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.”

The Aperture Foundation, the photography department in the School of Art, Media and Technology, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics present a provocative panel discussion Images, Surveillance, and Power. Since its invention, the camera has been used to make images surreptitiously and to satisfy the desire to see what is hidden. Today, cameras on street corners, in shops, and public buildings silently record our every move, while web-based tools such as Google Earth adapt satellite technology to ensure that there is no escape from the camera’s all-seeing eye. Moderated by Tom Vanderbilt, panelists Trevor Paglen, and Jill Magid discuss how they use contemporary photographic technologies to examine issues of voyeurism, privacy law, security control and freedom of media.

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.

In awarding New York Times art critic Holland Cotter the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, the Pulitzer Committee citation noted his “acute observation, luminous writing [and] dramatic story telling.” In his AICA/USA Distinguished Critic talk the writer known for the range and deep humanity of his concerns will address his roundabout route to art criticism, his response to the predominant modes of art criticism, the increasing limitations of that model, and how he imagines it could be changed and expanded.

This is the fourth AICA/USA Distinguished Critic Lecture at The New School, an annual event addressing current issues in the world of art criticism.  It is presented by the International Association of Art Critics (AICA: Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art) in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.

AICA was founded in the wake of World War II to protect the openness of global discourse in the arts.  There are now chapters in 64 countries currently promoting art criticism and its insights into contemporary culture.  AICA/USA, with a nationwide membership, contributes significantly to the current dialogue.

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

Friendship and hospitality frame a series of conversations this spring at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics in collaboration with the Bachelor’s Program at The New School for General Studies. Each evening features a faculty member from The New School who introduces their best friend—a prominent figure outside of The New School, and coming from a field different from the one of the host. Friendship and hospitality serve as more than framing devices: they are engaged in a variety of ways, and each pair is free to choose their approach in elaborating on the story of their friendship. The evening has a strong social element. The audience is invited to mix, eat, and drink—gestures of hospitality are extended to all present.

Participants Filmmaker Vladan Nikolic, Associate Professor, Director of Undergraduate Studies, Film and Media Studies, The New School, and Director and Producer (Surla Films), will host Eric Werthman, psychotherapist and director of Going Under (2004).

This panel discussion examines the viability of the conventionally printed and published book —monographic, serial, facsimile, high-value, low-budget, no-budget, and otherwise—as a means of artistic production in view of digital media. At a time of mass convergence, when much of the social experience is structured by virtual, electronic means, how might the physical and material residue of small-scale publications distinguish themselves from a space apart for resistance and subjectivity? Moderated by Gil Blank, the panel includes artists Roe Ethridge and Collier Schorr, alongside with James Hoff and Miriam Katzeff of Primary Information.

The Aperture Foundation, publisher of Aperture magazine, is a not-for-profit institution dedicated to the support and advancement of photography as a fine art. In collaboration with the Photography Program in the School of Art, Media and Technology at Parsons Confounding Expectations XI is generously supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the Henry Nias Foundation, the ASMP Fund, and the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation. The lecture series has been hosted by The New School since 2001.

CALL: Roberta Smith, Criticism: A Life Sentence

On November 5, 2009, Roberta Smith delivered the 2009 AICA/USA Distinguished Critic Lecture at The New School. From her vantage as senior art critic of the New York Times, she shared her thoughts on art criticism in general and, in particular, as it relates to her twenty years at the Times. She both embraced and challenged the concept of art journalism for a daily newspaper that caters to a broad general public, and elaborated on the primary importance of the art object, distinct from the cultural, political or economic context in which it might be situated.

RESPONSE: Laura Auricchio, Responsibility

Laura Auricchio is the Assistant Professor of Art History at Parsons The New School for Design. Auricchio has written extensively for both scholarly and general audiences on topics in the disparate fields of eighteenth-century French visual culture and contemporary art. She is the author of several dozen exhibition and book reviews that have appeared in publications ranging from The Art Bulletin to Art Papers to Time Out New York. Her first book, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard: Artist in the Age of Revolution, was published by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2009. She is currently working on a visually-informed biography of Lafayette, the French hero of the American Revolution.

During the heated 2008 campaign season, Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin sought to downplay Barack Obama’s experience as a grass-roots organizer by contrasting it with her own past as the chief elected official of Wasilla, Alaska. The mayor of a small town, Palin famously pronounced, “is sort of like a community organizer, except with real responsibilities.”

Listening to Roberta Smith discuss her thirty-seven years as an art critic, more than twenty of which have been spent writing for the New York Times, I found myself returning to an underlying, if unintended, question implied by Palin’s invidious comparison: does every profession come with its own set of responsibilities? If so, what are the responsibilities of an art critic? And does the act of speaking from a platform as powerful the Times add to her load?

By responsibilities, I do not mean tasks, though Smith surely wrestles daily with a to-do list of epic proportions. (As she explains to a questioner, it is only through obsessive list-making that she manages to maintain her bearings on New York’s high-speed carousel of gallery, museum, and alternative exhibitions.) Rather, I mean responsibility in the sense of “moral accountability,” in the words of Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary. To whom, and for what, is an art critic responsible?

Smith apparently believes that art critics do indeed carry a certain burden of responsibility. Mid-way through her presentation, she proposes that all of us who are “lucky enough to have a feeling for art” have an obligation “to give back.” “You can’t be proud about where art will take you,” she insists, suggesting an equivalence among the art world’s varied career choices. Whether your professional relationship to art involves making it, curating it, writing about it, or selling it, the fundamental responsibility, Smith believes, remains the same: to “put [the love of art] back into society.”

As a critic, Smith understands herself to be primarily responsible to her “readership.” But who, precisely, is the reader?

At one point, Smith suggests that her readership may be composed of frequent exhibition-goers. Noting that her reviews are “written in the moment,” she observes that they are also “used by people that way, very quickly.” To a certain extent this is true. For a cultured New Yorker or an out-of-town visitor with a bit of spare time, a Times review may offer little more than casual guidance on which shows to catch and which to skip. In this view, criticism is fleeting, with few enduring consequences.

Elsewhere in her talk, however, Smith implies that responsibilities may run deeper. Lamenting that “our visual lives in this country are more or less unexamined,” Smith seems to propose that a critic might serve as a model whose approach to works of art, designed spaces, and other visual features of our environment could be emulated by others. Everyone has a response to the visual, she avers, and everyone has a “critical ability” – the capacity to “analyze and judge.” Yet when faced with Art, which seems always to begin with a capital A, many otherwise confident viewers feel unprepared, intimated, and so fail to engage with their reactions. The world might be a very different place, Smith muses, if this vast but underutilized resource of critical potential could somehow be tapped. She is quite clear on the point that museums have a role to play in fostering visual literacy among the public. Perhaps critics also share some of this burden.

I wonder, though, whether a critic’s constituency might be much smaller than this vision would suggest. As a very part-time writer of exhibition reviews for Time Out New York, I have been known to share Smith’s hopeful attitude towards the power of criticism to open eyes. I’ve aspired to reach out to a broad public, to persuade just one person to give art a chance. But in moments of more sober reflection I have to concede that a reader who finds art uninteresting is not likely to spend any length of time with an exhibition review. Those who turn to the art section are already hooked. In that case, maybe the best I can do is to provide a bit of historical insight or comparative context that will enable readers to see the art in new ways. In other words, maybe the critic’s responsibility is to educate the educated.

Of course, exhibition-goers are not a critic’s only readers. Artists, curators, dealers and collectors also read reviews. In fact, they can be affected quite profoundly, and in lasting ways, by their contents. Is the critic to be held accountable for these effects? Should potential consequences influence a critic’s writing?

Smith responds with a resounding “no.” She is the viewer’s advocate, pure and simple. “I’m not doing it for the artist,” she states. “They can take my response as evidence of how their broadcast is being received,” or they can ignore it. On the subject of commerce, she demurs. “I don’t really know what effect I have on the market because I don’t really pay any attention to it.”

Does anyone? Should anyone? If so, who?

An audience member hints at this line of inquiry by asking how exhibitions are selected and assigned for review at the Times. Evidently, as the critics with greatest longevity, Smith and Holland Cotter wield considerable power in this regard. But Smith hastens to add that they are not omnipotent. Ultimately, the critic reports to her editor, who reports to someone else, and so on up the ladder. At some point, the paper’s bottom line – a matter of particular urgency in these difficult economic times – must come into play. After all, the Times is a commercial enterprise, albeit one that adheres to a code of journalistic ethics. The critic is an employee. She is, in the cold parlance of an increasingly web- and numbers-driven world of journalism, a “content provider.” Neither more nor less.

Still, I think the question is worth pondering. To whom, and for what, is an art critic responsible?