artist talk

Tuesday, June 29, 7:30pm (free)

Please join us for 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 counter-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 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.

ABOUT LEONIDAS MARTIN
Leonidas Martin is a Professor at Barcelona University where he teaches video, new media and political art. For many years he has been developing collective projects between art and activism, many of them well known internationally. He also writes about art and politics for cultural blogs, journals and newspapers. As a video maker he has created several documentaries and movies for television and internet. He is a member of the cultural collective “Enmedio” (http://www.enmedio.info). Last but not least, he is an expert telling jokes, often using this divine gift to get free beers and to avoid police arrest.

“That is art beyond media: the impossible –
And you are dealing with it.”

-Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei and Jonas Staal, Follow Us Or Die (Atropos Press, 2009)

Thursday, April 29, 7:30pm (free)
Artists Vincent van Gerven Oei and Jonas Staal explore the relationship between art, morality and society. In their work, they transform a court session into a performance, fragments of car bomb wrecks into jewelry, while a suicide terrorist is judged on his composition techniques.

Their video pamphlet “Follow us or Die” is a reflection on so-called ‘high school shooters’, young people who kill their teachers and classmates in a brutal manner. The visual and textual legacy of these ‘shooters’- the pre-recorded videos and texts circulating in the media after the events – function as central elements in the video.

The corresponding book presents short stories, poetry, theater pieces, visual outputs and essays that deal with the heritage of these young shooters – who saw total annihilation as the only possibility to express themselves – to point to core fears and desires in contemporary society.

On Thursday, April 29th we’ll be joined by Vincent W. J. van Gerven Oie for a book reading, screening and artist talk that will situate these subjects in a broader social and artistic context.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei studied composition, linguistics and conceptual art in Den Haag and Leiden, The Netherlands and Amherst MA, USA. He is a PhD candidate in the Media & Communications department at the European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland. His research targets the borders and interfaces between art, technology, activism and theory and encompasses installations, pamphlets, essays and lectures. Van Gerven Oei works and lives in Den Haag, The Netherlands.

Story-based Strategies for Action Design
Multimedia presentation and training
with smartMeme

Monday, March 29, 7:30pm (free)
Streamed live for out-of-towners at http://livestream.com/notanalternative

Story telling is an ancient and powerful form of human expression. Today, however the power of story is mainly used by advertisers, PR flacks and political propagandists. In order to make change, social movements must tell new stories that challenge assumptions and shape new possibilities for action and change.

How can activist and artists use story-based strategies to design "image events": actions, images or stories that simultaneously destroy and construct new meaning? How can we either replace existing sets of symbols or re-define their meaning? Can we connect organizing struggles with the ethereal world of culture, media and narrative?

The story-based strategy approach is grounded in a narrative analysis of power––the recognition that humans understand the world and their role in it through stories and thus all power relations have a narrative component. Every issue already has a web of existing stories and cultural assumptions that frame public understanding. Story-based strategy provides a process to understand the current story around an issue and identify opportunities to change that story with the right framing, messages, messengers and creative interventions.

Join Doyle Canning and Patrick Reinsborough, cofounders of smartMeme and authors of Re:Imagining Change for a provocative, multi-media presentation and hands-on training that will explore the power of memes, creative action and new strategic frameworks for affecting social change and the transmission of culture.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Thursday June 4, 7:30 pm, free
@ The Change You Want To See Gallery in Brooklyn, NY
and streamed live at http://www.livestream.com/notanalternative

This Thursday evening artist and activist Martin Krenn will present his work that ranges from co-operative, socially committed and participatory projects to politically symbolic, provocative actions. Based in Vienna, Austria, Krenn is an artist, curator, filmmaker, and activist whose work focuses on strategies and methods of resistance to the governing relations of power. He uses different media such as photography, video and the internet to develop projects that are realized in exhibitions, the web and in public space. His talk will give insights in his newer projects where an extended concept of art, subversive techniques and testing the so-called 'freedom of art' are deployed mostly strategically.

Krenn is the Chair of the Austrian Artists Association - IG Bildende Kunst and since 2006 has taught Interventionist Art at the Department of Art and Communicative Practice/University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Current projects include "In between the movements - an ongoing video project about global justice movements", "Normality in [the] Crisis", "Democracy and Welfare for All" and "On the Tectonics of History" which can be seen in the ISCP-New York in Brooklyn till June 28.
http://www.martinkrenn.net

This event is co-produced by Not An Alternative and Pond: art, activism, ideas.

Not in NY? This event will be streamed live at http://www.mogulus.com/notanalternative

Sunday, April 26, 7pm - 10pm EST
Please join us this Sunday evening for an artist talk and presentation by Sara Sajjad, a founding member of Swedish arts collective Piratbyran (the Bureau of Piracy).

Sajjad will discuss their popular project The Pirate Bay, the world's largest bit torrent file-sharing service on the internet. A landmark trial pitting the Scandanavian pirates vs. Hollywood privateers made international headlines this week when four defiant Swedes were found guilty of violating copyright law. It's a mild blow to the buccaneers, but more like cutting heads off hydras or hitting hornets nests. Like an international game of whac-a-mole, the file-sharing community keeps popping up to promote new modes of connecting. A discussion about intellectual property and the free culture movement will be joined by special guests, including folks from MuxTape, a US-based music sharing site that was shut down last year. Sajjad will also screen footage from related Piratbyran projects and performances, including KopimiTV (CopyMeTV), the CopyRiot ritual, and the Pirate Bus art tour.

The talk will be followed by a guerilla music swap, so bring your laptop, USB stick or hard drive, and share, swap, and propagate like the pirate you arrrrrrr! As Piratbyran says, multiplication can produce powerful numbers. And great music collections.

Note: The event will take place at The Change You Want To See Gallery, and will also be live broadcast at Black Betty, the bar/restaurant across the street. For those who can't make it in person it will be live streamed at http://www.mogulus.com/notanalternative a bit after 7:30pm EST.

Monday, March 30, 7:30pm (free)
Please join us for a conversation with renowned philosopher, media activist and cultural agitator Franco Berardi (aka Bifo) and media theorist MacKenzie Wark, author of Game Theory and A Hacker's Manifesto.

Bifo has been a pivotal figure in Italian social movements for that past 40 years. He co-founded the legendary Radio Alice (1977), the first pirate radio station in Italy, the magazine A/Traverso (1977-81), and Rekombinant (2000), an online network environment that focuses on radical philosophy, urban conflicts, media activism, networking art, knowledge economy, western psychopathology, autonomous universities, and institutions of the common. More recently he produced the autonomous street television network Orfeo TV (2002), which sparked a national network of pirate micro TV stations to counter the media monopoly of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

This event marks the long awaited publication of the first two Bifo’s books in English: Felix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography (Palgrave, 2008); and Ethereal Shadows: Communication and Power in Contemporary Italy (with Marco Jacquemet and Gianfranco Vitali, Autonomedia, 2009).

The evening will be moderated by Marco Deseriis, member of Not An Alternative and Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU. It is cosponsored by Not An Alternative and This Is Forever.

About Franco Berardi Bifo

Thursday, January 29 7:30pm - 10:00pm
Saturday, January 31 1:00pm - 5:00pm*
no crafting experience necessary

Please join us at Change You Want to See Gallery for an artists talk, screening and workshop led by J Mandle Performance. Julia Mandle's installation Fabrication of Blindness attempts to give voice to the 700+ past and current detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Participants will learn the stories of those being held, and embroider detainees' poems onto hoods which will be exhibited at installations in Washington DC, Paris, and NYC.

As the paradigm shifts in Washington, Fabrication of Blindness hopes to negotiate the aftermath of Americans' complicit approval of the Bush administration's foreign policy. Working with local craft and activist groups where the installation is shown, sewing circles will offer an opportunity to connect the actions of dissenters with the voices of those who have been held.

Sewing experience is not required, non-crafters are highly encouraged to attend. All materials will be provided. Come Thursday evening and/or Saturday day and get your craft on. An artist talk, discussion and screening with kick the sessions off.

*Saturday drop in any time. Bear in mind the sewing project will take a minimum of two hours.