Events

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

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

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

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

HOMEWORK: FOR BONUS POINTS

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

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

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

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

   
Monday, 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.

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

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

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

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

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

About the Presenters