• Oct. 27: John Jackson, author of Small Acts of Resistance.
* Nov 3: John Stewart and Dan Glass, Aviation Justice, UK Climate Campaign
• Nov. 17: Mark Rudd, formerly of the Weather Underground.
* Dec 1: Gabriella Coleman, about the Lulz in Anonymous.
• Dec. 8: Timothy Patrick McCarthy, The Radical Reader.

Revolutionaries Live! kicks off this Thursday with the great Ivan Marovic, one of the founders of Otpor, the student resistance movement that played a critical role in the downfall of Slobodan Milosevic.

In October 2000, a group of students from Belgrade University with a yearning to live a democratic life helped to overthrow the rule of Europe’s most bloody dictator, Slobodan Milosevic. Their influences were Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and the work of the American academic and guru of non-violent resistance, Gene Sharp. They employed simple but effective tactics: using mobile phones, slogans and Monty Python-style street humor. But their secret was their methodology: unity, planning and non-violent discipline. Using this trio of tactics, they managed to pull together a politically divided Serbia.

After Milosevic’s fall, Marovic began consulting with various pro democracy groups worldwide and became one of the leading trainers in the field of civil resistance. Ivan will speak about the role of humor and creative activism in the struggles he has helped to guide.

Space is limited, RSVP required. After the Ivan's talk at NYU, we'll take the N/R train a few stops down to Liberty Plaza and Occupy Wall Street. There, around 8:30 or 9pm, Ivan will continue his talk for our very own here-and-now revolutionaries. So if you can't get into the talk, you can see it in context around 8:30 or 9pm Thursday!

ABOUT THE PRESENTERS
All events are at 7pm at Performance Studies, 6th Floor, 721 Broadway, NY unless otherwise noted.
Dates scheduled so far for fall 2011:

Sept. 22: Ivan Marovic, Otpor. After Ivan's talk, we'll all take the N/R train a few stops to #occupywallstreet! Ivan is one of the founders of Otpor, the student resistance movement that played a critical role in the downfall of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. After Milosevic’s fall, Marovic began consulting with various pro democracy groups worldwide and became one of the leading trainers in the field of civil resistance. Ivan will speak about the role of humor and creative activism in the struggles he’s helped to guide. Introduction by Bryan Farrell of WagingNonViolence.org.

Sept. 29: Srdja Popovic and Slobo Djinovic, Otpor. Srdja is founding member of Otpor, the student resistance movement that played a critical role in the downfall of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. In late 2003 he co-founded the Center for Applied Non-Violent Actions and Strategies (CANVAS), a group that supports nonviolent democratic movements through the transfer of knowledge on strategies and tactics of nonviolent struggle. Slobo is an innovator in democracy and technology, founding Serbia’s first wireless internet company and a founder of Otpor. He has since become a leader exponent of sharing strategic non-violence training for democracy movements and peaceful opposition groups in the world’s remaining dictatorships. Introduction by Eric Stoner of WagingNonViolence.org.

Oct. 5: John Stewart and Dan Glass, UK Climate Campaign. John Stewart was a key organizer in the successful decade-long campaign to stop the expansion of London’s Heathrow Airport. He was named Britain’s most effective green activist by the Independent for bringing together aviation-impacted communities, climate activists, and fiscal conservatives. His publications include Roads for People: Policies for Liveable Streets and Victory Against All The Odds: The Story of the Campaign to Stop a Third Runway at Heathrow. Dan Glass was named one of the UK’s youth climate leaders by the Guardian and one of Attitude magazine’s 66 new role models for helping bridge LGBTQ and environmental justice movements. The grandson of four Holocaust survivors, he’s best known for having superglued himself to the Prime Minister to draw attention to communities impacted by aviation climate change. Dan revels in creating militant but cheeky ways to be a thorn in the side for those destroying the planet — occupying airports, dancing with old ladies blighted by flightpaths, and working with aviation justice direct action network Plane Stupid. Introduction by Not An Alternative.

Oct. 13: Gabriella Coleman, about the Lulz in Anonymous. Biella is a professor in NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication and a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study. Her book, Coding Freedom: The Aesthetics and the Ethics of Hacking, is forthcoming with Princeton University Press and she is currently working on a new book on Anonymous and digital activism. Biella will speak about the revolutionary humor the hacker group Anonymous uses as one of its key tactics.

Oct. 20: Leonidas Martin is a Professor at Barcelona University where he teaches New Media and Political Art. For many years he has been developing collective projects between art and activism, some of them well known internationally (Las Agencias, Yomango, Prêt a Révolter). He writes about art and politics for blogs, journals and newspapers, has created several documentaries and movies for television and internet, and is a member of the cultural collective “Enmedio” (www.enmedio.info). Last but not least, he is an expert telling jokes, often using this divine gift to get free beers and avoid police arrest. Leo will tell stories about the current upheaval in Spain, among other things. Introduction by Not An Alternative.

Oct. 27, 7:30pm, Rm 105, 34 Stuyvesant Street: John Jackson, author of Small Acts of Resistance. John is co-author of Small Acts of Resistance, a collection of stories showing how humor, tenacity, and ingenuity can change the world. Currently Vice President for Social Responsibility at MTV Networks International, John was a founder and Director of Burma Campaign UK, and has been involved in major international campaigns on fair trade, landmines, child labor, and climate change.

Nov. 17, 7:30pm, Rm 105, 34 Stuyvesant Street: Mark Rudd, formerly of the Weather Underground. Mark led the legendary 1968 occupation of five buildings at Columbia University, a dramatic act of protest against the university's support for the Vietnam War. As charismatic chairman of the Columbia chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, the largest radical student organization in the United States, Rudd became a national symbol of student revolt, and went on to co-found the Weathermen faction of SDS, which helped organize the notorious Days of Rage in Chicago in 1969 before going underground. Mark will speak about the intended and unintended humor of ‘60s activism. Introduction by Jeremy Varon.

Dec. 8: Timothy Patrick McCarthy, The Radical Reader. Tim is Lecturer on History and Literature and on Public Policy at Harvard University and Director of the Sexuality, Gender, and Human Rights Program at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he hosts the monthly public conversation series, “The Activist’s Studio,” convenes an annual spring conference on “Gay Rights as Human Rights,” and co-chairs the Regional Working Group on Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery. He will speak about the ways that humor is crucial to cultural transformation, and specifically the role of humor in the LGBT movement.

Revolutionaries Live! (aka Creative Activism Thursdays) is co-sponsored by NYU Dean for Social Science, the Hemispheric Institute, the Yes Lab, the Humanities Initiative at NYU Working Research Group on Artistic Activism, CAA, and Not an Alternative. Speakers will also attend following Yes Lab Friday.

Some Sad News About NO↔SPACE

beka — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 23:21:59 -0700

Dear friends,

It's been a great run over here at 84 Havemeyer Street, but with the latest rent hike -- a 240% increase -- it's time to move on.

We moved to this storefront in 2000, when there was nary a health food store, bar, condo, or sushi joint this side of Bedford Ave. It was off the beaten path. 99 cent stores abounded, and the Puerto Ricans owned this block. Their lives were lived on the street: barbecues and backgammon, family and friends.

There's a lot of history in this space, and it started well before we arrived. Beka took it over from a woman named Megan who hosted a pirate radio station in her living room, with 24 hr. jam sessions, performance art, and parties. She and her boyfriend built a sort of gingerbread house cum forest cottage in the middle of the space from reclaimed wood. It was Beka’s bedroom for 2 years. Before Megan was a man whose name we can't remember, known by the neighbors as the curmudgeonly guy who'd open the front door, pull out a guitar and amp, and play heavy metal in his bathrobe on the street. Much, much earlier it was a grocery store, and before that, a bagel factory.

We saw potential beyond a home/office, and when the 2004 Republican National Convention was announced Not An Alternative was formed, and we started to use the storefront as our headquarters. We hosted weekend workshops on the sidewalk with a boom box, a grill, and political artists from around the city, recruiting passersby to pitch in with production in advance of the protests. For evening artist talks and meetings we’d carry all of the living and bedroom furniture to a friend’s apartment upstairs and bring it all back down again at the end of the night. It was truly a multi-purpose space!

That soon grew old and in 2005 Beka moved out and Jason, Winnie, Ian, and friends renovated the space to be Not An Alternative’s dedicated events venue, workshop and coworking office, née The Change You Want To See Gallery and recently re-named NO↔SPACE. Over the years we’ve hosted 100’s of events here: from film screenings, artist talks, workshops and trainings, panel discussions, and festivals, it’s been a laboratory for the cross-pollination of artists, activists, and academics.

Beyond pedagogy, we’ve engaged in practice, in collaboration with community groups and cultural producers. Our first major effort involved a series of projects aimed at challenging the 2005 rezoning and gentrification of North Brooklyn. But the neighborhood has changed dramatically since then, and we've had front row seats. The block built up, the foot traffic grew, and so did the rent. The latest hike is the last straw: a 240% rent increase, from $2500 to $6000. And so we find ourselves displaced, like countless other spaces, businesses and residents around here over the years.

It's been a wild ride, with ups and downs, but never a dull moment, and we're grateful for it all. Much gratitude to our residents and coworkers, our audience, our allies, and our collaborators, past and present, as this experiment never would have happened without you.

This isn’t goodbye: we’ll keep you appraised of our next steps! But this is the end of this chapter. And we'd like to commemorate it with you.

Please save the date:

Saturday, September 17
Final Event at NO↔SPACE on Havemeyer St
Film screenings and Closing Party
(Exact Time TBA)

We hope to see you then.

ART21: 5 Questions (for Contemporary Practice) with Not An Alternative by Thom Donovan

beka — Sat, 21 May 2011 18:53:44 -0700

"Tate Modern: Tomorrow Is Another Day (After the Economic Crisis)" installation produced by Not An Alternative for the Tate Modern’s 10th anniversary show “No Soul for Sale: A Festival of Independents.” The work implicated corporate sponsor, Morgan Stanley, for its role in the economic crisis. The piece was accompanied by an essay situating the work art historically as in intervention on participatory art, while simultaneously linking it to other local campaigns targeting Tate sponsorship. May 14-16, 2010 Photo by Not An Alternative.

I encountered the art group Not An Alternative for the first time about a month ago in Corona, Queens, where Tania Bruguera (featured last month in 5 Questions) had assembled a panel on “useful art.” What immediately impressed me was the group’s ability to articulate its ongoing project, which aims both to create new spaces for cultural production and to question the ways that various participatory structures (social media, election processes, relational aesthetics) exclude certain subjects and amplify social and economic inequalities by means of participation.

Through their highly engaged work, work that functions somewhere between political activism, social service, and institutional critique, Not An Alternative confront the limits of what political theorist Jodi Dean has called, after a variety of critical theoretical debates, “communicative capitalism.” In a time of communicative capitalism, our political and social participation is increasingly exploited by the use of new media. Not An Alternative foregrounds this fact, presenting ways of navigating a relatively new digital landscape in which values once cherished by the militant left and avant-garde alike–participation, reflexivity, interactivity–have become corporate watchwords for how neoliberalism manages consent in a networked age.

Networked for some, but obviously not for all. Not An Alternative’s work is also crucial in the ways that it foregrounds exclusion, offering ways to visualize the limits of participation in a society in which obviously one’s ability to participate is largely determined by social and economic privilege. As Not An Alternative said during their presentation in Corona, referring to their collaboration with a homeless advocacy group in the Bronx (discussed below), they recognize the important of “desubjectifying” themselves, where to draw attention to their efforts may work against the causes of the community groups with whom they choose to work.

The Not (or nots, plural) of Not An Alternative are significant in a time in which terms like “collaboration,” “participation,” and “interactivity” remain largely unquestioned. What would it mean to drop out, when dropping out would no longer seem an option? Not An Alternative do not so much drop out as use the resources and machinery of communicative capitalism to produce a different set of results that undermine the seamless functioning of neoliberalism. In this way they negate and refuse, but their refusal also has a positive effect.

Read the Interview

Video from "Conversations on Useful Art" Presentation

beka — Tue, 17 May 2011 13:49:13 -0700

On Saturday, April 23, Not An Alternative took part in A Conversation on Useful Art #1, an event organized by artist Tania Bruguera as part of Immigrant Movement International, a year-long, socio-political movement initiated by the artist in Corona, Queens presented by Creative Time and the Queens Museum of Art. The event took place at Immigrant Movement International headquarters and was held in conjunction with the Useful Art Association and featured an introduction to Useful Art followed by a series of brief conversations with artists and presenters Patrick Bernier and Olive Martin, Mel Chin, Not An Alternative, Rick Lowe, Pase Usted, Creative Time Chief Curator Nato Thompson, QMA Executive Director Tom Finkelpearl, Larissa Harris, Gregory Sholette, representatives from Make the Road, New York, and N.I.C.E. (New Immigrant Community Empowerment), and New York City Council Member Julissa Ferreras.

Further documentation can be found here: http://immigrant-movement.us/?p=2120.

Coworking at No-Space Featured in NY Post

beka — Mon, 16 May 2011 21:32:35 -0700

Snow Flow 2011

beka — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 09:30:59 -0800

SnowFlow is a collaborative event between several organizations interested in creativity, sustainability and organizational awareness. Our shared concerns regarding environmental issues and the increasing frequency of global catastrophes have focused our efforts into establishing ongoing collaborative projects that raise public awareness and bring together artists, activists, naturalists and concerned citizens into settings that inform, support and energize participants into making a difference.

Registration | Participating Groups | Schedule of Events | Donations | Press Release

SnowFlow will be held the weekend of February 11-13, 2011 at the Full Moon Resort. Located within the Catskill State Park and Forest Preserve, this region serves as both the main contributor to the New York City watershed and as the headwaters to the Delaware River, recently declared the “Nation's Most Endangered River.” The main initiative for SnowFlow is to bridge water rights activism between the Hudson and Delaware Valleys in relation to natural gas extraction, hydraulic fracturing, peak water and the foodshed.

The weekend events will combine outdoor activities, art, music and lively conversations to produce and document a variety of works focused on water in it most crystallized form – Snow! During the day, SnowFlowers will cascade down the slopes of nearby Belleayre Mountain and engage in parallel artistic interventions and snow shelter building competitions. The festivities will continue into the evening with a cocktail reception and a regional Catskill foodshed specialtiesdinner, followed by conversations related to peak water & the foodshed and musical performances curated by Suzanne Thorpe and featuring Pauline Olivero, Miguel Frasconi and Tianna Kennedy & Hannah Marcus.

Pics from Fall Foliage, Farms, and Fracking Tour

beka — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 07:28:52 -0800

Get Your Farmy Fall Frack On!

beka — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 01:17:40 -0700

Agri-artists, urban farmers, data visualizers, designers, radical cartographers, performers, waterpodders, activist geographers, and YOU in a veggie-oil powered bus. Join us as we drive upstate to the beautiful Delaware River Valley on the NY/PA border to visit local farms that are fighting hydrofracking in their backyards. $50/person includes transportation, meals, hiking, farm and drill site tours, potluck dinner party, accommodations, and free morning yoga class. Leave Saturday morning November 6th, return Sunday afternoon.

WE ARE NOW SOLD OUT! SPACES MIGHT OPEN UP, REGISTER BELOW TO GET ON THE WAITING LIST. WE'LL LET YOU KNOW BY THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 4.

Why should you come? Cuz fall leaves rock, so do veggie oil buses, and organic veggies, and road trips, and rivers, and farmers, and food, but fracking doesn't. Pssst, they're all related, find out how. Get out of Gotham and come visit Gasland.

Organized by Not An Alternative, with Sky Dog Projects.

Co-sponsors: Ant Hill Farm, Damascus Citizens for Sustainability, Delaware Valley Arts Alliance, Electronic Media Foundation/Earth to the Earth, Issue Project Room, Not An Alternative, Riverlights B&B, Rude Mechanical Orchestra, Sky Dog Projects, Urban Rustic.

ITINERARY
We'll have two departure points on the morning on Saturday, November 6th, one in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and the other near Columbia University in Harlem.

9am: bus leaves from No-Space (formerly called The Change You Want To See Gallery) in Williamsburg. The address: 84 Havemeyer St, at Metropolitan Ave, Brooklyn NY 11211. Closest subway stops: L to Bedford; J/M/Z to Marcy; G to Metropolitan.
9:45am: uptown pick-up point at the Starbucks on Broadway between 114th and 115th. Closest subway stop is the 1 train at 116th / Columbia University.

Lunch will be served on the bus, sandwiches compliments of Urban Rustic, and fruit from the NYC Green Markets. We arrive upstate on the NY/PA border in the Upper Delaware River Valley around 1pm. In the afternoon we'll visit the following farms:

Diehl Farm, Callicoon, NY: a 6th generation Catskill dairy farm, they also produce maple syrup, honey, Christmas trees, and organic produce. The drilling issue has been a contentious one for the Diehl family, as profiled in this recent Bloomberg News article.
River Brook Farm, Cocheton, NY: right on the Delaware River, Farmer Neil and Farmer Alice grow organic heirloom variety produce and sell meat as well.
Willow Wisp Organic Farm, Abrahamsville, PA: Farmer Greg and Farmer Tannis grow a diverse mix of organic vegetables, herbs and cut flowers. Until recently a gas drilling test pad was located next to their farm.

We'll also stop by an active drill site on our way to the town of Narrowsburg, NY, where we can check out the Main Street shops and galleries, and pick up drinks for dinner. Around the corner at the Delaware Valley Arts Alliance we'll have a potluck dinner party with area farmers, artists and activists.

Down the street by the Ten Mile River is Riverlights Bed & Breakfast and Yoga Center, where we'll crash for the night. The owner, Jane Morris, has generously offered to put us up for a reduced rate, make us brunch, and teach a free yoga class for those interested.

PLEASE NOTE: Bring sleeping bags to stay on the yoga studio floor (you'll have access to showers). The rooms at the B&B are now full, we can only offer accommodations in the yoga studio.

In the morning you can take a yoga class, take a hike, or take it easy. The B&B is on 8 pristine acres of woods, trails and water. After a home-cooked brunch we'll be on our way back to the city, to arrive by late afternoon.

COSTS
For $50 per person the tour includes: transportation, farm and fracking tour, lunch and dinner on Saturday, brunch on Sunday, accommodations in the yoga studio at the B&B, and a free yoga class in the morning.

WHAT TO BRING
• Warm clothes and jacket – it can be as much as 10 degrees cooler upstate
• Comfortable shoes for walking around the farm
• Snacks: nuts, fruit, chocolate, whatever you need to get you between meals.
• Water bottle
• Sleeping bag if you’re sleeping in the yoga studio (optional: yoga mat or camping pad for the floor)
• Earplugs in case of snorers (optional)
• Overnight toiletries and jammies
• Money if you’d like to buy wine or drinks for dinner
• Camera

WE ARE SOLD OUT! SPACES MIGHT OPEN UP, FILL OUT THIS FORM TO GET ON THE WAITING LIST.
Loading...*****WAIT! YOU'RE NOT DONE YET...
If you registered before Monday, November 1 but didn't purchase tickets, please do so below. You can pay with a paypal account or credit card. If you just signed up for the waiting list please DO NOT purchase tickets yet. We'll let you know if there's room for you by Thursday, November 4.

new fall programming series

beka — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 00:53:08 -0700

August 24 - November 28, 2010

Global urbanism is one of the most significant trends of this century. For the first time, a majority of people on the planet now live in cities. As populations shift to urban centers, space – which is already at a premium in most cities and dwellings – becomes an even more pressing concern. Short of growing our architecture ever higher and spreading the creep of concrete, we seek solutions that consider size constraints alongside questions of environmental, social and economic sustainability.

Artists and designers, developers and planners, activists and architects respond to these challenges with creative solutions. But our fixed gear bikes and rooftop farms, geo-location apps and LEED certified lofts are lifestyles cum commodities, quickly subsumed into brand campaigns, used to sell a spatial agenda. Kill your Facebook profile, grow your food, you are still a walking talking advertisement for gentrification whether you like it or not.

Inevitably, where people converge, spatial conflicts arise. The ideas and desires of one group come at the expense of another. While social media and technology are heralded as cost-effective means to open-source the city, this participation is only partial, presenting an imagined consensus that obscures deeper forms of social exclusion. Too often, participation affirms a system rather than challenging it. And our contemporary system contradicts sustainability principles with a fundamental and fatal design flaw: that of impossible, unlimited growth.

Given these conditions, how can cultural creatives and spatial practitioners participate productively? What are constructive forms of critical engagement? What does an architecture look like that acts not to serve a community but to produce it? How might we open-source the city in invited and uninvited ways?

Series Schedule
(save the dates)

Tuesday, August 24, 7:30pm - 9:30pm -- professor/author Miriam Greenberg (Branding NY: How a City in Crisis Sold Itself to the World)

Thursday, September 16, 7:30pm - 9:30pm -- artist/activist Emily Forman (Department of Land Space Reclamation)

Thursday, October 14, 7:30pm - 9:30pm -- artist Shaun Slifer (Howling Mob Society) and artist/academic Gregory Sholette (Repo History)

NEW!. Thursday, October 21, 7:30pm - 10pm - screening of the recently released award-winning film Gasland by Josh Fox, about shale gas drilling (aka hydrofracking).

Thursday, October 28, 7:30pm - 9:30pm -- Michael Cataldi, John Houck, David Kelley, Hans Kuzmich, Jens Maier- Rothe, Jeannine Tang (Parallel Lines project)

NEW!. Saturday, November 6, all day (possibly overnight, tbd): "Fall Foliage, Farms, and Fracking Tour". Agri-artists, urban farmers, green marketeers, FEASTers, food activists and YOU in a veggie-oil powered bus. Join us as we drive upstate to the beautiful Delaware River Valley on the NY/PA border to visit local farms that are fighting hydrofracking in their backyards. Interested in taking part? Email info@notanalternative.net. NOTE: trip is funding contingent. Help make it happen! Donate via the yellow paypal button to the right.

(Postponed, date TBD), 7:30pm - 9:30pm -- architect/writer Markus Miessen (The Nightmare of Participation)

THE LIMITS OF PARTICIPATION

beka — Fri, 14 May 2010 08:09:30 -0700

“Ideological victory can look just like ideological defeat. When one’s enemy accepts one’s terms, one’s point of critique and resistance is lost, subsumed. The dimension of antagonism (fundamental opposition) vanishes.” – Jodi Dean
Today everyone sings the praises of participation: leading academics hail active audiences who remix commercial culture, established curators wax poetic about relational aesthetics, web 2.0 executives and marketing experts applaud openness and connectivity, conservative economists have discovered the benefits of collaboration. Interactivity, access, engagement are the highest ideals of the new order, ideals taken by many to be synonymous with democracy. Participation is perceived as politics, and vice versa.
Not An Alternative’s installation at the Tate Modern’s No Soul for Sale show was inspired by artist Rikrit Taravanija’s influential work “Tomorrow is Another Day,” a piece that welcomed people into a gallery remodeled as an apartment, where they were met with free food, interesting conversation, even a bed to rest on. As critic Claire Bishop points out, the tradition of socially engaged art that Taravanija is part of assumes that “the creative energy of participatory practices rehumanizes – or at least de-alienates – a society rendered numb and fragmented by the instrumentality of capitalism.” The problem, as Jerry Saltz complacently observed, is that many of the people who accepted Taravanija’s invitation were art world denizens – dealers, curators, creators, and wannabes – who already felt entitled to access the space.
By offering us the padlocked façade of a foreclosed home Not An Alternative’s “Tomorrow is Another Day (After the Economic Crisis)” demands we take an outsider’s view, that we remain in a space of contemplation not engagement, and consider those excluded from the uncritical celebration of participation. What about the families who have lost their homes as a consequence of the subprime mortgage crisis? What about people who don’t visit museum exhibitions, or frequent the proper websites, who are not invited into social networks because they lack the necessary technological or cultural capital?
The fantasy of participation is a powerful one, postulating, as it does, the invitation and inclusion of everyone, everywhere. The Internet, we are told, makes this dream a reality, erasing borders and distinctions, smoothing out differences and hierarchies. We are all equal now, because we believe everyone’s voice can be heard. Political theorist Jodi Dean calls this “communicative capitalism,” an ideological formation that fetishizes speech, opinion, and participation: “It embeds us in a mindset wherein the number of friends one has on Facebook, the number of page-hits one gets on one’s blog, and the number of videos on one’s YouTube channel are key markers of success, and details such as duration, depth of commitment, corporate and financial influence, access to structures of decision-making, and the narrowing of political struggle to the standards of do-it-yourself entertainment culture become the boring preoccupations of baby boomers stuck in the past.” Welcome to the age of interactivity, where participation means everything and nothing. Every action is subsumed by this new framework, including our very sociability – our likes and desires, our heartfelt comments and curiosities, our mindless searches and indiscriminate clicks – which are mined, analyzed, and monetized by the new powerbrokers.
“Tomorrow is Another Day (After the Economic Crisis)" asks us not to ignore the wave of foreclosures caused by the housing bubble, one that preyed upon people’s overwhelming desire to participate in the American dream of home ownership. The evictions and dispossessions that resulted illustrate just how elusive and cruel the fantasy of inclusiveness can be when unbuttressed by fair social and economic policy. But Not An Alternative does not stop with the housing bubble (one that, we are reminded, was sponsored by institutions like Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, and Bank of America, all corporate sponsors of this museum); their installation subtly calls attention to the emergence of a new bubble, one that has been referred to as “relationship inflation.” As media theorist Trebor Scholz points out, participation is the oil of the digital economy. In this era of social networks, we run the risk of making too much out of the relationships we have, while unthinkingly excluding populations beyond our immediate consciousness. We must ask ourselves: How deep do our connections go? How much dissensus do we tolerate? How homogenous is the social field we’ve selected for ourselves?
Architect and theorist Markus Meisson eloquently interrogates the consensus-seeking rhetoric of participation, which he says too often assumes a romantic view of “harmony and solidarity.” Meisson writes that he “would like to promote an understanding of conflictual participation, one that acts as an uninvited irritant.” Here, at Tate Modern, Not An Alternative acts as just such an irritant, a presence that provokes us to remember those who have not received an invitation to this space, those who may be unwelcome or ill at ease. And by permitting the viewer to contemplate and deliberate -- by granting a respite from the pressure to collaborate, to immerse and implicate ourselves in the moment -- we are invited to take a longer view, to reflect on the limits of participation (something rarely experienced as the free and limitless opportunity we would like to imagine) and consider other, more contentious, forms of collective action that may be possible.

Frequently Asked Questions about Un-nominated Art

beka — Wed, 12 May 2010 21:55:49 -0700

Un-Nominated Art

1. Un-nominated art is not art.

2. Like art, un-nominated art can take any form.

3. Where art is associated with the individual, un-nominated art is collective (non-individual).

4. No un-nominated artwork is more important than any other. But a single un-nominated artwork can become elevated as a symbol of what every un-nominated artwork represents.

5. If an attempt is made to nominate an un-nominated work to the status of art, the un-nominated work can retain its status if someone challenges the nomination. Though, once the challenge is made, the work becomes contested.

6. An un-nominated work need not be nominated as such, but can be.

7. If the situation arises where an un-nominated work is nominated as art, the nomination is challenged and the work becomes contested, the un-nominated art work then shifts from being passively un-nominated to actively un-nominated.

8. Passively un-nominated art is that which exists prior to being nominated as art. (Duchamps “urinal” prior to nomination)

9. A work can be nominated an un-nominated work at any point, even long after it has been nominated a work of art. In which case it an example of an actively un-nominated work.

10. Un-nominated art is a form of art, but one defined in terms that refuse any positively constituted nature. Un-nominated art does not replace the form that came before it because it can only exist at the point of exteriority. It is neither formal material rejection nor immaterial conceptual reaction. Un-nominated art comes into being only in its negatively constituted character. And yet it is also not simply negation. Un-nominated art is art only at the point whereby it is exterior to the definition of art. For this reason this statement is paradoxical.

Symbols, Branding and Persuasion: An Art & Politics Presentation Series

beka — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 07:01:06 -0700

If advertising is the engine of capitalism, then brands are its symbolic currency. Branding is a complex communications system of signifiers that leverages psychoanalytical principals of irrationality and desire. As activists and socially engaged cultural producers we recognize the problems associated with a culture designed around consumption. Unlimited growth in a finite ecosystem is a recipe for global catastrophe. The practice of branding is a central force driving the system towards its inherent limit. How are we to respond?

A typical reaction is to reject branding/advertising with anti-advertising rhetoric. But the successful negation of representation is as likely as erasing language. After all, signs and symbols are the basis of communication. Another approach would be to deconstruct the internal workings of branding, making visible the ways in which society and individuals are determined by irrational drives, skillfully manipulated by corporations. Becoming aware however does little to circumvent a pervasive practice that ignores rational understanding as it preys on our subconscious.

With these challenges in mind this presentation series plans to explore 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? Can we produce our own brands in the service of a progressive politics? Does a brand communicate a fixed message, or can it be interpreted to signify a variety of meanings? If so, can we intervene upon and appropriate brands to point them in a direction of new meaning?

The Change You Want To See Gallery
September 24 - November 5, 2009
With Douglass Rushkoff, Stuart Ewen, Joo Young Oh, Carrie McLaren, Steve Lambert, Stephen Duncombe, Jessica Teal, and Loid Der

Events live-streamed at http://livestream.com/notanalternative

SERIES SCHEDULE:
(save the dates)

Thursday, Sept 24, 7:30-9:30pm – professor/author Douglass Rushkoff

Sunday, Sept 27, 4pm-9pm -- Screening Adam Curtis' four-part BBC series The Century of Self

Thursday, Oct 1, 7:30pm–9:30pm -- professor/author Stuart Ewen

Monday, Oct 12, 7:30pm–9:30pm -- consultant JooYoung Oh workshop on design research

Monday, Oct 26, 7:30-9:30pm: professor/author Stephen Duncombe

Monday, Nov 2, 7:30pm–9:30pm: author Carrie McLaren and artist Steve Lambert

Thursday, Nov 5, 7:30-9:30pm: consultant Loid Der workshop on branding

ABOUT “THE CENTURY OF SELF”
"The Century of Self" (2002) is a four-part BBC mini-series about the history of "spin," consumerism, mass psychology, and the role of propaganda in politics, social movements, cultural attitudes, and consumption. Adam Curtis' acclaimed series examines the rise of the all-consuming self against the backdrop of the Freud dynasty. To many in both politics and business, the triumph of the self is the ultimate expression of democracy, where power has finally moved to the people. Certainly the people may feel they are in charge, but are they really? The Century of the Self tells the untold and sometimes controversial story of the growth of the mass-consumer society in Britain and the United States. How was the all-consuming self created, by whom, and in whose interests?

Freud provided useful tools for understanding the secret desires of the masses. Unwittingly, his work served as the precursor to a world full of political spin doctors, marketing moguls, and society's belief that the pursuit of satisfaction and happiness is man's ultimate goal.

ABOUT THE PRESENTERS:
(in order of event date)

Douglas Rushkoff is the author of ten books on media, technology, and society, including Cyberia, Media Virus, Coercion, Nothing Sacred, Playing the Future, Open Source Democracy and Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out. Rushkoff also wrote the acclaimed novels Ecstasy Club and Exit Strategy, the graphic novel Club Zero-G and the comic book series Testament. He has written and hosted two award-winning Frontline documentaries - "The Merchants of Cool", which looked at the influence of corporations on youth culture, and "The Persuaders", about the cluttered landscape of marketing, and new efforts to overcome consumer resistance. He is currently working on PBS' new multiplatform project, Digital Nation, which will culminate as a Frontline documentary. Rushkoff’s commentaries air on CBS Sunday Morning and NPR’s All Things Considered, and have appeared in publications from The New York Times to Time magazine. His column on cyberculture is distributed globally through the New York Times Syndicate. He is Advisor to the United Nations Commission on World Culture, on the Board of Directors of the Media Ecology Association, The Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, and was a founding member of Technorealism. He has been awarded Senior Fellowships by the Markle Foundation and the Center for Global Communications Fellow of the International University of Japan. He regularly appears on TV shows from NBC Nightly News to Larry King and Bill Maher. He developed the Electronic Oracle software series for HarperCollins Interactive. He currently hosts the WFMU radio show The MediaSquat, and teaches at the New School University. His latest book, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation And How To Take It Back, was released in June 2009.

Stuart Ewen is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Film & Media Studies at Hunter College, and in the Ph.D. Programs in History, Sociology and American Studies at The CUNY Graduate Center (City University of New York). He is generally considered one of the originators of the field of Media Studies, and his writings have continued to shape debates in the field. Ewen is the author of influential books on the history of consumer society, visual culture, propaganda and modernity, including PR! A Social History of Spin, All Consuming Images: On the Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture and, with Elizabeth Ewen, Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness, and also Typecasting: On the Arts & Sciences of Human Inequality. Under a nom de plume, Archie Bishop, he has also worked as a photographer, pamphleteer, graphic artist, multimedia prankster, and political situationist for more than thirty years. Bishop's artwork is part of an international traveling exhibit, “Toxic Landscapes,” sponsored by the Puffin Foundation, and was recently featured in “Tactical Action,” a group exhibit at the Gigantic ArtSpace (GAS), 59 Franklin Street (Broadway/Lafayette), from April to June, 2004.

JooYoung Oh is a specialist who provides consumer insights that lead organizations to innovative design strategies. She does this through using tools that help people express their dreams and desires, identifying patterns and insights, and translating those insights into actionable frameworks for concept generation. Through multi-sensory stimuli approach she not only provides companies the understanding of current and ideal experience, but also how the ideal experiences can translate into metaphors and attributes with visual and tangible examples. She teaches these techniques through short and long term training courses and workshops and is a frequent presenter at design conferences and design schools, sharing her knowledge in participatory design methods. Prior to starting her own consultant business in 2009, she was with Lextant where she gained over 5 years of experience leading both domestic and international programs to gain consumer understanding for fortune 500 companies including Samsung mobile communication, Dell, P&G baby care hair care, Cardinal Health, Kohler, Moen, Whirlpool, Kaz, Wilson’s Leather, Ethicon Endo Surgery, Respironics, Cordis, CheckFree, Nationwide Insurance, and Wireless Generation. JooYoung gained her MFA in product design at Savannah College of Art & Design in Savannah, GA, USA and BFA in ceramic arts at Ewha Woman’s University in Seoul, Korea.

Carrie McLarenis 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.

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.

Stephen Duncombe is an Associate Professor at New York University where he teaches the history and politics of media and culture. He is the author of Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy and Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture the editor of the Cultural Resistance Reader and the coauthor of The Bobbed Haired Bandit: A True Story of Crime and Celebrity in 1920s New York. He also writes widely on culture and politics for scholarly journals and collections, as well as popular publications like the New York Times, the Nation, and Playboy. He is the co-founder of the College of Tactical Culture, part of the 2009 night school series at the Eyebeam Art and Technology Center. Duncombe has been a lifelong political activist and is currently working on a book about propaganda during the New Deal.

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.

SNIFF - A Public Interactive Projection

beka — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 02:16:29 -0700

The Change You Want To See Gallery is currently hosting SNIFF: public interactive projection project by Karolina Sobecka, with software design by Jim George. The projection can be viewed from the sidewalk outside the gallery after dark from Thursday, September 17 - Sunday, September 20. The project is associated with the 2009 Conflux Festival.

As you walk down the street you are approached by a dog. He is on his guard trying to discern your intentions. He will follow you and interpret your gestures as friendly or aggressive. He will try to engage you in a relationship and get you to pay attention to him. Sniff is an interactive projection in a storefront window. As the viewer walks by the projection, her movements and gestures are tracked by a computer vision system. A CG dog dynamically responds to these gestures and changes his behavior based on the state of engagement with the viewer.

Sniff from karolina sobecka on Vimeo.

CONCEPT
Sniff, simulating the visceral satisfaction of reality’s responsiveness and dynamism, is also an exploration of engagement of two different planes of understanding, and of relationships created by body’s presence in an environment. The experience is very familiar yet strange, leading us to re-examine notions we take for granted. Dog’s behavior externalizes the process of assessment, evaluation and testing we perform every time anything new enters in the scope of our experience. Sniff has us unwittingly enter into an exchange simply by following the basic instinct of stopping and looking at something that is paying attention to us. A tension is produced by a mixture of fears and expectations, curiosity and interest.

Sniff is supported by a Finishing Funds grant from the Experimental Television Center. The Experimental Television Center’s Finishing Funds program is supported by the Electronic Media and Film Program at the New York State Council on the Arts.