Occupy Wall Street needs mediagenic visual framing and aesthetically-driven actions, especially as the movement comes under attack and opponents seek to do brand damage to OWS. We are fielding PR hits that dilute the focus on the issues that OWS is about and drag us into defensive posture, or distract from the issues with police vs. protester dynamics (via news and images). We need to reclaim the message, and advance productive visual memes and well-implemented actions that can serve to galvanize, and drive our message in the news. These memes can be actively distributed and virally spread to other occupations, tying Topeka to Detroit, Wall Street to Washington D.C.. The NY-based non-profit Not An Alternative has a long history of producing these kinds of projects.
For the past several years Not An Alternative has worked with groups like Picture The Homeless, FUREE, National People's Action, NESRI, Organizing for Occupation, New Immigrant Community Empowerment (N.I.C.E), and Housing is a Human Right. With Picture The Homeless we helped choreograph and visually frame a homeless building occupation, and also a tent city occupation in a vacant bank-owned lot, which was live-blogged by the NY Times and got electeds engaged. Both actions were read as activism/organizing within the political/organizing world, but they were successfully articulated and defended within an art historical discourse as well, with coverage in Art Forum, Art in America, PBS's Art21 blog, and video documentation screened in galleries and museums, including Tate Modern in London, Museo De Arte Moderno in Mexico City, and at Immigrant Movement International, sponsored by Creative Time and the Queens Museum in NYC.