On January 21st Not An Alternative took part in "The Last Word", an event co-organized by Simon Critchley, Ph.D., Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy, the New School for Social Research, and Nancy Spector, Deputy Director and Chief Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, and curator of the Guggenheim exhibition "Maurizio Cattelan: All".

From the event announcement:

Maurizio Cattelan is retiring from art making with his current retrospective. To mark the end of the exhibition (and the beginning of retirement), more than 30 prominent artists, philosophers, writers, comedians, filmmakers, actors, musicians, and more will come together to contemplate the end. More than just some winter morbidity, this event tackles that most difficult moment: to decide when to stop one thing and begin another or to end it altogether. Less strenuous than a long distance race and much more than a quick sprint, this event will be a meditative seven-hour jog around life's Central Park of pleasures, desires, and regrets.

The Last Word is organized as a series of brief 10–15 minute individual presentations by:

Arthur Danto
Adam McEwen
Virginia Rutledge
Doryun Chong
Aquila Theatre
Marc Etkind
Francis Naumann
Nancy Northup
Jamieson Webster
George Vecsey
Donelle Woolford
Michael Rush
Slater Bradley
Matt Wrbican
Rick Moody
Aquila Theatre
Sarah Murray
Mark Taylor
Drew Daniel
David Lipsky
Robert Boyd
Stewart Home
Thomas Lawson
Tehching Hsieh and Sandhini Poddar
Steven Schwartz
Tracey Emin
Not an Alternative
Proenza Schouler and Harmony Korine
Matmos
Aquila Theatre
Amy Hollywood
Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno
Sina Najafi & Simon Critchley
Courtney Love

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.

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.

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!

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