We know more and more about digital activism with each new example of online "people power", yet we understand very little about the fundamentals. We have been asking the same questions about digital activism's effect on political power around the world, yet we remained locked in the same debates between optimists and pessimists, each armed with their own anecdotes. How can activists, practitioners, and citizens move the discourse of digital activism forward?
Join us on Tuesday, July 20 at 7:30pm for a participatory discussion led by Mary Joyce, co-founder of the site DigiActive.org and editor of Digital Activism Decoded, and contributors Katharine Brodock , Brannon Cullum, Sem DeVillart, Dave Karpf, Dan Schulz, and Brian Waniewski.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Citizens around the world are using digital technologies to push for social and political change. Yet, while stories have been published, discussed, extolled, and derided, the underlying mechanics of digital activism are little understood. This new field, its dynamics, practices, misconceptions, and possible futures are presented together for the first time in Digital Activism Decoded.
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.
Please note: we've reached the maximum number of attendees for this workshop, however DoTank may be hosting more in the future. If you're interested in hearing about future urban agriculture skillshares sign up here.
Please join us at The Change You Want To See Gallery this Saturday for a hands-on urban agriculture workshop with hosts DoTank Brooklyn. From worms to seed bombs to vertical, hydroponic, modular, low-energy, high-yield edible window farms, you'll gain new tools to help you engage in and enhance your urban environment.
Bring curiosity, cameras, and a pen and notebook.
Saturday June 5, 1-3pm
$15 entry to cover materials
Capped at 30 attendees for the best hands-on experience
ABOUT DOTANK BROOKLYN
DoTank is a public vessel for interdisciplinary exploration, engagement and enhancement of our urban environment through means outside of the formal urban planning process. We make rapid and meaningful change by exploring and testing in our laboratory: Brooklyn, NY. By catalyzing local intellectual capital, we carry out interventions meant to improve the built environment. We connect, capture, build, design, and produce, and above all else, we Do. http://dotankbrooklyn.org
For the next Upgrade NY! event we present a panel and discussion on “multiple singularity”: when a group of people makes work or takes action under a singular name. Panelists Marco Deseriis, Leónidas Martín Saura, and Janez Janša will present and discuss radical strategies in the construction of singularity by tracing a genealogy of collective pseudonyms and "multiple-use names" such as Ned Ludd, Alan Smithee, Monty Cantsin, Karen Eliot and Luther Blissett, and connecting it to contemporary experiments such as Yomango! and Janez Janša.
Upgrade! is an international network of autonomous nodes located throughout the world that are united by art, technology, and a commitment to bridging cultural divides. Upgrade! NY is a monthly programming series co-produced by Eyebeam and Not An Alternative. The 2010 curatorial theme explores open source activist and creative practices. http://upgradeny.net
May 10, 7pm - 9pm (free)
Eyebeam Art & Technology Center
540 W. 21st Street, NY, NY
And streamed live: http://eyebeam.org/live
Panelists:
Marco Deseriis (New York University)
Leonidas Martin Saura (Artist and Professor, Yomango! and Enmedio)
Janez Janša (Artist, Janez Janša Janez Janša Janez Janša)
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.
Monday, November 23, 7:30pm (free/by donation)
The Change You Want To See Gallery
84 Havemeyer St, at Metropolitan Ave, Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Branding is a complex communications system of signifiers that leverages psychoanalytical principals of irrationality and desire. While products are made in a factory, brands are created in our minds. A typical response to the persuasion industries on the part of the Left has been to reject them as manipulative, or servicing an unsustainable system of consumption.
Baudrillard defines consumption as “an active mode of relations…a systematic mode of activity and a global response on which our whole cultural system is founded.” This consumption refers not only to material goods in the classical sense, but also to concepts, images and messages. We are surrounded by systems of language and exchange.
In this series we’ve explored the history and mechanics of branding and advertising, multi-billion dollar industries that seek to expand influence over culture. We have also raised the question: are the tools the problem, or is it the ends to which they are employed? What might it look like to sell something beyond propaganda or products?
In this final installment, consultant Loid Der, former creative director of the world’s largest branding agency, will present the tricks of the trade. From research and design, branding briefs to implementation and analysis, Loid will walk us through the methodologies and processes he’s used in developing brands.
This is an A to Z curriculum, customized for our crowd (like a pro market researcher Loid has attended every event in the series). We’ll unpack case studies from corporations, non-profits, and the political world. Don’t miss this rare opportunity to peek under the hood and arm yourself with the tools of persuasion.
ABOUT LOID DER
Loid Der is creative consultant specializing in developing and managing strategic brand solutions for corporations and non-profit organizations. Until he began his own practice, he was a creative director at the world's largest branding agency, Interbrand for the last four years, leading creative teams from strategy, concept, design through implementation, and was responsible for creating the brand identities for AT&T, Microsoft and Xerox. His non-profit clients and projects include Feeding America (formerly America's Second Harvest), the Nelson Mandela Foundation, the Yes Men, Alternet and Not An Alternative. and He has collaborated with artists and writers on book and installation projects to explore issues of surveillance, security and seduction, female interrogation and torture techniques , kitsch and death. He has won numerous awards from Communication Arts, Graphis, Art Directors Club New York, Critique, Type Directors Club, and Idea Magazine. His work has been included in the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Design.
Within activist and creative practice there is a range of models for mobilizing the labor and creativity of the crowd (aka "crowdsourcing"). Both practices experiment with a spectrum of autonomy and control within those models. From distributed design to distributed fundraising, MoveOn to Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcer issues a call and creates structure for participation. What role do individual motivations and collective goals play within these structures? What are the ethical, social and political implications of distributed labor?
Moderated by Mushon Zer-Aviv, panelists include xtine, artist, educator and creator of the Mechanical Olympics; Jeff Crouse, artist, technologist and creator of the Invisible Threads virtual jeans factory; and Beka Economopoulos, online organizer, consultant and curator at The Change You Want To See Gallery.
This event is an installment of the monthly Upgrade NY! series on open source as it relates to activist and creative practice, co-produced by Eyebeam and Not An Alternative. It is presented as a prelude to "The Internet as Playground and Factory", a conference organized by Trebor Scholz to take place at The New School University November 12-14.
Please join us this Monday, October 26th as we continue our series on Symbols, Branding and Persuasion with an exploration of branding in the context of electoral and legislative politics. We'll start with a presentation by media theorist Stephen Duncombe, author of Dream: Reimagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy and the forthcoming Branding the New Deal. Afterward Jessica Teal, design manager for the Obama 2008 presidential campaign will join Duncombe for a conversation via video skype.
Like it or not, propaganda and mass persuasion are part of modern democratic politics. Many progressives today have an adverse reaction to propaganda: ours is a politics based in reason and rationality, not symbols and fantasy. Given our last administration's fondness for selling fantasies as reality, this aversion to branding, marketing and propaganda is understandable. But it is also naive. Mass persuasion is a necessary part of democratic politics, the real issue is what ethics it embodies and which values it expresses.
Looking critically at how the Roosevelt Administration tried to "brand" the New Deal and how the Obama campaign leveraged principles of marketing and advertising gives us an opportunity to think about different models of political persuasion.
Join us this Monday as we continue our exploration of symbols, branding and persuasion as they relate to activist and creative practice. This lecture series examines the mechanics of the branding industry; it’s principles, and tricks of the trade. To see what lessons we might learn. How might activists and cultural producers leverage the tools of advertising, marketing, public relations and spectacle production?
For this installment of the series design research expert and consultant JooYoung Oh will offer a lecture and workshop on the techniques of her industry. Participatory design research is a combination of psychology and design. It is about understanding people and their ideal experiences in order to inform and inspire design (of products, systems, environments, and brands). How do you know your brand will resonate with your target audience?
JooYoung will discuss design research theory, and will present a hands-on exercise that will demonstrate methodologies for capturing the current and ideal experience. Come prepared to participate!
Please join us this Thursday, October 1 for a presentation by author, historian, and media/culture theorist Stuart Ewen.
The intersection of semiotics and psychoanalysis has proven fruitful terrain for PR professionals, advertisers, politicians, and other types of leaders. Over the course of a century those whose job it is to persuade the public have increasingly abandoned appeals to rationale in favor of appeals to emotion. Instead of trying to persuade with text and reason, they use imagery and symbols to appeal to instinct and emotion.
Ewen will tour us through the history of "spin", propaganda, and the role of images in consumerism, mass psychology, politics, social movements, cultural attitudes, and consumption. PR is a battle to define reality, and how people see and understand that reality. In this presentation, we will explore what it means to do battle armed with the tools of persuasion.
Thursday, October 1, 7:30pm (free / by donation)
@ The Change You Want To See Gallery
And live-streamed at http://livestream.com/notanalternative for remote participants
The Change You Want to See Gallery and Convergence Stage is home to Williamsburg Coworking and a project of Not An Alternative, a non-profit organization whose mission aims to integrate art, activism and theory in order to affect popular understandings of events, symbols and history. The multi-purpose venue hosts free and low-cost lectures, screenings, panel discussions, workshops and artist presentations. The space also houses a production workshop, filming studio and video editing suite for Not An Alternative's Communication Department. During the day it is a collaborative office space (aka coworking) for like minded cultural producers.
We know more and more about digital activism with each new example of online "people power", yet we understand very little about the fundamentals. We have been asking the same questions about digital activism's effect on political power around the world, yet we remained locked in the same debates between optimists and pessimists, each armed with their own anecdotes. How can activists, practitioners, and citizens move the discourse of digital activism forward?
Please join us this Thursday, October 1 for a presentation by author, historian, and media/culture theorist Stuart Ewen. 