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.

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.

Coming soon to a bank near you...

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!

Please join us this Thursday, December 1 for another installment of Creative Activism Thursdays: Revolutionaries Live!, a programming series by the Yes Lab, Not An Alternative, and the Center for Artistic Activism. This time the topic is the hacktivist collective Anonymous.

Over the last three years, Anonymous went from Internet pranking and trolling to a narrowly focused protest movement against the Church of Scientology to one that has now emerged in more general registers, attracting many geeks and hackers to its ranks, some who have entered the arena of activism for the first time. In this talk professor and author Gabriella Coleman will examine the transformations and tactics of the digitally-based protest movement Anonymous to examine various political and ethical facets of their operations, including their rhizomatic social organization, the ways they enact an ethics around their denial of service attacks, and the ways in which they are rooted in and parlay liberal commitments such as anonymity and free speech. In so doing, she will also visit a range of theorists entertaining the cultural politics of anonymity, spectacle, the commodification of dissent, and trolling in order to grasp the political and cultural significance of Anonymous.

Thursday December 1, 7:30pm | Gabriella Coleman
NYU Department of Performance Studies, Room 105, 34 Stuyvesant Street
bring ID to get into the building

Gabriella Coleman 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. Gabriella will speak about the revolutionary humor the hacker group Anonymous uses as one of its key tactics.

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!

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.

Sunday, November 6th, 5pm
Zuccotti Park - under the red sculpture
(directly after the multi-faith service.)

We are honored that three Middle Eastern and North African activists Esraa Abdel Fattah - Egypt, Jamel Bettaieb - Tunisia, Mahboubeh Abbasgholizadeh - Iran will be with us at OWS.

Esraa Abdel Fattah - Cyber activist and creator of the April 6th Facebook page which called for the first successful Egyptian general strike in 2008. Jailed for her efforts, she quickly became one of the most recognizable and prominent spokespersons for the Egyptian opposition. She was short listed for the 2011 Nobel Peace prize.

Jamel Bettaieb - Tunisian activist and labor leader from the birth city of the Arab Spring - Sidi Bouzid. He recently won the 2011 NED Democracy award.

Mahboubeh Abbasgholizadeh - Iranian women’s rights activist, journalist, and filmmaker - one of the founders of the Iranian Green Movement, the Stop Stoning Forever campaign, the Iranian Women's Charter Movement, and the coordinator for Meydan Zanan Network, Former Director of the women's NGO Training Centre (NGOTC), and editor-in-chief of Farzaneh Women’s Studies Journal.

For further information please contact:
Kobi Skolnick, kskolnick@gmail.com

#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).