Events

   
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

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BYOB encouraged, popcorn provided.