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.”

“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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

]]> http://www.veralistcenter.org/currentprograms/?p=1991 Thu, 28 Oct 2010 21:41:14 +0000 http://www.veralistcenter.org/?p=1991 Wednesday, December 1, 2010, 6:30-8:30 pm
Theresa Lang Community and Student Center, The New School
55 West 13th Street, second floor
Free

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…