How can we harness collaborative culture, critical analysis, participatory technologies and aesthetics to incite social change?  What content and platforms can we create that will respond to the limits and possibilities of the ever-shifting contemporary media landscape?

Paper Tiger Television puts theory into practice — participants of the conference are challenged to collaboratively design prototypes for a new rrradical media, building on the ideals of non-hierarchical-participatory culture, critical analysis, activism and innovative aesthetics. A broad cross section of individuals, working together with varied proclivities, interests and abilities, opens up the potential for something truly revolutionary to develop.

Media Intensive: 10:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Succinct, fast-paced and provocative presentations on key topics of the design challenge: Justice & Autonomy, New Activism & Movement Building, Collectivism & Collaborative Culture, Materiality & Aesthetics

Lunch: 12:00 – 1:00 p.m.
Presenters and grassroots media advocates host informal discussions dedicated to conference themes.

Design Challenge: 1:00 – 4:30 p.m.
Groups of 8-10 participants will be challenged to collectively create prototypes for a new form of rrradical media.

Team Presentations: 4:30 – 6:00 p.m.
Each group gives 10 minutes to present their rrradical media prototype. Selected prototypes will be featured in Documentary Fortnight 2012: MoMA’s International Festival of Nonfiction Film and Media on February 24.

Media Studies Speakers
Jesse Drew, professor, Techno-cultural Studies, University of California, Davis
Pablillo Jose, hacktivist
Shannon Mattern, assistant professor, School of Media Studies, The New School
Martha Wallner, Media & Communications Coordinator, Legal Services for Prisoners with Children
Isaac Wilder, Executive Director, Free Network Foundation

Design Challenge Facilitators
Robby Herbst, artist
Tracy Luz, documentary filmmaker
Deep Dish TV, media laboratory since 1986

Democracy Now!, national, daily, independent, and award winning global news program
Housing Is A Human Right, documentary project
Manhattan Neighborhood Network, public access network
Media Action Grassroots Network, local-to-local advocacy network of grassroots community organizations
People’s Production House, journalism training and production institute

Follow the links to detailed event description and DAY ONE schedule.

* Presented by Paper Tiger Television, Vera List Center for Art and Politics, and School of Media Studies at The New School for Public Engagement , on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2011-2013 focus theme “Thingness.”

Posted on January 23, 2012

“The power of mass culture rests on the trust of the public. This legitimacy is a paper tiger.”
–PTTV Manifesto

Borne of the residual political optimism from the sixties and a flush of infatuation with small-format video, Paper Tiger Television (PTTV) began as a series on Communications Update on public access. Featuring Herb Schiller tearing apart the New York Times’ “all the news that is fit to print,” Paper Tiger’s penetrating and playful critiques of Time, Rolling Stone, National Geographicand Cosmopolitan soon followed.

The public access movement took root at a moment of disillusionment with network television, generating hope that cable would offer a genuine alternative to TV wasteland. Over the last thirty years, the accessibility of public access TV centers has significantly declined, while for-profit corporate media consolidated from fifty into five companies that control 90% of the public’s media consumption.

Yet, with the growth of the internet and the proliferation of consumer grade production equipment, social media, crowd sourcing, online video, live streaming, and wireless technology, today’s media environment is rife with opportunities for innovation and collaboration.  Still, from the digital divide, to online filter bubbles, to the echo chamber of social distribution of mass media, to SOPA and Net Neutrality, an analysis of how these developments are used coupled with the threats coming from the policy level reveals that even these seemingly promising trends are nuanced.

Given these developments, what does a vibrant, radical media look like, how could it function? What lessons can we apply from Paper Tiger’s innovative media activism?  How can we use media strategically and creatively in the pursuit of social justice?

Moderated by Daniela Capistrano, Multi-Platform Producer of DCAP Media, the festive event features a keynote address, a screening of Paper Tiger Television’s Greatest Hits, selected by current Tigers, followed by a panel discussion on the future of rrradical media.

Keynote Speaker
Malkia Cyril, Executive Director, Center for Media Justice

Panelist
Andy Bichlbaum, The Yes Lab
Jamilah King, News Editor, Colorlines
Jennifer Pozner, Founder, Women in Media & News

Follow the links to detailed event description and DAY TWO schedule.

* Presented by Paper Tiger Television, the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, and the School of Media Studies at The New School for Public Engagement , on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2011-2013 focus theme “Thingness.”

Posted on January 23, 2012

What is radical media? What has it been in the past? What can it be in the future? What is media’s relationship to social justice and movement building?

Paper Tiger Television, the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, and the School of Media Studies at The New School for Public Engagement present a two-day conference of activists, artists and media makers to celebrate, reflect and build on thirty roarin’ years (and counting!) of media art and activism.

In 1981, Paper Tiger Television (PTTV) pioneered a truly radical public access show, raising awareness amongst workers in the communication industries of the economic, political and social power structures perpetuated through the profit-driven mainstream media. Ever since then, the collective has been making fun, yet incisive video that demystifies the information industry and provides a platform for underrepresented perspectives. Collaborating with activists and artists, PTTV videos take many forms — from critical performative readings of the mass media & popular culture, to traditional style documentaries on social justice issues.

Thirty years later, how can we harness collaborative culture, critical analysis, participatory technologies and aesthetics to incite social change?  What content and platforms can we create that will respond to the limits and possibilities of the ever-shifting contemporary media landscape?

We invite artists, activists, scholars and media makers, movers and shakers of all stripes to explore these questions. Participants are challenged to collaboratively design prototypes for a new rrradical media, building on the ideals of non-hierarchical-participatory culture, critical analysis, activism and innovative aesthetics. A broad cross section of individuals, working together with varied proclivities, interests and abilities, opens up the potential for something truly revolutionary to develop.

Follow the links to detailed event schedules: DAY ONE and DAY TWO.

*Presented by Paper Tiger Television, the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, and the School of Media Studies at The New School for Public Engagement, on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2011-2013 focus theme “Thingness.”

Posted on December 8, 2011

Designed by artists Melanie Crean and Claire Picher, the Building Better Speech workshops investigate how issues of identity and power can be communicated as a form of text, either through the body’s gestures, or through network-based collective action. Building Better Speech workshops make use of performance, games, and open education models to collaboratively facilitate dialogue around issues defined by groups affected by political transformation and upheaval.

In the pilot iteration of Building Better Speech, a workshop has been designed with a group of female high school students from Turning Point for Women and Families, a Queens-based organization that supports Muslim American families dealing with issues of domestic violence. Over the course of the workshop, the young women first identify and then explore issues of faith and stereotypes through automatic writing assignments, serigraphy, theatrical games, reflection, and discussion. These various methods are a means of improving communication within groups and building ties to allies, as well as promoting mutual understanding. Physical and visual approaches to communication augment the spoken word to help overcome the greatest obstacle to communicating: the challenge of being heard.

On the occasion of Performa 11, and hosted by the Performa Institute, Crean, Picher and the young women of Turning Point for Women and Families will conduct an open workshop, inviting the public to explore issues of stereotyping and identity in a shared session of collective performance games.

The project is developed in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, and presented as part of the Performa Institute, a research and educational initiative of Performa 11.

Posted on November 7, 2011

With a title lifted from Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville’s film Here and Elsewhere (Ici et Ailleurs, 1976), this day of screenings presents contemporary and historical, documentary and fictional films to suggest correspondences in the contested land of Palestine/Israel. Curated by 2011-2013 Vera List Center Fellow Joshua Simon, the program proposes to view the conflict through the prism of “affinities” rather than “belonging” and “addition” rather than “opposition,” and does so in a mixed program of film screenings and conversations. It is presented as one of two programs to accompany the publication of United States of Palestine-Israel (in the Solution series by Sternberg Press, 2011), a book of speculative scenarios for the region, edited by Simon.

Reaching beyond geographical borders and instead focusing on the word “and,” the films present  fictional stories about run-down places in Jaffa (Copti and Boukhary); speculation on the future Jewish-Arab State (Rosen and Atia); visions of Israel in Uganda, proposed by Ugandan dictator Idi Amin (when, at the beginning of Zionism, Uganda was considered for Jewish settlement); the landscapes of Jerusalem and the Dead Sea so familiar to both Palestinians and Israelis (Struggle in Jerash); and, finally, Godard’s reading of the history of this place through cinema, and a reading of cinema and history through this place (Ici et Ailleurs and Notre Musique).

Presented in collaboration with Artis–Contemporary Israeli Art Fund, and in conjunction with The New Museum’s Repurposing the Kibbutz, September 17,
3:00 p.m.

Program Schedule
• Screening I. Short-reverse-shot
11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Excerpts from Local Angel, Udi Aloni, dir. (Israel, 2002, 70 minutes)
The Jewish-Arab State, Yossi Atia and Itamar Rose, dir. (Israel, 2007, 4:30 minutes)
Notre Musique, Jean-Luc Godard, dir. (Switzerland & France, 2004, 80 minutes)
• Brunch
12:30 – 1:00 p.m.

• Screening II. Here And Elsewhere
1:00 – 2:00 p.m.
Ici et Ailleurs, Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, dir. (France, 1976, 53 minutes)

• Conversation I
2:00 – 3:00 p.m.
Sam Ishii-Gonzales and Joshua Simon

• Screening III. The Uganda Proposal
3:00 – 4:30 p.m.
General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait, Barbet Schroeder, dir. (France & Switzerland, 1974, 90 minutes)

• Conversation II
4:30 – 5:30 p.m.
Udi Aloni, Reem Fadda, and Joshua Simon

• Screening IV. Affinities
5:30 – 7:00 p.m.
Struggle in Jerash, Eileen Simpson and Ben White, dir. (Jordan, 2009, 63 minutes)
The Truth, Scandar Copti and Rabih Boukhary, dir. (Israel, 2003,15 minutes)

For more information, please download a detailed program, including film descriptions, here.

Posted on August 26, 2011

How do objects sometimes act as vibrant things, with an effectivity of their own, a degree of independence from the words, images, and feelings they provoke in humans? Political theorist Jane Bennett delivers the inaugural lecture as the Vera List Center for Art and Politics embarks on a two-year exploration of the material world. In the face of virtual realities, social media and disembodied existences, the center will focus on the material conditions of our lives and examine “thingness,” the nature of matter.

Renowned for her work on nature and ethics, Bennett investigates the power of things, which sometimes manifests as the strange allure that even useless, ugly, or meaningless items can have for us. Her latest book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke, 2010) asks how our political world would approach public problems were we to seriously consider not just our human experience of things, but the capacity of things themselves. How is it that things can elide their status as possessions, tools, or aesthetic objects to manifest traces of independence and vitality?  Following the tangled threads linking vibrant materialities, human selves, and the agentic assemblages they form, Bennett examines what hoarders – people preternaturally attuned to things – might have to teach us about the workings of agency, causality, and artistry in a world overflowing with stuff.

*  *  *

Jane Bennett is Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, where she teaches political theory and American political thought. She is a founding member of the journal Theory & Event, and is currently working on a project on over-consumption, new ecologies, and Walt Whitman’s materialism.

* Presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2011-2013 focus theme “Thingness.”

Posted on August 10, 2011

Vera List Center for Art and Politics and Sheila C. Johnson Center for Design at Parsons celebrate the 99th Annual Conference of the College Art Association, with a reception and workshop featuring the artistic entrepreneurs of tomorrow.

Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture is both a book launch for Gregory Sholette’s new work of the same title, and a concrete application of the principles laid out in the book. The book argues that imagination and creativity in the art world originate and thrive in the non-commercial sector. It examines the political economy of art and business by highlighting interventionist and collective art as the ‘dark matter’ of the art world. This dark matter is indispensable to the survival of mainstream culture which it frequently opposes.

Two projects are lifted from the book’s pages and installed installed in the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center lobby for passerby to participate.

Boston-based artist Cat Mazza offers a craftivism workshop, based on the work of her organization MicroRevolt. MicroRevolt projects investigate the dawn of sweatshops in early industrial capitalism to inform the current crisis of global expansion and the feminization of labor.

New York-based artist Jim Costanzo calls for the 2nd Whiskey Rebellion: A Distillation of American Spirit. The original Whiskey Rebellion was a tax protest in Pennsylvania in the 1790s, during the presidency of George Washington. The conflict was rooted in western dissatisfaction with a 1791 excise tax on whiskey. The tax was a part of treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton’s program to centralize and fund the national debt. Costanzo is acting on behalf of the Aaron Burr Society which has begun to distill whiskey without a license, in an act of flagrant civil disobedience.

Posted on January 26, 2011

ByProduct is a new book that assembles the commentaries of artists, activists, curators, and interdisciplinary thinkers on cultural projects “embedded” in industries, the government, and other non-art sectors. Situated deeply in such institutions – and incorporating their architecture, language and much else – these projects produce meaning contingent on their host, becoming a “byproduct” of their existence. Whether the works are explicitly polemical, indirectly critical or instrumentalized by the host institutions is up for debate, and evokes old and new questions around political efficacy, and tactical media.

Posted on December 1, 2010

A new initiative co-organized with the School of Art, Media, and Technology and the Fine Arts Program Parsons, this lecture series captures the increasingly trans-disciplinary nature of scientific, academic, artistic and cultural practices and, in particular, focuses on the complex cross-disciplinary settings for art’s production in contemporary life.

Artist Mel Chin discusses the philosophical and conceptual development of selected works, in relation to the notion of sustainability. For more than three decades, Chin has been developing a unique and socially engaged body of work in which cultural diversity and global solidarity played an important role. His project Revival Field, perhaps his most well-known work, has made him one of the most important pioneers of ecological art. His works have been defined “sculptural witnesses to ecological and political tragedies.” Whether examining American imperialism in Central America, September 11, the fate of the Native American Indians, civil wars in postcolonial Africa, abuse at Guantanamo Bay, the extinction of animal species, or the way in which people pollute the natural world, Chin’s practice creates an arena in which social and (geo)political activism are coupled with ideas from philosophy, biology, history, religion, anthropology, literature, and alchemy. Chin received a BA from Peabody College in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1975, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1988 and 1990. He lives in North Carolina.

Posted on November 22, 2010

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In the United States, the AIDS crisis is now almost completely within the control of public health management systems. Through global NGOs, we have exported our programs for managing this epidemic, along with US public health ideologies that downplay or avoid politically sensitive concerns with sexual rights (such as the rights of commercial sex workers), harm reduction (such as drug legalization and needle exchange), and the oppression of racial and sexual minorities (in the form of multi-generational poverty, incarceration). Increasing infection rates among poor women, rural populations, and young men of color who have sex with men and the inability of many around the world to access affordable, life-saving treatments remind us that social violence and structural inequalities are not resolved by the efficient management of the epidemic.

As long as this global health structure remains in place, the AIDS crisis is always still beginning. Film screening of Jean Carlomusto’s award-winning film Sex Is An Epidemic (2010), followed by an open discussion on how to organize against the AIDS crisis.

Posted on October 28, 2010

The sound-art collective Ultra-red is concerned with the intersection of sound and politics. Collective listening procedures serve as foundation of their exhibition Vogue’ology (at Parsons’ Aronson Gallery, November 17 through 30) which examines the possibilities for establishing an archive of the House/Ballroom community. These procedures have been deployed by the exhibition’s curatorial and archive teams to process and select fragments and phrases from House/Ballroom oral histories and vogue descriptions for the exhibition. Their interpretation will be further provoked and utilized to encourage visitors to move through the exhibition space. On occasion of Vogue’olgy, members of Ultra-red consider this intersection of sound and politics in a public event with artists, union organizers, historians and representatives of Ballroom ministries. The audience is invited to engage with sound as an object of reflection and with listening as a means of political organizing.

* Presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2009/2011 focus theme “Speculating on Change.”

Posted on October 26, 2010

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A new initiative co-organized with the School of Art, Media, and Technology and the Fine Arts Program Parsons, this lecture series captures the increasingly trans-disciplinary nature of scientific, academic, artistic and cultural practices and, in particular, focuses on the complex cross-disciplinary settings for art’s production in contemporary life. Clustered around specific subjects such as geophysics, system theory, economics, and the physics of time, the lectures are presented in thematic pairs, one week apart from one another. Members of The New School’s acclaimed faculty alternate with external scholars, experts and artists. All lectures are open to the public.

Kim Knowlton discusses how climate change impacts public health and how energy production alters landscapes and lives. She explores the story of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill to shed light on the far-ranging impacts of energy choices we make today on near-term and future environmental and health consequences.

This lecture is paired with a talk by artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle on October 12, 2010, who will talk of his recent works on natural and constructed phenomena, including climate change.

*   *   *

Kim Knowlton, PhD, is senior scientist with the Health and Environment Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), where she leads the Global Warming and Health Project. She is also Assistant Clinical Professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, and chair of the Global Climate Change and Health Committee of the Environment Section at the American Public Health Association. She was among the scientists who participated in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report. She works at NRDC on communicating the health impacts of global warming, and on advocating for public health strategies to prepare for and prevent these impacts. Her published research has looked at heat- and ozone-related mortality and illnesses, as well as climate change’s effects on pollen, allergies and asthma, and infectious illnesses. She attended Cornell University and Hunter College/CUNY, and received a doctorate in public health from Columbia University. She was a postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia, and a Mellon Foundation Teaching Fellow in Barnard College’s Department of Environmental Sciences before joining NRDC.

Posted on September 29, 2010

A man-made catastrophe of rare magnitude has changed the Gulf of Mexico. The largest marine oil spill in history, the Deepwater Horizon disaster spewed oil into the sea for close to three months, from April 20 to July 15, 2010, at the rate of 60,000 barrels a day. How are we to think of this catastrophe? Do customary categories – environmental disaster, corporate responsibility, governmental regulations – still apply? Is the Deepwater Horizon oil spill calling for a new consideration of systems we depend on?

Join faculty members from across The New School as they analyze distinct aspects of the oil spill, drawing from their expertise in political science, economics, environmentalism, media, ethics, fashion, and art. Each one will speak for five minutes and address the crisis from their particular professional domain. Possible questions include: what is the nature of our dependency on technology, and how has technical know-how become the domain of a few? What is the impact of those who made their living on boats and beaches along the coast, and of their new conversations with distant peers in Alaska, still struggling after the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill? What issues of design are implicated in the inability to cap the well? How have images of the plume served as a metaphor of the failures of both corporate responsibility and government regulation? How has the visual, what can be seen versus what cannot, shaped our perception of the spill’s effects? What long-term social, political, and environmental consequences might the disaster have in the years to come? What are we to the coral crabs and brittle stars, the mussels and tube worms of the “cold seeps,” the geological features of the Gulf’s ocean floor?

An interdivisional encounter organized by Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School for General Studies, The New School for Social Research and Parsons The New School for Design.

Posted on September 27, 2010

On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Congressional decision to require the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to consider “general standards of decency and respect” in awarding grants, the National Coalition Against Censorship and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School collaborate on two panel discussions and a video interview project evaluating censorship and arts funding today. Prominent artists, non-profit arts organization directors, art dealers, and founders of alternative spaces examine issues related to how the introduction of the decency clause in particular, and the culture wars in general, have affected funding, free speech and self-censorship, and how attitudes towards notions of decency and respect for the values and beliefs of the American public have changed over the past twenty years. Click here for information on Panel Discussion II.

Panel Discussion I
Survival vs. Autonomy: Public Funding of the Arts, Free Speech and Self Censorship
Have arts organizations modified their programming in the aftermath of the culture wars? What alternative funding sources and strategies have they had to employ? How does the commercial market relate to the issue of decency and community standards? What is the future of government funding for arts institutions and individual artists?

The panel examines how the introduction of the decency clause and culture wars over arts funding in general have contributed to a growing distinction between conservative and avant-garde institutions. A number of alternative organizations have sprung up that simply forfeit – or are prepared to forfeit – government funding. Panelists include founders of new alternative spaces that seek autonomy from government funding, leaders of art projects that have been supported by the NEA, and key figures in public art funding.

Moderated by Laura Flanders,GRITtv.

Posted on June 28, 2010

On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Congressional decision to require the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to consider “general standards of decency and respect” in awarding grants, the National Coalition Against Censorship and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School collaborate on two panel discussions and a video interview project evaluating censorship and arts funding today. Prominent artists, non-profit arts organization directors, art dealers, and founders of alternative spaces examine issues related to how the introduction of the decency clause in particular, and the culture wars in general, have affected funding, free speech and self-censorship, and how attitudes towards notions of decency and respect for the values and beliefs of the American public have changed over the past twenty years. Click here for information on Panel Discussion I.

Panel Discussion II
Decency, Respect and Community Standards: What Offends Us Now?
This panel looks at changing attitudes towards notions of decency over the past twenty years. It addresses how representations of nudity and sexuality have changed in contemporary art, and proposes a redefinition of what is considered offensive or inappropriate under our current political climate. The panel brings together artists whose work provoked the culture wars twenty years ago and those who deal with taboo topics today.

Moderated by Laura Flanders, GRITtv.

Posted on June 10, 2010

Vogue’ology contains seemingly incompatible elements: aesthetic experience and political activism; community events and forensic research; public manifestations and private workshops. The exhibition is a joint project between the Ballroom Archive & Oral History Project and the sound art collective Ultra-red. Central to the collaboration is a shared interest in developing terms that can serve to organize the Ballroom Archive, a community-initiated effort to gather histories of the House|Ballroom scene.

The House|Ballroom scene emerged in New York City in the first half of the last century and is today found in cities across the United States. Members of the scene have organized themselves into houses, such as the House of Ebony, the House of Evisu, and the House of Garçon, which function as intentional communities and artistic collectives. Houses sponsor Balls: large events at which members compete in multiple performance categories. For generations of transgender, bisexual, lesbian and gay primarily Latino and African American men and women, the Balls have provoked radical explorations of style, identity and social inequality. Vogue, the community’s signature performance form originally inspired by poses in Vogue magazine, enacts an analysis of normative gender, class and racial identities.

Rather than exhibiting the archive or attempting to represent the House|Ballroom scene itself, Vogue’ology investigates the processes and goals of archiving as they pertain to the specific characteristics and conditions of the House|Ballroom scene. Its structure and aesthetic elements amplify the resonances between the vocabularies of both archive and Balls, particularly their common interest in protocol, category, disassembly, and recombination.

Curators
Arbert Santana Evisu, member, House of Evisu
Carin Kuoni, Vera List Center for Art and Politics
Robert Sember, member, Ultra-red sound art collective, Vera List Center 2009-2010 Fellow

* * *

The exhibition is accompanied by a series of free public programs:

EXHIBITION OPENING CELEBRATION
Thursday, November 18, 5:00 – 6:30 p.m

PANEL DISCUSSION
Organized Listening: Sound Art, Collectivity and Politics
Thursday, November 18, 6:30 – 8:30 p.m.
The New School, Theresa Lang Community and Student Center
55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor

Participants include Edgar Riviera Colon and Rev. Jamaul Roots from Ballroom Ministries; human rights advocate and musician Karen Hakobian; artist Paige Sarlin of 16 Beaver; musician, writer and curator Alex Waterman of Plus Minus Ensemble and Either/Or Ensemble.

Facilitators: Dont Rhine and Robert Sember

LISTENING SESSIONS
Monday, November 29, 2010, 6:00 – 8:30 p.m.

Gallery visitors are encouraged to interact with the exhibition and share their responses in writing, at the gallery or via email (info@ultra-red.org). In addition, the artists are facilitating a public listening session in the gallery, to consider collectively the intersection of object and analysis, and to evaluate and debate the political consequences and possibilities of recording history.

PANEL DISCUSSION
Living the Fight: AIDS Activism
Tuesday, November 30, 7:00 – 9:00 p.m.
The New School, Michael Klein Room
66 West 12th Street, 5th floor

With Lolisa Gibson, Johnny Guaylupo, Charles Long, and Pedro Julio Serrano

Sponsored by Health Education, Global Studies, Department of Natural Sciences and Math/ Interdisciplinary Science at Lang, Campus Queer Collective, Parsons Diversity Initiative, Lang’s Ethnicity and Race Program, Office of Intercultural Support, VDay@New School, The New You, Association for International Development, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics

FILM SCREENING
Sex In An Epidemic
Wednesday, December 1, 2010, 6:30 – 8:30 p.m.
The New School, Theresa Lang Community and Student Center
55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor

Screening of Jean Carlomusto’s award-winning film Sex In An Epidemic (2010), followed by a conversation with Arbert Santana Evisu, Kevin Trimell Jones, Black LGBT Archivists Society of Philadelphia, and Robert Sember

Posted on June 8, 2010

In January 2009, artist and Parsons faculty member Melanie Crean launched The Shape of Change, an ongoing project consisting of two interconnected works that examine the ephemeral nature of change, independence and the formation of identity. The first work tracks change on an international scale on the Web site www.shapeofchange.com, an online archive of American and Iraqi desires for political change.

Through the presentation and visualization of opinions of artists, writers and the general public, this part of The Shape of Change seeks to countermand the empty political brand that the term ‘change’ was reduced to in recent American and Iraqi elections. The second project looks at change on a personal scale, documenting an infant’s early development as it learns to walk and speak, thus establishing itself as an independent social subject. In this conversation, scholars and practitioners from the fields of art, science and religion discuss how their concepts of change both correspond and differ.

Participants:

AA Bronson is an artist and healer living and working in New York City. In the sixties, he left university with a group of friends to found a free school, a commune, and an underground newspaper. This led him into an adventure with gestalt therapy, radical education, and independent publishing. In 1969 he formed the artists’ group General Idea with Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal; for the next 25 years they lived and worked together to produce the living artwork of their being together, in addition to undertaking over 100 solo exhibitions, and countless temporary public art projects. In 1974 they founded Art Metropole, Toronto, a distribution center and archive for artists’ books, audio, and video. From 1987 through 1994, they focused their work on the subject of AIDS. He is currently the President of Printed Matter, Inc., in New York City, and Artistic Director of the Institute for Art, Religion, and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary.

Melanie Crean is Assistant Professor of Media Design at Parsons The New School for Design, teaching classes in experimental time-based work, mobile media and gaming. As the former Director of Production at Eyebeam, she founded a studio that worked with socially based moving image, sound, public art and open source software. She designed special effects at MTV Digital Television Lab and produced documentaries in Nepal, on subjects that include women trafficking and the spread of HIV along trucking routes. Crean has received commissions from Art in General, Bronx Arts Council, Harvestworks, NYFA, NYSCA, Rhizome and Creative Time.

Sensei Jules Shuzen Harris is a Soto priest who has been practicing Buddhism for more than twenty-five years. He holds an Ed.D. with a concentration in applied human development from Teachers College of Columbia University and a MSW from New York University. As a psychotherapist, Shuzen has found creative ways to synthesize Western psychology and Zen to achieve dramatic results with his patients. He also focuses on the relationship between Zen and the martial arts. He is a fourth-degree Dan Black Belt in Iaido (the art of drawing and cutting with a samurai sword) and a Black Belt in Kendo (Japanese fencing). He also founded two schools of Japanese swordsmanship in Albany, NY and Salt Lake City, UT.

Alaa Majeed is a reporter, producer, and translator. She received her BA from Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. Majeed has co-produced segments for Al-Jazeera International and PBS. She has also reported for United Press International, Pacifica Radio, the BBC, National Public Radio, “60 Minutes,”and The Sunday Times (London). Her experience as a translator includes work with news services, conducting/translating classes for Iraqi civil servants, and a position with Nature Iraq, a non-governmental, environmental organization. She is currently also working as a researcher, monitoring news wires, documenting press freedom violations, and conducting investigative interviews with journalists overseas for the Committee to Protect Journalists, which is based in New York. In 2007, she received the International Courage in Journalism award from the International Women’s Media Foundation.

Presented as part of Streaming Culture / Art & Politics, a new interdivisional initiative organized by Victoria Vesna, Visiting Professor, UCLA, and Director of Research, School of Art, Media and Technology, Parsons The New School of Design, in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School.

If you are not able to join us in person, log on to: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/parsons-the-new-school-for-design

Posted on April 19, 2010

How to design democracy? This program features political scientists Steven J. Brams (New York University) and Christian List (London School of Economics) in a conversation with designer and artist Colleen Macklin (Parsons The New School for Design) on the design of democratic decision-making procedures that are broadly associated with Rational Choice Theory and reflective of game theory.

Titled after List’s research – who coined the term – “The Democratic Trilemma” probes the quandary stemming from three basic requirements for the successful design of a democratic, collective decision-making process: value pluralism, majoritarianism, and rationality. A trilemma ensues, as these three requirements are mutually inconsistent although, separately, any pair is perfectly consistent. Depending on which one we reject or violate, we end up with a very different conception of democracy.

List is joined in this cross-disciplinary conversation by Steven J. Brams and Colleen Macklin. Brams presents his research on the relevance of Rational Choice Theory (RCT) to real-life situations, drawing in particular from his recent book, Mathematics and Democracy: Designing Better Voting and Fair-Division Procedures. Voters today often desert a preferred candidate for a more viable second choice in order to avoid wasting their vote. A leading authority in the use of mathematics to design decision-making processes, Brams discusses how social-choice and game theory could enable voters and participants to better express themselves, thereby making political and social institutions more democratic. Macklin presents Budgetball, a newly developed sport designed to increase awareness of the national debt and reward strategic thinking and collaborative problem-solving around the issues of fiscal responsibility.

Ultimately, the focus of the program is on how theory can contribute to society and, in particular, how abstract results such as those identified as the “Democratic Trilemma” may guide us to view our discourses about democratic decision-making in a new light. The program echoes the VLC’s previous cycle on democracy as an eternally deferred state. * Presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2009/2010 program theme Speculating on Change, and initiated and organized by Begum Yasar, a graduate student at Columbia University and Vera List Center Program Intern.

Posted on April 5, 2010

A three-day event explores the radical oeuvre of British experimental composer Cornelius Cardew and the activities of the Scratch Orchestra (co-founded by him in 1969), and illuminates their significance today as artistic, pedagogical and political tools. Workshops, sound installations, a film screening, and an exhibition bring together historians, musicians, artists, and New School faculty and students, and are presented at The New School. Among the participants are contemporary music ensemble Either/Or, artists Luke Fowler and Robert Sember, and New School faculty members Danielle Goldman, Sarah Montague, Simonetta Moro, Evan Rapport and Ivan Raykoff and their students. Pianist and Cardew biographer John Tilbury is contributing a (pre-recorded) Call-to-Action.

Inspired by The Cardew Object at the ICA London (November 2009), these events are organized by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics as part of its 2009-2010 program theme “Speculating on Change.” Vera List Center Fellow Robert Sember, a member of the sound-art collective Ultra-red and the School of Echoes, leads the colloquium and workshops in collaboration with faculty members from Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts and The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music. DAY THREE PROGRAM Exhibition The Skybridge Art & Sound Space Opening Reception: Thursday, April 15, 2010 – 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. Exhibition Dates: Thursday, April 15 to Monday, May 10, 2010 Skybridge Gallery, Eugene Lang College, 65 West 11th Street, 3rd floor (enter at 66 West 12th Street) Admission: Free New School faculty Sarah Montague and Simonetta Moro and their students in the Skybridge Curatorial Project present an exhibition celebrating Cardew’s work and the events above. The Skybridge Art & Sound Space hosts multi-media exhibitions and curriculum-based projects in the arts, showcasing student projects that make the space a vibrant and exciting laboratory for visual, aural, and critical thinking. __________________________________________________________________ Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981) was a seminal figure of the British avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s. A student of Karl-Heinz Stockhausen and a follower of John Cage, he formed the Scratch Orchestra with Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton in 1969 in London. Based on their experiments, Cardew published the book Scratch Music, now a classic resource for experimental musicians. In the late 1970s, Cardew became increasingly involved in a Marxist-Leninist discourse, eventually rejecting his own compositional work as elitist. Cardew died in an unresolved hit-and-run accident at the age of forty-five, estranged from most of his colleagues and challenged for his political convictions.

The Scratch Orchestra was a collaborative group of musically trained and untrained participants engaged in radical modes of improvisatory and cross-disciplinary art-making. In an effort to liberate performers from the constraints of traditional music notation as well, Cardew developed elaborate forms of graphic notation – all part of an explicit agenda of political consciousness and social action. These larger “ways of organizing,” including interpretations of two sections from Cardew’s The Great Learning (1968-71), are presented during The New School events in a structured environment that invites creative engagement and collaboration. __________________________________________________________________

Posted on March 31, 2010

A three-day event explores the radical oeuvre of British experimental composer Cornelius Cardew and the activities of the Scratch Orchestra (co-founded by him in 1969), and illuminates their significance today as artistic, pedagogical and political tools. Workshops, sound installations, a film screening, and an exhibition bring together historians, musicians, artists, and New School faculty and students, and are presented at The New School. Among the participants are contemporary music ensemble Either/Or, artists Luke Fowler and Robert Sember, and New School faculty members Danielle Goldman, Sarah Montague, Simonetta Moro, Evan Rapport and Ivan Raykoff and their students. Pianist and Cardew biographer John Tilbury is contributing a (pre-recorded) Call-to-Action.

Inspired by The Cardew Object at the ICA London (November 2009), these events are organized by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics as part of its 2009-2010 program theme “Speculating on Change.” Vera List Center Fellow Robert Sember, a member of the sound-art collective Ultra-red and the School of Echoes, leads the colloquium and workshops in collaboration with faculty members from Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts and The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music.

DAY TWO PROGRAM

Workshop
How Can We Organize Collective Listening?
Saturday, April 10, 2010 – 12:00 to 6:00 p.m.
The New School, Theresa Lang Community and Student Center
55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor
Admission: Free, advance reservations recommended at vlc@newschool.edu

New School faculty members Evan Rapport and Ivan Raykoff host a public workshop developed in collaboration with Lang College classes New Ears for New Music (Raykoff), Punk & Noise (Rapport), Politics of Improvisation (Danielle Goldman), Image/Text (Simonetta Moro), and The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music class Cross-Cultural Improvisation (Rapport). Workshop participants are asked to collect sounds in response to a specific question relating to local and current social or political concerns, then explore procedures for collective listening and organized action following some of Cardew’s models. Public participation encouraged – sound tools provided. __________________________________________________________________

Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981) was a seminal figure of the British avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s. A student of Karl-Heinz Stockhausen and a follower of John Cage, he formed the Scratch Orchestra with Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton in 1969 in London. Based on their experiments, Cardew published the book Scratch Music, now a classic resource for experimental musicians. In the late 1970s, Cardew became increasingly involved in a Marxist-Leninist discourse, eventually rejecting his own compositional work as elitist. Cardew died in an unresolved hit-and-run accident at the age of forty-five, estranged from most of his colleagues and challenged for his political convictions.

The Scratch Orchestra was a collaborative group of musically trained and untrained participants engaged in radical modes of improvisatory and cross-disciplinary art-making. In an effort to liberate performers from the constraints of traditional music notation as well, Cardew developed elaborate forms of graphic notation – all part of an explicit agenda of political consciousness and social action. These larger “ways of organizing,” including interpretations of two sections from Cardew’s The Great Learning (1968-71), are presented during The New School events in a structured environment that invites creative engagement and collaboration. __________________________________________________________________

Posted on March 31, 2010

A three-day event explores the radical oeuvre of British experimental composer Cornelius Cardew and the activities of the Scratch Orchestra (co-founded by him in 1969), and illuminates their significance today as artistic, pedagogical and political tools. Workshops, sound installations, a film screening, and an exhibition bring together historians, musicians, artists, and New School faculty and students, and are presented at The New School. Among the participants are contemporary music ensemble Either/Or, artists Luke Fowler and Robert Sember, and New School faculty members Danielle Goldman, Sarah Montague, Simonetta Moro, Evan Rapport and Ivan Raykoff and their students. Pianist and Cardew biographer John Tilbury is contributing a (pre-recorded) Call-to-Action.

Inspired by The Cardew Object at the ICA London (November 2009), these events are organized by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics as part of its 2009-2010 program theme “Speculating on Change.” Vera List Center Fellow Robert Sember, a member of the sound-art collective Ultra-red and the School of Echoes, leads the colloquium and workshops in collaboration with faculty members from Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts and The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music.

DAY ONE PROGRAM

Colloquium with Sound Installation and Film Screening

An Introduction to Cardew Friday, April 9, 2010 65 West 11th Street (enter at 66 West 12th Street) Admission: $8, free for all students as well as New School faculty, staff and alumni with valid ID Sound samples installation by New School students – 6:00 to 6:30 p.m. Introduction by Robert Sember – 6:30 to 7:00 p.m. Film screening, followed by discussion – 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. Cornelius Cardew’s music and ideas – and their significance today as an artistic as well as pedagogical and political project – are introduced by Vera List Center Fellow Robert Sember. A screening follows of Glasgow-based artist Luke Fowler’s Pilgrimage from Scattered Points (2006, 45”), a film that explores the internal contradictions and struggles of Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra through first person interviews, recent and archival footage and original recordings.

“Filmmaker Luke Fowler depicts the Scratch Orchestra’s composer Cornelius Cardew in action, resonating in a brilliant, impressionistic visual landscape. Sound and image unite to form a hypnotic and freely associating current, which reaches far into the subjective sphere of experimental film.” (hotdocs.com)

Robert Sember and Luke Fowler are then joined by art historian Claire MacDonald, New School faculty members Ivan Raykoff and Evan Rapport in a closing discussion.

Sound samples culled from previous workshops are installed in the lecture hall and ring in the evening’s events; pianist John Tilbury (via recording), Cardew’s biographer and one of his closest associates, provides a call-to-action. __________________________________________________________________

Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981) was a seminal figure of the British avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s. A student of Karl-Heinz Stockhausen and a follower of John Cage, he formed the Scratch Orchestra with Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton in 1969 in London. Based on their experiments, Cardew published the book Scratch Music, now a classic resource for experimental musicians. In the late 1970s, Cardew became increasingly involved in a Marxist-Leninist discourse, eventually rejecting his own compositional work as elitist. Cardew died in an unresolved hit-and-run accident at the age of forty-five, estranged from most of his colleagues and challenged for his political convictions.

The Scratch Orchestra was a collaborative group of musically trained and untrained participants engaged in radical modes of improvisatory and cross-disciplinary art-making. In an effort to liberate performers from the constraints of traditional music notation as well, Cardew developed elaborate forms of graphic notation – all part of an explicit agenda of political consciousness and social action. These larger “ways of organizing,” including interpretations of two sections from Cardew’s The Great Learning (1968-71), are presented during The New School events in a structured environment that invites creative engagement and collaboration. __________________________________________________________________

Posted on December 21, 2009

Held in conjunction with The Bronx Museum of the Arts’ exhibitions “Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1956-1968″ and “After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy,” the Vera List Center and the Bronx Museum present a panel discussion with photographer Julian Cox, curator of African American culture and of the exhibition “Road to Freedom”; Doris Derby, a Bronx-born, Atlanta-based photographer of the movement whose work is included in this exhibition; photographer Eric Etheridge; artist LeRoy Henderson; curator and gallery owner Steven Kasher, and artist Nadine Robinson. Moderated by Deborah Willis, Chair and Professor of the Photography and Imaging Department at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

During the span of twelve years, a series of events, later hailed as the Civil Rights Movement, forever changed the social and political course of America. From March 28 to July 11, 2010, The Bronx Museum of the Arts will present two sweeping exhibitions that chronicle both these pivotal moments in the nation’s history and their legacy surveyed through the works of young African-American artists. The first, “Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1956-1968,” features 150 vintage photographs, images that not only exposed rampant acts of discrimination in America’s past, but also revealed shinning glimpses of equality and unity amongst its citizens. The second, smaller exhibition, “After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy,” includes works by seven African-American emerging artists and collectives – all born in or after 1968 – who have created new work examining the heritage of the Civil Rights Movement and its affect on the lives of this new generation. Both exhibitions were organized by The High Museum of Art in Atlanta.

Posted on December 17, 2009

“We still do not know what a body can do.” (Spinoza/Deleuze)

The early Greek philosopher Heraclitus famously claimed, “You can never step in the same river twice.” Comically, one of the rebuttals to this observation was, “You can never step in the same river once.” The logics of activism invariably relate to ideas of how change happens – how we step in this seemingly paradoxical river. This discussion is an attempt to test and experiment with the linkages between activist practices, ideas of change, and theories of time.

Arguing that theories of activism need to frame activism as essentially a theory of time, the presenters propose that the time of change not be defined chronologically but qualitatively. Rather than sequential time, they propose measureless time. But how can we think and experimentally work with qualitative time today? How do we take into account the ruptures, swerves, emergences, and folds of becoming that sweep us far beyond identity, being, and the logics of critique? What are the new possibilities and techniques of activism and activist art that develop out of these logics of the event? This is an evening to debate and develop new models of time, and in so doing to rethink and propose new ideas of artistic practice.

A presentation by Iain Kerr, artist, theorist and founding member of the research collective spurse, is followed by discussion with respondents Brian McGrath, architect, writer and Associate Professor of Urban Design at Parsons The New School for Design; Petia Morozov, architect, writer, educator and urban explorer; and Nato Thompson, writer and Chief Curator of Creative Time.

Presented as part of “Streaming Culture / Art & Politics,” a new interdivisional initiative organized by Victoria Vesna, Visiting Professor (UCLA) and Director of Research, School of Art, Media & Technology, Parsons The New School of Design, in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, on occasion of its 2009/2010 program cycle on “Speculating on Change.”

If you are not able to join us in person, log on to Parsons The New School for Design Ustream channel.

Posted on November 11, 2009

Presented in conjunction with an exhibition of recent video art from the Middle East on view at the Art in General gallery, this discussion considers the contributions of video art to political developments in the region. Speakers include Galit Eilat, writer, curator and founding director of the Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon and Reem Fadda, a Ramallah-based curator, art historian and former director of the Palestinian Association for Contemporary Art (PACA).

Eilat and Fadda consider the role of art as a tool for civil disobedience and passive resistance that affects its surroundings, wielded by individuals during times of social or political distress. Within this context they discuss Liminal Spaces, a long-term project examining the possibility of joint action in light of the ever-growing existential hardship of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. Video works that were produced during this project will be on view at Art in General as part of the Mobile Archive, a cross-national library of video art.

The Israeli Center for Digital Art was founded to promote, distribute, and exhibit video, media-, and Internet-based art in Israel. An exhibition space with a library open to the public, the video archive contains hundreds of works, including pieces by Israeli artists who have exhibited at the center and others who have contributed to the archive over time.

For the last two years, the Mobile Archive has traveled to art institutions in Europe and the Middle East, acquiring new works in each location. The exhibition at Art in General will be the Mobile Archive’s first stop in the United States.

Presented in collaboration with Art in General and the Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon.

Posted on September 20, 2009