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

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.

Joshua Simon is a curator and writer based in Tel Aviv-Jaffa. He is the co-editor of Maayan Magazine for Poetry and The New & Bad Art Magazine and editor of Maarvon – New Film Magazine, all based in Tel Aviv. Among his projects in poetry is Red: Poems of the Working Class, an anthology in Hebrew and Arabic he co-edited (May Day, 2007). Recent curatorial projects include Internazionale! (Left Bank, Israeli Communist Party Culture Club, Tel Aviv 2008), Come to Israel, It’s Hot and Wet and We Have The Humus! (Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York Times 2008), The Rear at the First Herzliya Biennial of Contemporary Art (2007), and Sharon (Tel Aviv 2004). The book The Aesthetics of Terror (Charta, 2009) which he edited, is based on a group show on censorship he co-curated in New York City.

1.
Roee Rosen’s insightful “The Law is Laughing: Fragments Following the War in Gaza” traces a variety of pathologies through their symptoms expressed in the Israeli media. The self-explanatory mechanisms of the Israeli media disavow any criminality on their part. The Israeli media presents its case from the standpoint of the victim.
In order to render the logic of the unconscious, Freud cites a joke about the impoverished man who borrows 25 florins from a well-to-do acquaintance, assuring him at some length of his distress. The very same day, his patron comes upon him in a restaurant with a plate of salmon with mayonnaise before him. He reproaches him: “What, you borrow money from me, and then you go and order salmon with mayonnaise. That’s what you used my money for?” “I don’t get it,” answered the accused, “when I’ve got no money I can’t eat salmon with mayonnaise. When I’ve got money, I mustn’t eat salmon with mayonnaise. So tell me, when can I eat salmon with mayonnaise?”

Freud’s delightful reading of this joke puts the impoverished bon vivant’s claim in an existential context: while the benefactor believes the impoverished man should be compelled not to even think of delicacies such as salmon with mayonnaise in his situation, the impoverished man knows that tomorrow he will be in the same situation, therefore he should enjoy today. In many ways, the Israeli self-explanatory mechanisms, both those of the government and those of the media, use the same logic of the accused in this joke, but in a very different way: a series of claims by Dutch, British, Norwegian, and Swedish organizations right after the attack on Gaza were answered with Israeli counteraccusations regarding these countries’ demeanor during the Second World War and during their Colonialist and Imperialist past. Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Avigdor Lieberman’s responds frequently to the accusations by saying something along the lines of: “I don’t get it. Our actions are nothing compared to what you did in the past centuries. Had we have done what we are now doing back then, it would not have even been regarded as crime at all.” In the spirit of the joke, this Israeli mechanism of justification against any criticism of its actions echoes the logic of the impoverished man: “When we didn’t have our own state we couldn’t do it. Now that we do have a state, we mustn’t do it?”

2.
Having the privilege to publish Rosen’s “The Law is Laughing” in Hebrew in Maayan Magazine was a learning experience—the text enabled a reading into the Israeli civil society as constantly oscillating between mobilization as citizenship and citizenship as mobilization. The regime of segregation has taken its toll on the privileged as well as on the oppressed. By making of the Palestinians non-citizens, Israeli civil society condemned itself to have no civilian life. One of the ways this toll manifests itself is a pathology of eccentric normativity: Only in Israel (and maybe North Korea) can one find on the front page of the most popular daily newspaper a rating of high schools based on the number of graduates volunteering to elite army units. Another example for the eccentric normativity of Israeli civil society is the “business as usual” manner with which the Israeli military’s video-on-demand TV channel was received by viewers; during the first days of the attack on Gaza the military spokesman launched a TV channel in which re-runs of aerial documentation of recent shelling on Gaza were shown, together with more “arty” videos with footage of blindfolded detained Palestinians dissolving to landscapes with swarming soldiers and of armored vehicles passing in slow motion. This same eccentric normativity enables the military to occupy a vast area right in the center of Tel Aviv-Jaffa (it owns the most desired real estate lots in the heart of the business district, spread over approximately a hundred acres), and to have its chief command facility hover over the city, making the 1.5 million residents in the surrounding area actual human shields of a military compound.

Contrary to Apartheid, the occupation is a system of denial. As a regime of segregation it differs from Apartheid in that the privileged do not admit its existence. This is a disavowal Apartheid. Eyal Weizman has claimed that today, the concept of the banality of evil, introduced by Hannah Arendt, has been updated to the paradigm of the lesser evil. Today political and ethical debates revolve around a management of evils. This would be one of the ways to explain the Israeli consensus surrounding the attack to which they subjected Gaza.

3.
In the months since the attack on Gaza in December 2008, Israeli media has ignored the city’s existence—there isn’t a word about the hunger and impoverishment of the population. In many ways it is as if the whole Gaza Strip had disappeared. This, while the war has continued by other means: as the military operation, killing approximately 1,400 people, was just phase one of the attack, phase two is the control of the reconstruction of Gaza, or more accurately, the prevention of re-building. Reconstruction is a form of destruction; the aim was to dethrone Hamas through the reconstruction. From the Israeli viewpoint, the battle now is over who will reconstruct Gaza and what elite will be consolidated through the distribution of foreign funds.

Almost ten months after the attack, the first report on the situation of the population in Gaza in Israeli media was a story about the Gaza zoo; after the zebras in the zoo were killed during the Israeli attack, the manager invited an artist to paint stripes on a number of donkeys. This sad story of deprivation and creativity was regarded as a funny anecdote by Israeli commentators, and experts on animal rights were rushed to the studios to explain how inhuman the Gaza zoo staff was.

During this whole period of silence since the attack, the front pages of Israeli papers were bleeding with headlines to stories of random violence: an ultra-orthodox pregnant woman arrested for starving her toddler son, later diagnosed in her psychiatric evaluation as suffering from Münchausen syndrome by proxy; a hate crime, directed against a gay youth center in the center of Tel Aviv, that killed two teenagers; a group of drunk teenagers beating to death a man on the beach in front of his wife and daughter; a TV celebrity, Dudu Topaz, going on a revenge spree, ordering attacks on TV executives after his show was taken off the air and rival channels rejected him—waiting for his trial in a detention facility, Topaz hanged himself in the shower using the cord of an electric kettle; a young divorcé drowning his daughter in the bathtub and cutting his wrists—while waiting for his trial he jumped to his death in the detention facility’s courtyard from a ten-foot-high wall, cracking his skull and breaking his neck.

At the same time Israeli media highlighted these gruesome stories, they were silent on the conditions in devastated Gaza. Since January 2009, after the Israeli military resumed its invasion, Gaza has continued to be enclosed from all sides and under a strict embargo of rations and quotas of food, clothes, medication, and building materials. In the face of the media’s inability to acknowledge their responsibility and unwillingness to report this collective abuse of a population of more than 1.5 million people, one cannot but define their hysteria over this series of random stories of violence in the past months as a symptom of repression and projection. These headlines are a confession: we are the starving mother, we are the drowning father, we are the ones committing hate crimes, we are the ones who are killing the innocent, we are going on a revenge spree.

4.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt suggested the Dreyfus affair to be a “foregleam” of the twentieth century, a grand rehearsal of the rivaling ideological powers of twentieth century Europe. With the help of Karl Marx’s analysis of the fall of the Second French Republic and the raise of Napoleon III in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (which was first published in the U.S. in the spring of 1852, one hundred years before Arendt’s book), one can borrow this “grand rehearsal” idea and apply the grave mishaps of the Second French Republic to twentieth- and twenty-first-century parliamentary regimes, or better, “dictatorships of the bourgeoisie.” Marx is giving an insightful report on the recent history of his time, describing how the logic of lesser evil and (almost) free general elections results in proto-Fascism. In his text, Marx shows how the Revolution, calling for universal manhood suffrage, resulted in just a few months in the election of a “grotesque mediocrity” of a president (on December 10 that same year). Louis Bonaparte was elected President of the Republic with almost 5.5 million votes—75% of the total). He would later on eliminate the Second Republic and restore a Second Empire on December 2, 1852 (What Marx refers to as his Eighteenth Brumaire). Marx would have probably agreed with Deleuze and Guattari when they say: “No, the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted Fascism.”

5.
Nowadays in parliamentary regimes governance is often synonymous with corruption, and Israeli politics is no exception. Under parliamentary regimes of the past decades we have been subjected to the rule of capital’s technocratic Fascism—a bureaucratic elite of economists and political practitioners. Yet, in Israel one notices how the traditional “junta” of military elite (Yitzhak Rabin, Commander in Chief turned Prime Minister; Ezer Weizman, Air Force Commander turned President; Ariel Sharon, Head of Southern Command turned Prime Minister; Ehud Barak, Commander in Chief turned Prime Minister; Shaul Mofaz, Commander in Chief turned Cabinet Minister and candidate for Prime Minister in the primary elections of Kadima Party—this genealogy of militarism in government established its dominance with the Israeli military victory of 1967) joined forces with the technocratic Fascists (Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni—and prominent Israeli politicians who are linked to the genealogy of neo-liberalism that swept the country since 1991, all with strong ties to key business figures who benefitted immensely from the ongoing wave of privatizations they have been implementing in the last two decades) to construct together a corporatist Fascism.

In 2006 Roee Rosen created the illustrated figure of Shit Boy and the drawing Shit Boy Showers (Suicide). In this touching and hilarious drawing, Shit Boy is showering in his own pee, and by doing so bringing about his own demise. Rosen’s Shit Boy is our Angelus Novus—it calls for an allegorical reading of the age of “Anal Capitalism” (as Kaja Silverman coined it) and is a poignant image for our political horizon. Walter Benjamin saw Paul Klee’s 1920 watercolor Angelus Novus as depicting “the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.” Rosen’s Shit Boy presents a perpetual circulation of destruction and reconstruction. This is an animation of an ungrateful privilege—being captive of yourself, being hostage of a logic of which you yourself are the cause. The “shit boy showers pathology” is self-inflicting. Jewish Israelis are held hostage by their own logic. They are trapped by their privileges.

6.
In his fragments, Rosen refers to war crime as a political qualification and to criminality as a sought-after characteristic of the Israeli leadership. It seems even more so today with the Israeli response to the investigation of international human rights and humanitarian law violations related to the attack on Gaza, which was assigned by the United Nations Human Rights Council and headed by Richard Goldstone. After the Goldstone report, Israeli Welfare Minister Isaac (Buzi) Herzog of the Labor Party suggested constructing a special internal bureau to deal with allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity by high-ranking Israeli officers and politicians. Herzog was quoted saying: “Israel is going through a harsh judicial campaign that undermines its sheer existence, and therefore it has to recruit the best jurist minds to support it in its battle.” In a bitter irony, the Welfare Minister turns the state that was supposed to protect the victims of crimes against humanity into a state that protects war criminals. By suggesting the construction of this bureau, the minister has proven that Israeli leadership forms its constituency through incrimination. We are all accomplices. Harboring war criminals, Israel has turned to be a very bad Holocaust joke.

CALL: Birth and Rebirth of a Nation, colloquium and film screening, September 26, 2009
Centered on D.W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation, this day-long event reconsidered the notorious white supremacist manifesto in the context of the Obama call for change. The speakers, among them Douglas A. Blackmon, David W. Blight, Bill Gaskins, Margo Jefferson, Michelle Materre, Paul D. Miller (a k a DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid), Miriam J. Petty, and Michele Wallace considered questions of race and representation and asked whether today’s racial imagination can be reconciled with that of nearly a century ago when Griffith’s film became the first blockbuster in American cinema.

Watch Birth and Rebirth of a Nation on YouTube: Parts 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

RESPONSE: Chris Johnson, Ways of Seeing
Chris Johnson is a musical anthropologist and Assistant Professor in Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts. Johnson has been a Fulbright Senior Scholar, in Germany for one year, and a Fellow at the Du Bois Institute at Harvard University. He is also an Apple Computer Distinguished Educator and a graduate of New York University’s American Studies Doctoral Program.

His interests include African American culture, as related to Jazz as a black art form specifically, and performance practices generally, and the role of images in the shaping of ideas in society, historically and in our time. Johnson teaches using images, film, and sound and promotes digital technology as a teaching tool.

As an alternative to seeing The Birth of a Nation at the public screening on September 26, I viewed clips of it on YouTube to refresh my memory of the content of the film.

Watching it on my laptop, I wondered how Americans could ever have accepted the white actors in blackface as African American? Their makeup does not appear to be very well done at all. This observation leads to more questions and other observations. Since “Birth” was the first blockbuster in American film, many moviegoers had not seen blacks or blackface on screen before. Also, Americans were mainly familiar with minstrelsy, where makeup at best was sort of a simulation of blackness. In The Birth of a Nation, the performers in blackface were juxtaposed with African American actors which truly jilts the mind. Is it possible, I thought, that Americans were so racist as to buy into this poor theater? What does it mean that “Birth” operated within this visual charade?

In his introduction to African-American Performance and Theater History (2001), Harry Justin Elam presents race in theatrical terms. Race, according to him, is a “device” that is only one of a set of other props that are  “co-constructed” by actors as well audience members.  Belief is both created and suspended in performance. In the same book, in a chapter entitled “Deep Skin: Reconstructing Congo Square,” Joseph Roach describes how white observers of live performances were habitually distracted by the actors’ skin color from the “cultural productions” that they observed. The authors take on the nature of observation suggests that the meaning of performance itself becomes “essentialized”—or condensed—by  the connotations of race. Art cannot be separated from social values, in fact, Roach goes so far as to propose that history and memory are rooted in performance.

If we apply this set of ideas to “Birth,” the theatrical device of the constructed character explains how audiences could have readily accepted blackface performers—alongside African Americans. Arguably, audiences knew the difference and reveled in the imitation, the racial lampoon. To the extent that certain performance is “essentialized,” the makeup serves as a prop to reinforce the actor’s role. The distraction of darkened skin is enough to propel a caricature. This thinking also explains the necessary segregation in the shooting of the film as audiences could only be comfortable with actors of the same race in intimate scenes. Thus “acting black” became a trope.

In his essay “Narrating Black Music’s Past,” (Radical History Review, 84, Fall 2002) Ronald Radano describes a dilemma in how black history has been presented. He writes of “the language of white supremacy in constituting ‘black music’” and asks the question “how might we engage simultaneously in black music’s deconstruction and its affirmative reconstruction?” Radano finds troubling the reality of African American culture’s mediated story. Our participation in the Vera List Center’s event “Birth and Rebirth” is of great importance as a means of articulating a new path for the construction of racial images while acknowledging the setting, ideology, and technical apparatus that created The Birth of a Nation in the first place. Such creative displays as “Rebirth of a Nation” challenge the force of the original piece by taking possession of the content, sampling it, and revaluing the film for our time. Through this process we take control of our destiny even in the face of continued bias.

“Birth” and “Rebirth” on the Web
If you search the phrase “Birth of a Nation” (in quotes) on YouTube, the top hit is for a trailer for the film with 140,825 views. The trailer was posted two years ago. It has 832 comments the first dozen of which were posted “2 days ago” and up to a week ago. One user has posted the entire film in twenty approximately nine minute segments. There are 2,890 results in total for this search on YouTube.

After viewing a few scenes from the film, I wondered about the fact that this controversial work can be viewed at any time and that we can all add our interpretation of the piece. The first page of comments vary in length and direction, ranging from one-liners such as “this movie is really disturbing” to responses that consist of full paragraphs. One response to a post ends with “attitudes like yours are not helping.” I am interested in the implications of having archival media at-the-ready in our time. I am concerned about the risks and dangers of misinterpretation of such work. Without context such items can be misread. In fact, isn’t YouTube racist for allowing such films to be posted? Well, no. But I do believe that context matters.

Searching “Rebirth of a Nation” on YouTube immediately brings up Paul D. Miller’s film with 24,143 views. There are five comments on the trailer posted one year ago with a total of 60 hits for the search phrase. Public Enemy’s 2006 rap album of the same name is second in prominence for listings on the first YouTube page for this search. On the first and on the following pages are many versions of Miller’s trailer and sections of the piece. It is interesting and ironic that “Rebirth” is so popular compared to “Birth.”

Jay David Bolter, in his essay “Digital Media and Art: Always Already Complicit?” (Criticism, Winter 2007, Vol. 49, No. 1), speaks of media archaeology when considering the  broad assemblage of film online and its study. Karen Gracy, in “Moving Image Preservation and Cultural Capital” (Library Trends,Vol. 56, No. 1. Summer 2007), makes a series of arguments regarding the need to reimagine the moving image archive. She speaks of the moving image as a form of “objectified cultural capital” that on the Internet is both user appropriated and user created. Moving images are recycled into “new works” and as part of “creative acts.” The growing meta-archive is tagged and linked within and beyond particular video hosting sites. My interest in this topic begins with the global community’s attraction to African American culture and the dissemination of that cultural capital.

Tagging and linking suggests promotion, not unlike the way Digg.com works where often tagged items become identified as particularly significant. The manipulated versions of the original clips, their posting and viewing, have established a unique archive. Whether this leads to an anarchic Internet is debatable, but it certainly is available to a large and ever growing audience. It is fascinating how, through access and distribution, a discussion of old material has found new life.

Classic Film
Not long ago I purchased the DVD version of Stormy Weather, the Hollywood produced, all-black-cast music and dance film from 1943. It has only recently become available in digital form. In the film, the African American star Lena Horne sings the title song with full orchestra; the film also features dance interludes with the Katherine Dunham dancers. There are two dance scenes that set off Lena’s position from a window where she begins the song to a down-stage position where she performs the core of the piece. I was amazed to see that in a close-up mode Lena is shedding a tear as she sings. It wasn’t until I saw the digital version in full screen modus (I use this film in class), that I noted this moving expression of emotion. In the 1947 film New Orleans Billie Holiday sings the song “The Blues are a Brewin’.” She is with trumpeter Louis Armstrong and his orchestra. Holiday plays the role of both the maid of the white woman with whom the main protagonist has fallen in love and the girlfriend of real life jazz artist Louis Armstrong. She is young and beautiful as she sings in a sequined gown, wearing her trademark gardenia in her hair. This is a high-class setting with a white and well-dressed audience. In this clip Holiday also gets her close-up: her eyes and jewelry sparkle as her face fills the screen. In both these examples, the digital versions of the films show us more than viewers have ever seen in the original versions. We are arguably seeing more than was originally intended to be seen.

It seems to me, conventions of seeing are at play in both the film experience described above and my earlier observations regarding blackface. The concept of “how we see” has undergone a profound evolution since the last century. These changes are in equal parts a metaphor for the changes the values attached to our vision  have undergone as well as the changes in the technologies that advance it. Above I suggest a set of ideas that have been a part of that change.

“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.

Refuting all notions of serious scholarship, Mitrasinovic and Kuoni tackle three big ideas–time, place and word–in little over an hour’s time. From their respective fields of architecture and urbanism (Mitrasinovic) and art and politics (Kuoni), each presents three case studies for the audience’s delight and their counterpart’s contemplation. The quick exchange will present examples of interdisciplinary practices that take into account current ideas about public space and social engagement.

Miodrag Mitrasinovic is an architect, author and Associate Professor at The School of Design Strategies, Parsons The New School for Design, where he currently serves as Dean and was previously the Chair of Urban and Transdisciplinary Design. His professional and scholarly work has been published internationally, including the Journal of Architecture and Building Science of the Architectural Institute of Japan, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, and Metropolis. He is the author of Total Landscape, Theme Parks, Public Space (Ashgate 2006), and co-editor of Travel, Space, Architecture (Ashgate 2009).

Carin Kuoni is director of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School. From 1998 to 2003, she was director of exhibitions at Independent Curators International (iCI), and from 1992 to 1997 director of The Swiss Institute. An independent curator and art critic, Kuoni has curated many exhibitions of contemporary international art including “The Puppet Show” (co-curated with Ingrid Schaffner, 2008) and “OURS: Democracy in the Age of Branding,” presented at Parsons The New School for Design in 2009.

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.

About Streaming Culture / Art & Politics
The New School comprises eight different schools with hundreds of programs in the visual and performing arts, design, the humanities, public policy, and the social sciences. This lecture series pairs faculty from the various schools and their guests, to discuss some of the pressing issues facing their fields, and to explore common grounds between aesthetic and political practices. Hailing from all New School divisions, the speakers will inspire students, colleagues and the public to connect across disciplines.

If you are not able to join us in person, log on to The New School’s Ustream channel.

Presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2009/2010 program theme “Speculating on Change.”

On view at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons The New School for Design from October 15, 2008, to February 1, 2009, the exhibition OURS: Democracy in the Age of Branding was conceived as an interdisciplinary investigation of democracy positioned as a consumer brand. Including original commissions and works by Yael Bartana, Sam Durant, Liam Gillick, Aleksandra Mir, Carlos Motta, Trevor Paglen, The Yes Men, and many others, the exhibition was guest-curated by Carin Kuoni and Marisa Olson (web component) and accompanied by a newspaper-style exhibition guide designed by Project Projects. The guide contains introductory statements by the curators; a complete list of public programs associated with the exhibition and the Vera List Center’s 2008-09 annual theme, Branding Democracy; and information on artworks and participants.

The exhibition guide is currently available free of charge from the Vera List Center. For more information, email vlc@newschool.edu.

OURS: Democracy in the Age of Branding Exhibition Guide (PDF)

Inspired by the 2005-06 cycle of public programs, Considering Forgiveness is the first in a series of forthcoming books that examine pressing issues of social, cultural and political relevance from a multitude of perspectives. The Considering Forgiveness volume is edited by Aleksandra Wagner with Carin Kuoni, with curatorial advice by Matthew Buckingham. It features textual and visual contributions commissioned from scholars, activists and artists, including Anne Aghion, Ayreen Anastas, Gregg Bordowitz, Omer Fast, Rene Gabri, Andrea Geyer, Mark Godfrey, Sharon Hayes, Susan Hiller, Julia Kristeva, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Lin + Lam, Jeffrey Olick, Brian Price, Jane Taylor, Eyal Weizman and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl.

Table of contents and introductions (PDF)

Pbk, 6.5 x 10.5 in. / 268 pgs / 90 color
ISBN: 978-0-9821745-0-0
Price: $24.00

Review in Modern Painters magazine, June 2009

Available in bookstores, at online retailers, and directly through D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers.

Drawing from critical perspectives on labor, social media, political theory, this panel discussion addresses the nature of the work of Internet users and networked workers, focusing on the relationship between invisible labor, play, exploitation, pleasure, and the production of value. What constitutes work in the digital era? What are some alternatives to the seamless corporate expropriation of value from millions of net users? Is it possible to acknowledge the moments of ruthless exploitation while not eradicating optimism, inspiration, and the many instances of individual financial and political empowerment?

As annotations to the panel, several web-based projects by artists including Burak Arikan, Jeff Crouse, Ursula Endlicher, Scott Kildall, Aaron Koblin, Stephanie Rothenberg and Victoria Scott will be installed in the same lecture hall from 5:30 p.m. onwards through the evening.

This event is presented as a prelude to “The Internet as Playground and Factory,” a conference organized by Eugene Lang faculty member Trebor Scholz that will take place at Eugene Lang College (The New School), from November 12 to 14, 2009 (www.digitallabor.org). The conference will address the massive transformations in economy, labor, and life related to digital media and confront the urgent need to interrogate what constitutes labor and value in the digital economy.

Presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2009/2010 program theme “Speculating on Change.”

Where do we stand on issues of race and representation? Can today’s racial imagination be reconciled with that of hardly a century ago, when D.W. Griffith’s notorious film, The Birth of a Nation, became the first blockbuster in American film? The Vera List Center presents a screening and colloquium around Griffith’s notorious white supremacist manifesto, reconsidered in the context of the Obama call for change.

The speakers hail from different backgrounds including history, film, music, journalism, and photography. Presenting analyses of some of the most recent scholarship on slavery and racism, particularly as manifested during the conception, production and distribution of The Birth of a Nation, they examine the film’s legacy and reverberations today.

PROGRAM

Screening I – 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.
D.W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation, 1915, silent, 180 minutes
Original sound score and live accompaniment by Michael Stein (Graduate of The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music), introduced by faculty member Sonny Kompanek

Colloquium – 2:00 to 4:00 p.m.
Introduction
Bill Gaskins
Photographer, essayist and Professor of Photography and Art History, Parsons The New School for Design

Presentations
Douglas A. Blackmon
Atlanta Bureau Chief, The Wall Street Journal, Social historian of the Civil War, and Pulitzer-prize winning author of Slavery by Another Name

David W. Blight
Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, Yale University; author of Race and Reunion and numerous other studies and books

Michelle Materre
Assistant Professor, Media Studies and Film, The New School for General Studies

Miriam J. Petty
Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies, Rutgers University-Newark

Michele Wallace
Professor of English, City University of New York

Roundtable – 4:00 to 5:00 p.m.
All participants, moderated by Margo Jefferson
Associate Professor of Writing, Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts

Screening II – 5:30 to 7:00 p.m.
DJ Spooky, Rebirth of a Nation, 2008, color, sound, 90 minutes
Followed by Q & A with filmmaker Paul D. Miller (a k a DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid)

Presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2009/2010 program theme “Speculating on Change,” with support of The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music and The Andy Warhol Foundation of the Visual Arts.