not an alternative -

Occupied Real Estate -- Property of the Week!

beka — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:47:28 -0800

Occupied Real Estate property of the week. Beautiful former children’s school in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn. Up for foreclosure this Thursday, Jan 26th.

Occupy Ninjas Take Manhattan

beka — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 15:15:39 -0800

Coming soon to a bank near you...

Kickstarting No↔Space: 48 hrs left!

beka — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 06:29:33 -0800

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!

When we opened the space years ago (then called The Change You Want To See Gallery) we imagined a laboratory and a factory: on one side a space for theory, presentation and discussion, and on the other a space for production where we could turn ideas into action.

Over the years we’ve hosted hundreds of artist talks, film screenings, panel discussions, workshops, and festivals. And we’ve produced dozens of actions, installations and interventions, from within art institutions like London’s Tate Modern and Mexico City’s Museo Del Arte Moderno, and in the public sphere, staging actions like a homeless building occupation in East Harlem and architecting a tent city take-over of a vacant bank-owned lot.

Now we find ourselves in the midst of a crisis and an opportunity: an economic meltdown of unprecedented proportions and the beginning of a new global movement. It’s against this backdrop that we situate our upcoming year of programming.

We have a big year ahead of us and a shiny new space to fill with experiments and explorations. As always, our work is made possible through the support of our audiences, and we’re proud to run on lean no-nonsense budgets, which means that donations of any size can make a big impact.

Thanks to the generosity of our community we've reached our goal of $10,000. Now we're setting out sights higher: an additional $5000 will allow us to implement some of the creative activist projects we've been incubating, to leverage this historic moment and help build a mass movement. Can you help us blow our goals out of the water and take our work to the next level? Please watch the video and give today, then share it on Facebook and Twitter!

Thanks for your support,
xoxo

Not An Alternative

Anonymous Hacktivism w/ Gabriela Coleman

beka — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 04:11:32 -0800

Start: 12/01/2011 - 7:00pm

End: 12/01/2011 - 9:00pm

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.

Kickstarter Video: Introducing...The New NO↔SPACE

beka — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 02:48:05 -0800

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!

Mili-tents on the scene!

beka — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 02:32:24 -0800

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.

GLOBAL REVOLUTIONS: The U.S., Middle East and North African Uprisings

beka — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 16:34:31 -0700

Start: 11/06/2011 - 5:00pm

End: 11/06/2011 - 6:00pm

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

#OccupyWallStreet Art Build -- Volunteer Sign-up

beka — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 06:35:11 -0700

Introducing #WhoOWNSpace

beka — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 13:33:12 -0700

#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).

Oct 20: Creative Activism + Occupations in Spain

beka — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 09:25:37 -0700

Please join us this Thursday, October 20 for the next installment of Creative Activism Thursdays: Revolutionaries Live, a series by the Yes Lab, Not An Alternative, and the Center for Artistic Activism.

This week Not An Alternative is hosting an artist talk and multi-media presentation by Spanish artist/activist Leonidas Martin. We'll get a visual tour of some of the most creative art/activist interventions performed in the context of the alter-globalization movement, and in contemporary urban struggles in Barcelona and beyond, including Las Agencias, Yomango, Pret a Revolter, and New Kids on the Black Bloc. Leo will also discuss his experiences as a participant/organizer in this Spring’s M-15 encampments in Spain, massive occupations that took hold throughout the country and lasted several months. These occupations were a direct inspiration for #OccupyWallStreet.

Leo will explore the relationship between art and activism, how creativity can be a powerful tool for social transformation, how we can have fun while fighting back, and why direct action is one of the fine arts.

Thursday, October 20, 7pm
@ NYU Department of Performance Studies
721 Broadway, 6th Floor
NY, NY 10003
(photo ID required)

P.S.: this programming series is hosted at NYU, as No↔Space recently got rentrified out of our Williamsburg home. Good news is we've lined up a new spot in Greenpoint, Brooklyn and we'll be ready for programming later this Fall. We just launched a Kickstarter fundraising campaign to help pay for the build-out and upcoming programming and projects. Please watch the video, share it on Facebook or Twitter, and make a contribution if you can, every bit helps!

Leonidas Martin is a Professor at Barcelona University where he teaches New Media and Political Art. For many years he has been developing collective projects between art and activism, some of them well known internationally (Las Agencias, Yomango, Pret a Revolter). He writes about art and politics for blogs, journals and newspapers, has created several documentaries and movies for television and internet, and is a member of the cultural collective Enmedio; (www.enmedio.info). Last but not least, he is an expert telling jokes, often using this divine gift to get free beers and avoid police arrest. Leo will tell stories about the current upheaval in Spain, among other things.

On #OWS, Co-optation, and the Growth Phases of a Social Movement

beka — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 23:53:39 -0700

PART 1: On #OWS, Co-optation, and the growth phases of social movements

Here's the thing: our messaging, our strategy, and our tactics must change based on the external landscape. When we become embraced by the Democratic Party and its allies, we must go further than what makes them comfortable. That's if we want to win more than concessions and easy reforms (that currently exist within the realm of possibility), and achieve game-changing substantive/structural reforms (that currently live in the realm of impossibility), that we didn't imagine we ever could see in our lifetimes).

We should aim for nothing less -- why aim for closing up shop soon when we have no idea what we're capable of?

Phase 1 = vanguard moves in, initiates occupation, largely dismissed, but staying power piques curiosity, and police misconduct/violence draws attention and wins sympathy.

Phase 2 = vanguards in other cities recognize potential, initiate occupations. At the same time, initial occupation gathers steam, grows, large membership orgs endorse and give legitimacy that wasn't present before, now the mainstream media start to change tune. Focus of coverage is human interest story of life in the park; and what do they want?

Phase 3 = mainstream media interest explodes, NGOs, labor, community, and establishment orgs engage supporters, connect existing campaigns to #occupy frame, amplify visibility and suggestion of social movement. Democratic leadership embrace movement, as do party-related and electorally focused orgs. Media coverage attributes power to movement, queries whether it's a Tea Party for the left, whether it will gain electoral power and legislative victories.

Phase 4 = ?

We currently find ourselves in Phase 3. Senior members of the White House administration, and the President himself, have expressed support for OWS. Democracy for America, a Howard Dean initiated group just sent an email blast to more than a million members tonight selling yard signs that say "We Are the 99%" with co-branded urls: OccupyWallSt.org and DemocracyforAmerica.org/occupy. OWS is embraced by the establishment as a means to amplify existing agendae.

Bloomberg gives tacit "permission" for our occupation, effectively rendering it non-threatening and normalizing it. Result is rise in media coverage of occupation as nuisance to neighbors.

This is a natural and necessary phase. So now what?

We're in this for the long haul. There are no "solutions" that can be presented quickly to make us go away. And so there will be moments where our presence is no longer an uncomfortable and unknown variable, but rather is normalized and integrated. It's in those moments that we have to push the envelop, pry open the space of possibility even farther. We go as far as we can to destabilize, but maintain momentum. And when that's the new "normal" then we go farther. That's how change happens, how we shift the terrain and the terms of the game.

From an actions perspective, that means getting tactical, and mobile, activating the rest of the city, executing higher-risk actions, civil disobedience and arrests.

From a media perspective, we have to get ahead of the game. We no longer need to legitimize. Or articulate the problem. Both are clearly established. So, given this new moment how can we use media strategically?

We must draw a line, disavow the Democrats explicitly, make our messaging a little uncomfortable. Yes, perhaps, split the support, lest we not be co-opted. This will be painful, internally, as it won't always achieve comfortable consensus. But to hold this space and expand the realm of possibility, we have to go farther than others are ready to go. It's how this started and we can't be too shy to be bold.

PART 2: Responses

On Oct 12, 2011, at 8:17 AM, Bailey Xxxxxx (name stricken) wrote:

It would seem that one of the most obvious ways to create the dividing line between OWS and groups like the DFA is to point out that they're seeking to profit off the movement. (AKA business as usual) I haven't seen anything saying that they'll be giving back any of that $14 to OWS or better yet, to any groups working with the disadvantaged.

I think if we just pointed this out, and highlighted the other orgs like MoveOn who are riding the wave without actually doing any heavy lifting, people are going to key into that. If we go further and force them to answer why they thought it was ok to profiteer off a campaign going after greed, that would be an interesting moment.

The moment you blanketly say we hate democrats, that becomes a divisive message and not really what everyone seems to be working at here. However, forcing the establishment democrats to answer why their go-to reaction was profiteering, that has some credibility.

Bailey

On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 9:44 AM, Will Xxxxx wrote:

+1001 (to Bailey's post)

Sent from my iPhone

PART 3: Emphasis on Democracy and Pluralism (99%) VS. Neoliberalism and Capitalism

Actually, many mainstream orgs, including MoveOn, have been doing heavy lifting to support this thing, and they truly don't want to co-opt the movement. But the reality is the movement has gone mainstream now, and it will get sucked in to establishment politics.

Astra Taylor, journalist and filmmaker said it concisely: "the Democrats would benefit from nothing more than the whole social and political playing field tilting left -- but that ain't gonna happen if they co-opt OWS! let them benefit inadvertently but that's it...we must push further".

I don't think saying publicly "DFA and other groups are profiting from the movement without giving back" gets us where we need to go. Quite the opposite: that's an invitation for more mainstream participation at the same time that internally we're watering our message down (being descriptive and reactive and celebrating OWS as being about a diversity of voices, democratic process, empowering the 99%), without maintaining the radical orientation this started with.

This occupation was initiated by, and remains largely organized by anti-capitalists. We don't need to say the "c" word, or the "n" word (neoliberalism - the agenda of the past 40 years: privatization, deregulation, financialization, and globalization, which has led to the concentration of wealth, corruption of the political process, and accelerated the destruction of all we hold dear.). But file in the back of our heads that after the 2008 economic crash, even mainstream media headlines did go there. And outlets like the Wall Street Journal / Market Watch, Crains, IBT, and other finance industry rags are going there now.

We can use softer, gentler terms: the free market, etc. But if we want accountability, regulation and restructuring of Wall Street and the finance industry we need to figure this out, and it has to play a much bigger role in OWS messaging. And an impending Eurozone crash if Greece defaults could result in a major economic crash here in the US, potentially soon. So there is an opening to push further.

This isn't a denunciation of establishment orgs, there are good people within them and they all want to see this succeed. But they can't lead us there. Now that we're in a new phase (of media coverage, of participation), we owe it to everyone to radicalize our message, go beyond what these groups can publicly say.

The Tea Party and radical right have always played this role. They make the establishment right uncomfortable, they divide and provoke, and they've been winning. The center moved to the right, and the republican party tows a much harder line, wielding greater influence in D.C. than they did before.

OWS needs to tow a harder line. Being more explicit about the finance industry, making clear that we're not calling for easy reforms, that both parties are the problem, our political process is poisoned by the influence of money, that this is an international movement, that Egypt, Tunisia, Greece, Italy, Spain and the UK are all popular uprisings, like ours, in response to the economic crisis, the cutting of social safety nets, budget cuts and privatization. That our economic system is broken. And we'll settle for nothing less than fundamental and structural change.

I just ask that we be as radical as the mainstream finance publications that understand this movement better than the rest of the mainstream press. Start saying what they are saying.

Enough focus on democracy. Talk about capitalism (/insert euphemism here).

Activists Barred from U.S., and #OccupyWallStreet

beka — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 09:37:39 -0700

We regret to inform you that this Wednesday's Yes Lab event, organized by Not An Alternative, with UK climate campaign campaigners John Stewart and Dan Glass has been postponed.

A few days ago, Stewart landed in JFK Airport for a month-long US speaking tour, only to be escorted off the plane by 6 police officers, interrogated for six hrs by the FBI, Secret Service, NY police, and Immigration, and put on a plane back to the UK. The other tour member, environmental activist Dan Glass, was also supposed to come but was stopped by the CIA on the UK side.

These guys are celebrated environmentalists, recognized by The Independent and the Guardian as the most effective and innovative green activists in the UK. They won support from direct action activists and even the Conservatives in Parliament, waging a successful campaign to reduce carbon emissions and stop the expansion of Heathrow airport. For some reason, however, our own government isn't keen on them coming here.

We're going to bring them to you anyway. Please save the date: on Thursday, November 3rd we'll host a special Skype session with these revered (and reviled?) climate revolutionaries. The best part...no transcontinental air emissions involved!

Thursday, November 3, 7pm
Department of Performance Studies
721 Broadway, 6th Floor
NY, NY 10003
(photo ID required)

And now that your Wednesday is freed up, consider joining us at #OccupyWallStreet! Wednesday is the biggest action yet, with labor unions and countless economic justice and community organizations taking part in a massive march to the Liberty Plaza encampment. Starts at 4:30pm at City Hall, 250 Broadway Ave.

Not An Alternative is coordinating a creative intervention there, an installation and action at the intersection of architecture and activism. That's all we can say about it, so come join us to get the full skinny!

Not An Alternative @ Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City

beka — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 02:31:31 -0700

Encuentro de Espacios Culturales de Accion No Institucionalizada: September 29-30, 2011

Originally in Spanish, Translation from Google Translate:
The Museum of Modern Art of Mexico City is organizing this international meeting to reflect on the contributions of the cultural spaces of self-management. From Europe, U.S. and Latin America, twelve disparate spaces will discuss their strategies and activation platforms artistic and communicative, in conversation with other cultural agents in Mexico.

Among the guests who will share their spaces and programs are Capacete prospects Entertainment (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), Not An Alternative (New York, EUA), Project Ultraviolet (Ciudad de Guatemala, Guatemala), Faculty of Contemporary Art Foundation (Montevideo , Uruguay), doubt. Art and hesitations (Cali, Colombia), CRAC (Valparaiso, Chile), Beta-Local (San Juan, Puerto Rico), CIA. Artistic Research Center (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Off Limits (Madrid, Spain), SLanguage (Los Angeles, United States), The Tannery (Oaxaca, Oaxaca) and periphery (Merida, Yucatan). Through their business models and public insertion, these spaces generate other strategies and / or dynamic interrelation; to build bridges between producers and participants, through creative, critical and / or knowledge unpublished.

During these two days of discussion, the panel will be moderated in discussion with directors and / or promoters of similar spaces in the city of Mexico, Border Cultural Center, SOMA and house next door. These projects, with their work, are now the benchmark for contemporary national artistic production and remain open territories leaders in knowledge sharing.

These strategies allow us to rethink noninstitutionalized current exhibition platforms, communication and exchange through art, and generate more ductile models, vital and effective social participation in the network

Meeting of Cultural Spaces of Action noninstitutionalized *

Thurs 29-Fri 30 Sep 2011 | 10:00 to 15:00 17:00 to 18:30 hours and hours

Thu 29 Sep

9:30 | Register
10:00 to 10:15 | Opening

Panel 1

Fri 30 Sep
10:00 to 10:30 | Register

Creative Activism Thursdays: Revolutionaries Live!

beka — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 17:41:17 -0700

Dear friends, as Not An Alternative is busy readying the new NO↔SPACE for public events and programming, we're teaming up with The Yes Lab to present a series of lectures and workshops this Fall at NYU. We hope to see you there.

And stay tuned for info on our new home: a beautiful 1500 square foot space on the waterfront in Greenpoint where we'll have dedicated desks with studio mates and collaborators, space for light fabrication, and film screenings, artist talks, panel discussions, workshops and exhibitions. We have just a couple more desks to rent for October 1, if you or someone you know is interested in more info let us know!

Creative Activism Thursdays: Revolutionaries Live!
Fall 2011 Programming Series

Creative activism considers the relationship between representation and action, the material and immaterial. Contemporary activists employ traditional tactics as well as those that take into account our hyper-mediated world of signs and symbols, stories and spectacle.

This Fall, The Yes Lab, Not An Alternative, and the Center for Artistic Activism are teaming up to bring you “Creative Activism Thursdays” a series of lectures and workshops with theorists, activists and artists from around the world.

From the merry militants of Serbia’s Otpor movement to the the anarchic hacktivists of Anonymous, from Spain’s New Kids on the Black Bloc, to the AIDS activists of Act-Up, we’ll unpack cultural tactics and creative strategies from social movements, both current and historic.

• Sept. 22: Ivan Marovic, Otpor.
• Sept. 29: Srdja Popovic and Slobo Djinovic, Otpor.
* Oct 5: (POSTPONED)
• Oct. 13: (POSTPONED)
• Oct. 20: Leónidas Martín Saura from Las Agencias, Yomango, and En Medio.
• Oct. 27: John Jackson, author of Small Acts of Resistance.
* Nov 3: John Stewart and Dan Glass, Aviation Justice, UK Climate Campaign
• Nov. 17: Mark Rudd, formerly of the Weather Underground.
* Dec 1: Gabriella Coleman, about the Lulz in Anonymous.
• Dec. 8: Timothy Patrick McCarthy, The Radical Reader.

Revolutionaries Live! kicks off this Thursday with the great Ivan Marovic, one of the founders of Otpor, the student resistance movement that played a critical role in the downfall of Slobodan Milosevic.

In October 2000, a group of students from Belgrade University with a yearning to live a democratic life helped to overthrow the rule of Europe’s most bloody dictator, Slobodan Milosevic. Their influences were Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and the work of the American academic and guru of non-violent resistance, Gene Sharp. They employed simple but effective tactics: using mobile phones, slogans and Monty Python-style street humor. But their secret was their methodology: unity, planning and non-violent discipline. Using this trio of tactics, they managed to pull together a politically divided Serbia.

After Milosevic’s fall, Marovic began consulting with various pro democracy groups worldwide and became one of the leading trainers in the field of civil resistance. Ivan will speak about the role of humor and creative activism in the struggles he has helped to guide.

Space is limited, RSVP required. After the Ivan's talk at NYU, we'll take the N/R train a few stops down to Liberty Plaza and Occupy Wall Street. There, around 8:30 or 9pm, Ivan will continue his talk for our very own here-and-now revolutionaries. So if you can't get into the talk, you can see it in context around 8:30 or 9pm Thursday!

ABOUT THE PRESENTERS
All events are at 7pm at Performance Studies, 6th Floor, 721 Broadway, NY unless otherwise noted.
Dates scheduled so far for fall 2011:

Sept. 22: Ivan Marovic, Otpor. After Ivan's talk, we'll all take the N/R train a few stops to #occupywallstreet! Ivan is one of the founders of Otpor, the student resistance movement that played a critical role in the downfall of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. After Milosevic’s fall, Marovic began consulting with various pro democracy groups worldwide and became one of the leading trainers in the field of civil resistance. Ivan will speak about the role of humor and creative activism in the struggles he’s helped to guide. Introduction by Bryan Farrell of WagingNonViolence.org.

Sept. 29: Srdja Popovic and Slobo Djinovic, Otpor. Srdja is founding member of Otpor, the student resistance movement that played a critical role in the downfall of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. In late 2003 he co-founded the Center for Applied Non-Violent Actions and Strategies (CANVAS), a group that supports nonviolent democratic movements through the transfer of knowledge on strategies and tactics of nonviolent struggle. Slobo is an innovator in democracy and technology, founding Serbia’s first wireless internet company and a founder of Otpor. He has since become a leader exponent of sharing strategic non-violence training for democracy movements and peaceful opposition groups in the world’s remaining dictatorships. Introduction by Eric Stoner of WagingNonViolence.org.

Oct. 5: John Stewart and Dan Glass, UK Climate Campaign. John Stewart was a key organizer in the successful decade-long campaign to stop the expansion of London’s Heathrow Airport. He was named Britain’s most effective green activist by the Independent for bringing together aviation-impacted communities, climate activists, and fiscal conservatives. His publications include Roads for People: Policies for Liveable Streets and Victory Against All The Odds: The Story of the Campaign to Stop a Third Runway at Heathrow. Dan Glass was named one of the UK’s youth climate leaders by the Guardian and one of Attitude magazine’s 66 new role models for helping bridge LGBTQ and environmental justice movements. The grandson of four Holocaust survivors, he’s best known for having superglued himself to the Prime Minister to draw attention to communities impacted by aviation climate change. Dan revels in creating militant but cheeky ways to be a thorn in the side for those destroying the planet — occupying airports, dancing with old ladies blighted by flightpaths, and working with aviation justice direct action network Plane Stupid. Introduction by Not An Alternative.

Oct. 13: Gabriella Coleman, about the Lulz in Anonymous. Biella 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. Biella will speak about the revolutionary humor the hacker group Anonymous uses as one of its key tactics.

Oct. 20: Leonidas Martin is a Professor at Barcelona University where he teaches New Media and Political Art. For many years he has been developing collective projects between art and activism, some of them well known internationally (Las Agencias, Yomango, Prêt a Révolter). He writes about art and politics for blogs, journals and newspapers, has created several documentaries and movies for television and internet, and is a member of the cultural collective “Enmedio” (www.enmedio.info). Last but not least, he is an expert telling jokes, often using this divine gift to get free beers and avoid police arrest. Leo will tell stories about the current upheaval in Spain, among other things. Introduction by Not An Alternative.

Oct. 27, 7:30pm, Rm 105, 34 Stuyvesant Street: John Jackson, author of Small Acts of Resistance. John is co-author of Small Acts of Resistance, a collection of stories showing how humor, tenacity, and ingenuity can change the world. Currently Vice President for Social Responsibility at MTV Networks International, John was a founder and Director of Burma Campaign UK, and has been involved in major international campaigns on fair trade, landmines, child labor, and climate change.

Nov. 17, 7:30pm, Rm 105, 34 Stuyvesant Street: Mark Rudd, formerly of the Weather Underground. Mark led the legendary 1968 occupation of five buildings at Columbia University, a dramatic act of protest against the university's support for the Vietnam War. As charismatic chairman of the Columbia chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, the largest radical student organization in the United States, Rudd became a national symbol of student revolt, and went on to co-found the Weathermen faction of SDS, which helped organize the notorious Days of Rage in Chicago in 1969 before going underground. Mark will speak about the intended and unintended humor of ‘60s activism. Introduction by Jeremy Varon.

Dec. 8: Timothy Patrick McCarthy, The Radical Reader. Tim is Lecturer on History and Literature and on Public Policy at Harvard University and Director of the Sexuality, Gender, and Human Rights Program at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he hosts the monthly public conversation series, “The Activist’s Studio,” convenes an annual spring conference on “Gay Rights as Human Rights,” and co-chairs the Regional Working Group on Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery. He will speak about the ways that humor is crucial to cultural transformation, and specifically the role of humor in the LGBT movement.

Revolutionaries Live! (aka Creative Activism Thursdays) is co-sponsored by NYU Dean for Social Science, the Hemispheric Institute, the Yes Lab, the Humanities Initiative at NYU Working Research Group on Artistic Activism, CAA, and Not an Alternative. Speakers will also attend following Yes Lab Friday.

NO↔SPACE Goodbye Williamsburg Party

beka — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 07:51:18 -0700

Start: 09/17/2011 - 6:00pm

End: 09/18/2011 - 12:00am

NO↔SPACE
GOODBYE WILLIAMSBURG
RENTRIFICATION PARTY
Saturday, September 17
84 Havemeyer St at Metropolitan Ave

$10 suggested donation (no one turned away for lack of funds)
All proceeds go to the move and build-out of our new space.
Cash bar with local beer and wine served.

Please join us for our last event ever at No-Space (formerly called The Change You Want To See Gallery) in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. After 7 years and hundreds of artist talks, film screenings, workshops, festivals, block parties, panel discussions and projects, a 240% rent increase sends us packing for new pastures. But first, we play.

We'll kick off the evening screening films shot in Williamsburg over the last 30 years, depicting a changing landscape, both physically and culturally. After that, a benediction by Reverend Billy of the Church of Earthaluliah, and then a dance party with DJs Angel Nevarez, DJ N-Ron, and the Hungry March Band.

This isn't goodbye, this is goodbye Williamsburg. Stay tuned for an inaugural party in the NEW No-Space sometime in October!

Film Screenings: 6pm - 9:30pm
6pm: Metropolitan Ave (1985, 52 mins)
7pm: Made in Brooklyn (1993, 55 mins)
8pm: Up on the Roof (2008, 58 mins)
9pm: Scenes from a Movement: The Fight to Halt Williamsburg's Over-Development (2011, 9 mins)
An Academic Discussion of Gentrification (2011, 6 mins)
Queen of Williamsburg (2009, 10 mins)

Benediction: 9:30
Reverend Billy of the Church of Earthaluliah
Dance Party: 9:30pm - 2am
DJ Angel Nevarez, Hungry March Band, and DJ N-Ron

Special party thanks to Sarah Nelson Wright, Angel Nevarez, Noel Hidalgo, Daniel Perlin, Angela Tran, Sasha Sumner, Jason Cadler, all our friends who are volunteering on Saturday, and most of all you, our audience and collaborators.

ABOUT THE FILMS
Metropolitan Ave (1985, 52 mins)
Metropolitan Avenue is an inspiring film about community, about the changing role of women, and about how powerful ordinary people can be when they join together to fight for something they believe in. The film focuses on a lively Brooklyn neighborhood which, like many urban areas, faces problems caused by racial tensions and cutbacks in municipal services. But in this case, a group of "traditional" homemakers from varied ethnic backgrounds rises to the challenge and forms coalitions to fight for the community's survival. Directed by Christine Noschese.

Made in Brooklyn (1993, 55 mins)
Made in Brooklyn examines the decline of New York's industrial base as economic policy makers shift their focus to a service-based economy. Focuses on the history and current vitality of Brooklyn's manufacturing community, and its implications for New York and the entire country. Interweaving historic photographs and archival footage, it traces Brooklyn's history as an industrial supplier and home to such business giants as Domino Sugar Refinery and the Eberhart Faber Pencil Factory. Directed by Isabel Hill.

Up on the Roof (2008, 58 mins)
The pigeon keepers of New York have been in the spotlight recently, and now a new JL Aronson documentary, Up on the Roof, looks at the gentrification of Williamsburg through their experiences. Up on the Roof follows several devoted pigeon breeders in one predominantly Latino section of Brooklyn through the rigors and rewards of a quintessential New York tradition. All along the waterfront, and throughout blue collar Brooklyn, pigeon fancying has been an active pastime for centuries, handed down from one group of residents to the next, and Williamsburg has long been the center of the action. But as with so many once blighted and now hip districts throughout the world, Brooklyn and Williamsburg in particular is being scrubbed of its old world character to make way for a new urbanism. This colorful, urban-wildlife doc considers what we lose in the process of urban renewal and treats the audience like an insider in an unseen and in many ways vanishing world. Directed by JL Aronson.

Scenes from a Movement: The Fight to Halt Williamsburg's Over-Development (2011, 9 mins)
Footage from the 2005 Williamsburg/Greenpoint rezoning protests' creative actions. Features Not An Alternative, the Williamsburg Warriors, Reverend Billy, the Hungry March Band and neighbors and friends. Directed by JL Aronson.

An Academic Discussion of Gentrification (2011, 6 mins)
Interview with Dr. Winifred Curran, an urban geographer with interests in gentrification and urban change, labor geographies, race and gender. Her dissertation work looked at the effect of gentrification on small scale manufacturers in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. Includes archival footage and excerpts from Jonas Mekas' film "Williamsburg, Brooklyn", and Diego Echevarria's film "Los Sures". Directed by JL Aronson.

Queen of Williamsburg (2009, 10 mins)
Leonora Russo is a widower who has been living in the same rent controlled Williamsburg apartment for the past 60 years. This short documentary follows her on an average day, as she walks down Bedford Avenue, past the funky boutiques and expensive cafes. Leonora is known as "The Queen of Williamsburg" (though some call her "The Mayor") and is widely acclaimed for both her unique style and for her advocacy work for the People’s Firehouse. Directed by Klara Egei.

ABOUT THE MUSIC
Angel Nevarez is an artist, musician, and DJ. He, and his longtime collaborator Valerie Tevere, have produced works which investigate contemporary music, dissent, and public fora, and move between the spatial simultaneity of performance and enunciation, reflecting upon the projection of political agency through transmission and song. He is also a faculty member at MIT in the program of Art, Culture, and Technology.
http://www.nevareztevere.info

Daniel Perlin , aka DJ N-RON, is an artist and producer based in Brooklyn, NY. His work includes production for David Byrne's label Luaka Bop records, mixes for Sound-Ink Records, and as a recording artist for Tax records, Broklyn Beats, Apple Core and Giant Corporate Records. Recent releases include collaborations with Dj/Rupture, Dj Small Change, Geko Jones, Anti-pop consortium and Vito Acconci. N-RON's The Collaborator was voted a best mixtape of 2007 by Kid Kameleon in XLR8R magazine. His sound has been heard at the The New Museum, Guggenheim Museum NY, Centre Georges Pomediou, Temporary Contemporary Gallery, London, TN Probe, Tokyo and at festivals such as Pireneos Sur, Spain, Berlin Film festival, Cannes and CMJ.
http://soundcloud.com/djnron

The Hungry March Band
Straight outta Brooklyn, HMB is a community group with a membership as diverse as our music. The band is an ever evolving musical experiment influenced and inspired from Brooklyn’s backyard with Latin flavor, punk rock noise, hip hop beats and the music of the streets. Put on your dancing shoes and break out the fancy threads because we’ve got the party going on – a blazing parade of flesh, blood, steel, brass and wood. We are the music of the people!

HMB has a repertoire of originals and traditionals that borrows from global brass band traditions, including, but not limited to, Balkan gypsy brass bands, Indian wedding bands, and New Orleans second line. The band also references punk rock; techno, hip hop; various jazz traditions, including free jazz and bop; reggae; and chance music. They cite Sun Ra, Charlie Parker, John Cage, the Shyam Brass Band, Fanfare Ciocarlia, Rebirth Brass Band, the Skatalites, Sonic Youth, Weird Al Yankovich and Black Sabbath as influences.
http://www.hungrymarchband.com

Some Sad News About NO↔SPACE

beka — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 23:21:59 -0700

Dear friends,

It's been a great run over here at 84 Havemeyer Street, but with the latest rent hike -- a 240% increase -- it's time to move on.

We moved to this storefront in 2000, when there was nary a health food store, bar, condo, or sushi joint this side of Bedford Ave. It was off the beaten path. 99 cent stores abounded, and the Puerto Ricans owned this block. Their lives were lived on the street: barbecues and backgammon, family and friends.

There's a lot of history in this space, and it started well before we arrived. Beka took it over from a woman named Megan who hosted a pirate radio station in her living room, with 24 hr. jam sessions, performance art, and parties. She and her boyfriend built a sort of gingerbread house cum forest cottage in the middle of the space from reclaimed wood. It was Beka’s bedroom for 2 years. Before Megan was a man whose name we can't remember, known by the neighbors as the curmudgeonly guy who'd open the front door, pull out a guitar and amp, and play heavy metal in his bathrobe on the street. Much, much earlier it was a grocery store, and before that, a bagel factory.

We saw potential beyond a home/office, and when the 2004 Republican National Convention was announced Not An Alternative was formed, and we started to use the storefront as our headquarters. We hosted weekend workshops on the sidewalk with a boom box, a grill, and political artists from around the city, recruiting passersby to pitch in with production in advance of the protests. For evening artist talks and meetings we’d carry all of the living and bedroom furniture to a friend’s apartment upstairs and bring it all back down again at the end of the night. It was truly a multi-purpose space!

That soon grew old and in 2005 Beka moved out and Jason, Winnie, Ian, and friends renovated the space to be Not An Alternative’s dedicated events venue, workshop and coworking office, née The Change You Want To See Gallery and recently re-named NO↔SPACE. Over the years we’ve hosted 100’s of events here: from film screenings, artist talks, workshops and trainings, panel discussions, and festivals, it’s been a laboratory for the cross-pollination of artists, activists, and academics.

Beyond pedagogy, we’ve engaged in practice, in collaboration with community groups and cultural producers. Our first major effort involved a series of projects aimed at challenging the 2005 rezoning and gentrification of North Brooklyn. But the neighborhood has changed dramatically since then, and we've had front row seats. The block built up, the foot traffic grew, and so did the rent. The latest hike is the last straw: a 240% rent increase, from $2500 to $6000. And so we find ourselves displaced, like countless other spaces, businesses and residents around here over the years.

It's been a wild ride, with ups and downs, but never a dull moment, and we're grateful for it all. Much gratitude to our residents and coworkers, our audience, our allies, and our collaborators, past and present, as this experiment never would have happened without you.

This isn’t goodbye: we’ll keep you appraised of our next steps! But this is the end of this chapter. And we'd like to commemorate it with you.

Please save the date:

Saturday, September 17
Final Event at NO↔SPACE on Havemeyer St
Film screenings and Closing Party
(Exact Time TBA)

We hope to see you then.

Slow Float River Festival

beka — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 21:46:05 -0700

Start: 08/06/2011 - 10:00am

End: 08/06/2011 - 10:00pm

Please join us on Saturday, August 6th for Slow Float.

Sky Dog Projects, Electronic Music Foundation's Ear to the Earth, Not An Alternative, Mildred's Lane, Continental Drift, the Rude Mechanical Orchestra, Damascus Citizens for Sustainability, Ant Hill Farms, and many other groups, artists, musicians and activists are teaming up to present a day-long extravaganza on one of the most endangered rivers in the country. The Upper Delaware, along the border of New York and Pennsylvania, sits on top of the Marcellus Shale region, where fracking threatens the food and water shed.

More details on the day's events, as well as info about pubic transportation and free camping and accommodations on the Slow Floatwebsite.

The Communist Horizon w/ Jodi Dean

beka — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 18:24:52 -0700

Start: 07/28/2011 - 7:30pm

End: 07/28/2011 - 9:30pm

Thursday, July 28, 7:30pm @ No-Space

Please join The Public School and Not An Alternative for an evening with political theorist Jodi Dean.

Focusing on her book-in-progress THE COMMUNIST HORIZON, this seminar mounts a provocative response to the economic and social crises that define our time. From the extremes of corporate bonuses to the attacks on public sector unions, the antagonism that cuts across capitalist countries is increasingly apparent.

Democracy is no panacea, Dean argues. Extreme inequality is not inevitable. Politics are not dead. Communism didn't end in 1989. Instead, the communist horizon is our horizon.

Come to discuss the potential of communism as the contemporary name for left political and economic aspiration. What possibilities does it open up? What aspects of our current conjunction suggest the continued force of communism as a universal and egalitarian ideal?

Background readings:
The Communist Horizon - Excerpt
Revolutionary Theory and the Communist Horizon

BIO
Jodi Dean is Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY. She has authored or edited ten books, including, most recently, ‘Democracy and other Neoliberal Fantasies’ (Duke 2009), “Blog Theory’ (Polity 2010), and 'Zizek's Politics" (Routledge 2006). She is the co-editor of Theory & Event.

PRAISE
"Jodi Dean...provides what we have all been waiting for: the authentic theoretical analysis of how ideology functions in today’s global capitalism. Her diagnosis of ‘communicative capitalism’ discloses how our ‘really-existing democracies’ curtail prospects of radical emancipatory politics. Dean demonstrates this status of democracy as a political fantasy not through cheap pseudo-Marxist denunciations, but through a detailed examination of social, symbolic, and libidinal mechanisms and practices.’”—Slavoj Zizek

Precarious Power: Syndicalism, Solidarity, and the New Organizational Paradigm

beka — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 16:22:10 -0700

Start: 07/12/2011 - 10:22pm

Not An Alternative is participating in a panel on "precarious power" this Saturday, July 16, investigating the intersections of labor organizing, art, and direct action. The panel is part of an upcoming exhibition "The Making of the Chinese New Working Class", curated by the Culture and Art Museum of Migrant Workers in Beijing and hosted by Ludlow 38 in NY. Associated programming is organized by artist Marty Kirchner and The Public School in various NYC venues.

Symposium: Precarious Power: Syndicalism, Solidarity, and the New Organizational Paradigm
Saturday, July 16, 2011, 4-6pm, free
@ Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies
25 West 43rd Street, between 5th and 6th avenues, 19th Floor
The reorganization of production along global supply chains, often through a complicated pattern of subcontracting, has provided significant challenges for the labor movement. Temporary and contingent employment has undermined labor rights protections worldwide. However, in both China and the West, the last few years have seen a proliferation of dissident worker movements, new kinds of workers organizations and workers’ rights campaigns. Some of the most dynamic and innovative have combined elements of community and labor organizing, cultural production, and direct action.

Immanuel Ness, professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York will facilitate the discussion. His writing focuses on social and revolutionary movements, labor militancy and migrant worker resistance to oppression.

Invited guests include the following participants:
Jeff Becker, International Labor Rights Forum
Daniel Gross, IWW/Brandworkers International
Carrie Gleason, Retail Action Project
Not An Alternative

“The Making of the Chinese New Working Class”
Exhibition by the Culture and Art Museum of Migrant Workers (CAMMW)
@ MINI/Goethe-Institut Curatorial Residencies Ludlow 38
July 14 – September 4, 2011

38 Ludlow Street
btw Grand and Hester
New York, NY
www.ludlow38.org
Gallery hours: Thursday – Sunday 1-6pm

Initiated in 2008 by a former migrant worker and musician, Sun Heng, the Culture and Art Museum of Migrant Workers is located in Picun, a village outside Beijing that is home to some 10,000 migrant workers. CAMMW is a project of Migrant Workers Home, an NGO founded in 2002, dedicated to supporting the rights of migrant workers, providing education for their children, and serving as a community center. The purpose of the museum is to record the histories of migrant workers and to advocate for the value of their labor. “The Making of the Chinese New Working Class” is an installation consisting of eight thematic topics that depict migrant workers conditions, a re-creation of a migrant worker’s living space, and materials donated by migrant workers from across China. It is an installation that was originally part of the exhibition The Potosí Principle that traveled from the Museu Reina Sofia in Madrid, to the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the IG Metall (metal workers union) in Berlin, to the Museo Nacional de Etnografía y Folklore in La Paz.

To coincide with the exhibition, Ludlow 38 is launching a series of side-events conceived in collaboration with New York based artist Marty Kirchner and The Public School New York.

Exhibition opening and conversation
Thursday, July 14, 6pm, free
@ MINI/Goethe-Institut Curatorial Residencies Ludlow 38
The exhibition opens with a conversation between Zhibin Lin, research co-coordinator of the Culture and Art Museum of Migrant Workers, and Ellen David Friedman, a union organizer and labor educator in both the U.S. and China. The conversation will include a discussion about the work Lin and Friedman do in China, as well as a recent history of Chinese migrant labor, including internal migration to urban economic zones, and a new wave of proletarianization.

Performance
Friday, July 15, 6:30-8:00pm, free
@ Unique Hairstylist, 47 Essex St.
The Hanns EislerWorkers Chorus (H.E.N.S./N.W.C.) will join Maria and Nancy at Unique Hairstylist to present a new cabaret performance: Nail Salon /Nail (re) Zoning, Manicured, a music soiree to describe and denounce the forces of dislocation and dispossession at work in our communities.

Symposium: Precarious Power: Syndicalism, Solidarity, and the New Organizational Paradigm
July 16, 2011, 4-6pm, free
@ Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies
25 West 43rd Street, between 5th and 6th avenues, 19th Floor
The reorganization of production along global supply chains, often through a complicated pattern of subcontracting, has provided significant challenges for the labor movement. Temporary and contingent employment has undermined labor rights protections worldwide. However, in both China and the West, the last few years have seen a proliferation of dissident worker movements, new kinds of workers organizations and workers’ rights campaigns. Some of the most dynamic and innovative have combined elements of community and labor organizing, cultural production, and direct action.

Invited guests include the following participants:

Jeff Becker, International Labor Rights Forum
Daniel Gross, IWW/Brandworkers International
Carrie Gleason, Retail Action Project
Not An Alternative

About the speakers/organizers:

Zhibin Lin
Dr. Zhibin Lin is the research coordinator of Migrant Workers Home, an NGO in Beijing, part of which is The Culture and Art Museum of Migrant Workers. Zhibin Lin has taught Development Sociology, and Gender and Rural Development at China Agricultural University from 1990 to 2001. Since 2003 she has been an NGO staff member working in migrant communities while conducting research in different parts of China. Her research reports include: “Migrant Workers Residential Rights and Future Development” (2009), “Action Research on Migrant Children’s Education and Development Projects” (Issue I in 2009, Issue II in 2010), “Where to Go? – Migrant Workers in between the City and the Countryside”(2011).

Ellen David Friedman
Ellen David Friedman has been a union organizer in Vermont for thirty years, twenty of which she served as the Vermont affiliate of the National Education Association. She was a founder and long-time leader of the Vermont Workers Center and the Vermont Progressive Party, and is a member of the Labor Notes Policy Committee. Since 2006 she has taught labor studies one term per year at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou and has worked at different levels of the labor movement, including grass-roots labor NGOs, the All China Federation of Trade Unions and with labor scholars.

H.E.N.S./N.W.C.
Manicurists, stylists, community organizers and artists are a potent alliance of life worlds, and their differences only invite the building of solidarity. Their desires are constrained by similar forces; beholden to capricious markets, their production rationalized as "luxury" by the forces of capital. The H.E.N.S./N.W.C. mission is to interrupt the politics of beauty, dislocate the politics of the gallery, and begin to imagine new relations that transform our ways of being in the neighborhood and being in the world; to manicure the ready-to-hand. Our namesake, exile composer Hanns Eisler (1898–1962), was twice robbed of his community; fleeing the rise of fascism in Germany, he found a home in the United States only to find himself on the Hollywood Blacklist, called before HUAC and deported. Like the current denizens of the Lower East Side, power came to deny him community by a vicious process of reorganization, redefinition and rezoning. His music, banned by Fascism, disavowed by US xenophobia and forgotten by the world of fine art, questions the false distinction between “development as progress,” “managed change” and "community preservation," and instead imagines new artistic-political-community relations. Eisler wrote some of the most potent hymns to workers rights. We strive to invest his political and artistic project with a lived experience of difference worthy of the contemporary beauty industry; to give an old Marxist a new manicure.

Immanuel Ness, Brooklyn College
Immanuel Ness is professor of political science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. He is currently writing a book on contemporary worker militancy. His work focuses on workers and capitalist political economy, migration and revolutionary movements, labor militancy, and migrant worker activism. Most recently he is author of Ours to Manage and to Own: Workers’ Control from the Commune to the Present (Haymarket 2011). He is General Editor of theEncyclopedia of Global Human Migration (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, four volumes). He has written numerous essays and books on labor migration, including Immigrants, Unions, and the U.S. Labor Market (Temple University Press, 2005). He is editor of the quarterly, Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society. (University of Illinois Press, 2011).Guest Workers, and the Resistance to Corporate Despotism

Jeffrey Becker, International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF)
ILRF is an advocacy organization dedicated to achieving just and humane treatment for workers worldwide. ILRF’s work supports international labor rights as defined by the International Labor Organization, including the right to freedom of association and collective bargaining, the prohibition of discrimination against women, and the elimination of forced labor and child labor. ILRF promotes decent work around the world. Jeffrey Becker joined ILRF in the summer of 2010, and serves as the program officer for the organization’s work in China. Mr. Becker holds a Ph.D. in political science from the George Washington University, and his research examines the rise in labor protests among migrant workers in China. As part of his dissertation research, Jeffrey spent thirteen months in China, interviewing migrant workers about their experiences in the workplace in Beijing, Guangdong, and Jiangsu provinces.

Daniel Gross, IWW / Brandworkers International
Daniel Gross is the founding director of Brandworkers International, a non-profit organization protecting and advancing the rights of retail and food employees. By empowering low-wage employees with legal, advocacy, and organizing tools, Brandworkers promotes fairness on the job and challenges corporate misconduct in the community. Brandworkers is helping lead the widely-acclaimed Focus on the Food Chain campaign, an organizing effort of immigrant workers overcoming sweatshop conditions in the food processing and distribution warehouses that supply New York's grocery stores and restaurants. With the Industrial Workers of the World, Mr. Gross co-founded the first labor union in the United States at the Starbucks Coffee Co. A graduate of the Fordham University School of Law where he was a Stein Scholar for Public Interest Law and Ethics, Mr. Gross is a workers' rights attorney and serves on the steering committee of the National Lawyers Guild Labor & Employment Committee.

Carrie Gleason, Retail Action Project
Carrie Gleason is the director of the Retail Action Project (RAP), a growing network of New York City retail and fashion workers. RAP is dedicated to winning economic justice for retail workers through strategic organizing, policy and research, creative communications, and services. RAP has integrated art into organizing by using video, design and performance to spotlight retail workers’ experiences and hold retailers accountable for workplace injustices.

Not An Alternative
Not An Alternative is a hybrid non-profit organization and arts collective with a mission to affect popular understandings of events, symbols, and history. We curate and produce work that questions and leverages the tools of advertising, architecture, exhibit design, branding, and public relations. Programs are hosted at a variety of venues, including our Brooklyn-based gallery No-Space (formerly known as The Change You Want to See Gallery). Not An Alternative has exhibited work in New York, Baltimore, Toronto, London, Barcelona, Amsterdam, and Sao Paolo.

Marty Kirchner
Marty Kirchner is an artist and labor organizer based in New York City. He completed the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2010, after graduating from HfBK Städelschule Frankfurt/M in 2009, and the University of California Los Angeles in 2004. A member of the Industrial Workers of the World labor union, he is currently an organizer with Focus on the Food Chain, a campaign to improve conditions of immigrants workers in New York’s food processing and distribution warehouses.

The Public School New York
The Public School is a school with no curriculum. At the moment, it operates as follows: first, classes are proposed by the public (I want to learn this or I want to teach this); then, people have the opportunity to sign up for the classes (I also want to learn that); finally, when enough people have expressed interest, the school finds a teacher and offers the class to those who signed up.

“The Making of the Chinese New Working Class” of the Culture and Art Museum of Migrant Workers has been supported by Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin and Kulturstiftung des Bundes.

MINI/Goethe-Institut Curatorial Residencies Ludlow 38 is supported by MINI and Friends of Goethe

Saturday June 11: Brooklyn Vacant Property Count

beka — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 16:03:44 -0700

Start: 06/11/2011 - 10:00am

End: 06/11/2011 - 2:00pm

Please join Picture The Homeless at NO↔SPACE in Williamsburg (and other meeting points around Brooklyn) as they lead a vacant property count aimed at confronting the City's division of real estate, property and space. Brooklyn has the highest density of vacant properties in New York City, and the greatest number of people entering into homelessness.

Saturday, June 11, 10am
@ NO↔SPACE (and other Brooklyn locations, see below)
84 Havemeyer St, at Metropolitan Ave

This is a massive borough-wide effort with multiple meeting points. When Picture The Homeless conducted a similar count in Manhattan in 2006 they were able to show that there are more vacant properties in Manhattan alone than the entire homeless population in all 5 boroughs of New York City.

FROM PICTURE THE HOMELESS
On Saturday, June 11th, hundreds of Brooklynites will pound the pavement and walk every block of eight community boards in search of vacant buildings and lots.

Why? Because they know that their community needs housing, gardens, jobs, and open space - and they know that there's a ton of vacant buildings and lots and storefronts that could help transform their neighborhoods in ways that help everyone - not just rich developers.

AND WE NEED YOU! VOLUNTEER SATURDAY, JUNE 11th, AT 10AM, FOR THE BROOKLYN VACANT PROPERTY COUNT at the following locations:
John Wesley United Methodist Church (260 Quincy Street, A/C to Nostrand)
Pratt Area Community Council (226 Lefferts Place; A/C to Franklin)
Neighbors Together (2094 Fulton Street; A/C to Rockaway)
No-Space (84 Havemayer St, L to Bedford or Lorimer)
Office of Council Member Diana Reyna: (217 Havemeyer Street: J/M/Z to Marcy…
Brooklyn Public Library: Clinton Hill Branch: 380 Washington Avenue (G train to Clinton-Washington)
Brooklyn Public Library: Brooklyn Heights Branch: 280 Cadman Plaza West (A/C to High Street)
Brooklyn Public Library: New Lots Branch: 665 New Lots Avenue (2/3/4/5 to New Lots)
Brooklyn Public Library: Brownsville Branch: 61 Glenmore Avenue (L Train to Sutter Ave)

TO VOLUNTEER, OR FOR MORE INFORMATION, call Adrian at 646-314-6423 or email adrian@picturethehomeless.org

We'll be counting the following Brooklyn Community Boards and Neighborhoods:

1. East Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Northside, Southside, Williamsburg
2. Boerum Hill, Brooklyn Heights, Clinton Hill, Downtown Brooklyn, DUMBO, Farragut, Fort Greene, Fulton Ferry, Navy Yard, Vinegar Hill
3. Bedford-Stuyvesant, Stuyvesant Heights, Tompkins Park North
4. Bushwick
5. Broadway Junction*, City Line, Cypress Hills, East New York, Highland Park, New Lots, Spring Creek, Starrett City
6. Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, Gowanus, Park Slope, Red Hook
8. Crown Heights, Prospect Heights, Weeksville
16. Broadway Junction*, Brownsville, Ocean Hill
Click here for video of City Council Member Letitia James, speaking about the need to count vacant property in Brooklyn.

What did we find in 2006, when we counted vacant property in Manhattan, in collaboration with Borough President Scott Stringer? Enough potential apartments to house every homeless household in the city!

ART21: 5 Questions (for Contemporary Practice) with Not An Alternative by Thom Donovan

beka — Sat, 21 May 2011 18:53:44 -0700

"Tate Modern: Tomorrow Is Another Day (After the Economic Crisis)" installation produced by Not An Alternative for the Tate Modern’s 10th anniversary show “No Soul for Sale: A Festival of Independents.” The work implicated corporate sponsor, Morgan Stanley, for its role in the economic crisis. The piece was accompanied by an essay situating the work art historically as in intervention on participatory art, while simultaneously linking it to other local campaigns targeting Tate sponsorship. May 14-16, 2010 Photo by Not An Alternative.

I encountered the art group Not An Alternative for the first time about a month ago in Corona, Queens, where Tania Bruguera (featured last month in 5 Questions) had assembled a panel on “useful art.” What immediately impressed me was the group’s ability to articulate its ongoing project, which aims both to create new spaces for cultural production and to question the ways that various participatory structures (social media, election processes, relational aesthetics) exclude certain subjects and amplify social and economic inequalities by means of participation.

Through their highly engaged work, work that functions somewhere between political activism, social service, and institutional critique, Not An Alternative confront the limits of what political theorist Jodi Dean has called, after a variety of critical theoretical debates, “communicative capitalism.” In a time of communicative capitalism, our political and social participation is increasingly exploited by the use of new media. Not An Alternative foregrounds this fact, presenting ways of navigating a relatively new digital landscape in which values once cherished by the militant left and avant-garde alike–participation, reflexivity, interactivity–have become corporate watchwords for how neoliberalism manages consent in a networked age.

Networked for some, but obviously not for all. Not An Alternative’s work is also crucial in the ways that it foregrounds exclusion, offering ways to visualize the limits of participation in a society in which obviously one’s ability to participate is largely determined by social and economic privilege. As Not An Alternative said during their presentation in Corona, referring to their collaboration with a homeless advocacy group in the Bronx (discussed below), they recognize the important of “desubjectifying” themselves, where to draw attention to their efforts may work against the causes of the community groups with whom they choose to work.

The Not (or nots, plural) of Not An Alternative are significant in a time in which terms like “collaboration,” “participation,” and “interactivity” remain largely unquestioned. What would it mean to drop out, when dropping out would no longer seem an option? Not An Alternative do not so much drop out as use the resources and machinery of communicative capitalism to produce a different set of results that undermine the seamless functioning of neoliberalism. In this way they negate and refuse, but their refusal also has a positive effect.

Read the Interview

Video from "Conversations on Useful Art" Presentation

beka — Tue, 17 May 2011 13:49:13 -0700

On Saturday, April 23, Not An Alternative took part in A Conversation on Useful Art #1, an event organized by artist Tania Bruguera as part of Immigrant Movement International, a year-long, socio-political movement initiated by the artist in Corona, Queens presented by Creative Time and the Queens Museum of Art. The event took place at Immigrant Movement International headquarters and was held in conjunction with the Useful Art Association and featured an introduction to Useful Art followed by a series of brief conversations with artists and presenters Patrick Bernier and Olive Martin, Mel Chin, Not An Alternative, Rick Lowe, Pase Usted, Creative Time Chief Curator Nato Thompson, QMA Executive Director Tom Finkelpearl, Larissa Harris, Gregory Sholette, representatives from Make the Road, New York, and N.I.C.E. (New Immigrant Community Empowerment), and New York City Council Member Julissa Ferreras.

Further documentation can be found here: http://immigrant-movement.us/?p=2120.

Coworking at No-Space Featured in NY Post

beka — Mon, 16 May 2011 21:32:35 -0700

Austerity Protests to Climate Actions: Recent Art-Activism in the UK

beka — Mon, 09 May 2011 02:46:32 -0700

Start: 05/12/2011 - 7:30pm

End: 05/12/2011 - 9:30pm

Thursday, May 12, 7:30pm

With the wave of opposition to austerity measures in the UK, many new creative political groups and projects have appeared. Not only the high-profile actions of UK Uncut, but others such as the University of Strategic Optimism, Arts Against Cuts, Precarious Workers Brigade, the Really Free School, and the Free University of Liverpool.

On Thursday, May 12, UK-based academic and art/activist Gavin Grindon will present stories and films from recent groups and activities that experiment with new creative approaches to activism’s materials and performance. From the Book Bloc’s very literate means of protecting crowds from police batons, to The University of Strategic Optimism’s critical theory lectures in high-street banks; from Liberate Tate’s oil spills inside the Tate galleries to encourage them to drop BP sponsorship, to the Space Hijackers driving a tank into an arms fair, and the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination&`;s reverse-engineering of hundreds of bikes into a swarming mass of direct action machines.

Gavin will introduce some of these groups and activities, tell some ridiculous stories of general troublemaking and daring misadventure, show some videos and do his best to answer any of your questions.

Gavin Grindon is a postdoctoral research fellow at Kingston University of London. His research focuses on the history of activist-art practices, and art in social movements in the twenteith century, through both objects and performance, and how these can be theorised and historicised in relation to the institutional bases of art history. He has written articles for the Oxford Art Journal, Third Text, Art Monthly and the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, and is a sometime member of the art-activist group the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination.

http://www.gavingrindon.net

[NO-RES]: A film in progress by METROMUSTER

beka — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 00:05:26 -0700

Start: 05/05/2011 - 7:30pm

End: 05/05/2011 - 9:30pm

Thursday, May 5
7:30pm - 9:30pm

Join us at No-Space on Thursday, May 5th for a screening of NO-RES, followed by a discussion with filmmaker and METROMUSTER collective member Xavi Artiga.

NO-RES, which means "nothing" in Catalan, is a work in progress documentary film about gentrification in Barcelona, Spain. METROMUSTER has been working for a year in a working-class neighborhood that is being destroyed in order to build luxury buildings. METROMUSTER focuses on the change in the way of life that gentrification brings in any context. NO-RES has a universal approach on gentrification and the different realities affected by the same problem.

NO-RES is a film without voice-over, which means that pictures speak for themselves. Since the film is still not finished, METROMUSTER in interested in screening sequences that lead to discussion within their presentations. In these conversations they exchange opinions about the artistic approach of the social problem. The debates are meant to influence the final cut of the film.

Trailer NO-RES from metromuster on Vimeo.

ABOUT THE FILM
[NO-RES] is a chronicle of life during the last days of Colònia Castells, one of the last remaining workers' quarters in Barcelona. The destruction of its small houses and alleys will bury a unique relational microcosm and obliterate its inhabitants' very human way of understanding city space. We present this videographic chronicle in two different levels: as a finished work (which we call "the film") and as a Work in Progress.

The film shows three moments in this space which depict the destruction of patterns of daily life that have existed for generations. These moments are:

1. LIFE: A evocation of life in Colònia Castells through the interactions of its residents on the streets.
2. TAXIDERMY: We watch as this life is frozen and dissected in the face of the imminent demolition of this picturesque space.
3. DEATH: We intensely experience the trauma of the demolition of the houses in this quarter.

We are talking about a paradigm of town-planning that is being implemented in many cities throughout the West. In the middle of the district of Les Corts, the tiny quarter is completely surrounded by big buildings and avenues, like Entença Street. The documentary shows, in a very visual way, how the horizontal city becomes a vertical one. Unavoidably, [NO-RES] also tells of the exodus of its main characters, who will be evicted at the beggining of 2011 and forced to adapt to an almost opposite environment. The story ends with the demolition of the houses where many of the neighbors were born.

The documentary is tied together by the space itself and the way of life within it: many hours of sun, absence of traffic, life in the streets, contact with neighbors, old people going for a walk, children playing with a ball, etc. In comparison to this space of life, we'll find the latent presence of the unlivable-space which grows little by little in the city. This non-space is exemplified by Entença Street, the four-lane street which crosses the quarter with its intense traffic and its absence of life. This sort of space is what we call [NO-RES].

[NO-RES], in Catalan: [NOTHING].

http://no-res.cc/en

ABOUT METROMUSTER
METROMUSTER is an independent production company that has been experimenting with art, sociology and politics since 2003. Our goals are:

__Provide more resources to non-commercial projects
__Take advantage of public resources for cultural productions to make good quality works that are free for everybody
__Advocate for social change related to ways of understanding urban space, social participation and access to new technologies
__Give documentaries and non-fiction films the same status as fictional cinema.
__Contribute actively to the Free Culture Movement inspired by Laurence Lessig i Richard Stallman.
http://metromuster.cc/en

ABOUT XAVI ARTIGAS
Xavi Artigas is a Catalan sociologist, filmmaker and artivist. He studied in Germany, where he specialized in Social Change at the University of Münster (WWUM). In 2003 he started to work as an artist in Paris, France by making interventions on advertising panels in the subway. Some years later he would be known under the name METROMUSTER, which is nowadays a collective for Visual Activism. Back in Barcelona, he majored in Creative Documentary Filmmaking at the Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) and directed a series of short documentaries about obsolete ways of life for TV3—Catalan TV, one of which won the prize "Docs&Kids" at the 2011 edition of DocsBarcelona.

Together with the artist Leo Martín, Xavi directed one of the chapters of the Spanish Art TV-show, called Metropolis (TVE—Spanish TV), about Art and Activism. Other independent visual productions made by Xavi are —among others—: "Terra Roja—Red Land", about the Coffee Industry in Vietnam, or "TanzAmRand", a video-art project about Contact Dance in Freiburg, Germany. Xavi currently works as an assistant for first class Spanish documentary directors like Ricardo Iscar or Mercedes Álvarez and since 2009 he has been the official Filmmaker of the Culture Institute of Barcelona (ICUB). He's a member of the political art association "ENMEDIO.info".

A Conversation on Useful Art

beka — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 22:46:13 -0700

Start: 04/23/2011 - 2:00pm

End: 04/23/2011 - 5:00pm

A Conversation on Useful Art
Hosted by artist Tania Bruguera
Presented by Creative Time and Queens Museum of Art
At the Immigrant Movement International Headquarters
Saturday, April 23, 2:00 pm – 5:00 pm

The event, held in conjunction with the Useful Art Association, will feature an introduction by political performance and installation artist Tania Bruguera, followed by a series of brief presentations with artists Mel Chin, Santiago Cirugeda, Not An Alternative, Rick Lowe, Pase Usted, and Patrick Bernier/Olive Martin.

A conversation will follow with responders Nato Thompson, Chief Curator at Creative Time; Tom Finkelpearl, Executive Director, Queens Museum of Art; Larissa Harris, Curator, Queens Museum of Art; and Gregory Sholette, Chair, MFA Studio Art Program, Queens College CUNY.

Claire Bishop, Associate Professor of Art History, CUNY Graduate Center, will moderate a round table discussion with participants, representatives from local immigrant community organizations Make the Road NY, N.I.C.E. (New Immigrant Community Empowerment), and New York City Council Member Julissa Ferreras.

Q&A will follow.

RSVP encouraged at united@immigrant-movement.us. Space is limited.

ABOUT IMMIGRANT MOVEMENT INTERNATIONAL
Tania Bruguera’s Immigrant Movement International, presented by Creative Time and the Queens Museum of Art, is a long-term art project in the form of an artist-initiated socio-political movement. Bruguera will spend a year operating a flexible community space in the multinational and transnational neighborhood of Corona, Queens, which will serve as the movement’s headquarters. Engaging both local and international communities, as well as working with social service organizations, elected officials, and artists focused on immigration reform, Bruguera will examine growing concerns about the political representation and conditions facing immigrants.

By engaging the local community through public workshops, events, actions, and partnerships with immigrant and social service organizations, Immigrant Movement International will explore who is defined as an immigrant and the values they share, focusing on the larger question of what it means to be a citizen of the world. Bruguera will also delve into the implementation of art in society, examining what it means to create “Useful Art”, and addressing the disparity of engagement between informed audiences and the general public, as well as the historical gap between the language used in what is considered avant-garde and the language of urgent politics.

It is part of QMA’s Corona Studio Initiative that brings long-term socially collaborative art projects to Corona, Queens, the Museum’s neighboring community.

http://immigrant-movement.us

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Tania Bruguera is one of the leading political and performance artists of her generation. Bruguera’s work researches ways in which Art can be applied to the everyday political life; creating a public forum to debate ideas shown in their state of contradictions and focusing on the transformation of the condition of “viewer” onto one of “citizenry.” Bruguera uses the terms ARTE DE CONDUCTA (conduct/ behavior art) and ARTE UTIL (useful art) to define her practice.

Bruguera has participated in Documenta, Performa, Venice, Gwangju and Havana Biennales and at exhibitions at mayor museums in Europe and United States including the Tate Modern, The Whitechapel Gallery, PS1, ZKM, IVAM, Kunsthalle Wien, and The New Museum of Contemporary Art. Her work is part of the collection of the Tate Modern; Museum für Moderne Kunst; Daros Foundation; Museo del Barrio; Bronx Museum; IVAM; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam.

A graduate of the MFA programs at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (United States) and Instituto Superior de Arte (Cuba), Bruguera is also the Founder / Director of Arte de Conducta; the first politic art studies program in the world, hosted by Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana. She is visiting faculty at Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, IUAV in Venice, and an Assistant Professor at The University of Chicago, United States.

END:CIV screening with filmmaker Frank Lopez

beka — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 21:53:10 -0700

Start: 04/21/2011 - 7:30pm

End: 04/21/2011 - 9:30pm

Thursday, April 21, 7:30pm - 9:30pm
Join us at No-Space for a screening of END:CIV followed by a Q&A with filmmaker and director Frank Lopez (of subMedia.tv).

If your homeland was invaded by aliens who cut down the forests and contaminated the food supply, would you resist? If creatures from outer space made the water so poisonous you wouldn't dream of drinking it, would you try to stop them? If monsters released toxic chemicals that caused cancer in the people you love, would you fight back?

These aren't idle questions. It's happening now – except there are no aliens. The culture that's cradled us since birth is a killer.

END:CIV illustrates the brutality of a civilization addicted to systematic violence and environmental destruction, and the heroism of those who confront it head-on. Rapid-fire video-game graphics, interviews, war footage and satire mock the excesses of the global economic system, even as it implodes around us.

Based on the best-seller Endgame by Derrick Jensen, END:CIV begins with the harsh reality that all civilizations eventually end. The ancient Mayans, the dynasties of China, and the mighty Roman Empire, as long-lived and powerful as they were, inevitably crashed. Western Civilization is no different. It's coming down, but not fast enough.

Jensen asks: "If civilization lasts another one or two hundred years, will the people then say of us, 'Why did they not take it down?' Will they be as furious with us as I am with those who came before and stood by? I could very well hear those people who come after saying,'If they had taken it down, we would still have earthworms to feed the soil. We would have redwoods, and we would have oaks in California. We would still have frogs. We would still have other amphibians. I am starving because there are no salmon in the river, and you allowed the salmon to be killed so rich people could have cheap electricity for aluminum smelters. God damn you. God damn you all.'"

Interviews include Captain Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Society and writers James Howard Kunstler (The Long Emergency), Gord Hill (500 Years of Indigenous Resistance), Waziyatawin (For Indigenous Eyes Only), Lierre Keith (The Vegetarian Myth), and Stephanie McMillan (Minimum Security). López interviews indigenous activists Qwatsinas (Nuxalk Nation) and Rod Coronado (Pascua Yaqui); environmentalists Steven Best, Zoe Blunt, Dru Oja Jay, Macdonald Stainsby, and many more.

About Director Franklin López
Hailing from San Juan, Puerto Rico, López hosts “It’s the End of the World as We Know It and I Feel Fine," the world's most subversive news show. In 2005, his post-Katrina video remix “George Bush Don’t Like Black People” reached a million people and got a nod from the New York Times and the Washington Post. Wired Magazine listed subMedia.TV in its top ten online video sites in 2006, the same year López was hired to produce Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now!

"Franklin López is a fantastically talented filmmaker who has created a powerful and important film about the most important topic ever: how to stop this culture from killing the planet." – Derrick Jensen
 
"By far, the most routinely-praised contemporary media activist is Franklin López. His shows and films not only possess a distinctive look and feel, but they also contain a wicked sense of humor … López’s work engages in constructing a new vision where popular culture serves the interests of the poor and dispossessed, where humor is reignited within activism, and the D.I.Y. ethics of punk and hip-hop allow those with talent and gumption to be the media, once again." – Chris Robé, Pop Matters

END:CIV. The future depends on it.

Aesthetics in Protest

beka — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 20:22:50 -0700

Start: 03/23/2011 - 6:30pm

End: 03/23/2011 - 8:00pm

Wed., Mar. 23rd, 6:30-8pm
The New School
Lang Auditorium
55 W 13th st.

PANELISTS:
Mark Herbst, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest
Member from W.A.G.E.
Beka Economopoulos from Not An Alternative
Chris Mansour, Platypus

This panel will focus on the aesthetic tropes that activists use to express political dissent. Theatrical gestures such as street art (e.g., glamdalism), dance parties (e.g., Funk the War), or costumes have found their way into protest tactics. Simultaneously, many contemporary artists create 'activist' or 'social' art by pulling off media pranks against the government or corporations (e.g., Yes Men), reenact past protests (e.g., Mark Tribe or Sharon Hayes) and other forms of public performances. What are the historical roots that contribute to the use of current aesthetic interventions in political protests? In what ways do they expand or limit the possibilities for protests to transform the social order? How does experimenting with aesthetic and artistic sensibilities influence our political consciousness and practice? Political thinkers and art-activists will address these questions in order to make sense of the various forms of protest today.

QUESTIONS:
1) Contemporary "political" artistic practice aims to raise political consciousness for progressive or left politics. How does -- and how can -- the use of aesthetic, theatrical and narrative elements heighten political possibilities and consciousness?

2) Over the last fifteen years, the 'star' of theatrical protest tactics has risen high in both leftist politics and the contemporary art world. Bored with the staid march-and-rally routine, activists seek to diversify the form of protest politics: Funk the War, Bash Back, Billionaires for Bush, Claire Fontaine, etc. Such tactics aim to allow the "message" of progressive politics to reach a broader audience and counter the 'right wing noise machine.' Despite this increase in creative ingenuity, the social situation has worsened over the past half a century, and one might even see this creativity as a symptom of worsening conditions (e.g., the deflation of the anti-war protests--which began as some of the largest protests in 20th century history). Given the Left's greater inability to change reality and gain popular support, how is the creative aesthetic approach towards activism bound up in this failure? What must be rethought in light of these dimming prospects?

3) "How might you articulate the difference between 'aestheticizing politics' and 'politicizing aesthetics'? How might the difference matter for the understanding of contemporary politico-aesthetic practice."

4) What role ought considerations of value and aesthetics play in our evaluation of politically minded contemporary art?

Snow Flow 2011

beka — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 09:30:59 -0800

SnowFlow is a collaborative event between several organizations interested in creativity, sustainability and organizational awareness. Our shared concerns regarding environmental issues and the increasing frequency of global catastrophes have focused our efforts into establishing ongoing collaborative projects that raise public awareness and bring together artists, activists, naturalists and concerned citizens into settings that inform, support and energize participants into making a difference.

Registration | Participating Groups | Schedule of Events | Donations | Press Release

SnowFlow will be held the weekend of February 11-13, 2011 at the Full Moon Resort. Located within the Catskill State Park and Forest Preserve, this region serves as both the main contributor to the New York City watershed and as the headwaters to the Delaware River, recently declared the “Nation's Most Endangered River.” The main initiative for SnowFlow is to bridge water rights activism between the Hudson and Delaware Valleys in relation to natural gas extraction, hydraulic fracturing, peak water and the foodshed.

The weekend events will combine outdoor activities, art, music and lively conversations to produce and document a variety of works focused on water in it most crystallized form – Snow! During the day, SnowFlowers will cascade down the slopes of nearby Belleayre Mountain and engage in parallel artistic interventions and snow shelter building competitions. The festivities will continue into the evening with a cocktail reception and a regional Catskill foodshed specialtiesdinner, followed by conversations related to peak water & the foodshed and musical performances curated by Suzanne Thorpe and featuring Pauline Olivero, Miguel Frasconi and Tianna Kennedy & Hannah Marcus.

Pics from Fall Foliage, Farms, and Fracking Tour

beka — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 07:28:52 -0800