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.

In celebration of the release of the second issue of Where We Are Now’s online journal, edited by Joseph Grima, Marisa Jahn and Vera List Center director Carin Kuoni, contributors gather to discuss their explorations of this issue’s guiding theme: Speculating on Change.

Explicitly tied to difference, change as such is perhaps most clearly measured in terms of chronological time, comparing a “before” to an established “after.” Speculation on change, however, entails projection, prognosis and risk into the future, and corresponds to the fluid, divergent and simultaneous time space continuum of our contemporary existence.

The launch will feature a presentation by journal contributor Melanie Crean. “The Shape of Change,” her ongoing web project featured in the second issue, investigates how people perceive, measure and represent change over time, in both personal and political contexts, through two distinct approaches. The first component of the project is a public web archive that tracks American and Iraqi citizens’ desire for political change as the two countries attempt to extricate from one another politically and militarily. The second component documents an infant’s early development as it learns to walk and speak, and thus establish itself as an independent social subject. The two approaches serve as counterpoint to one another, creating a portrait of the ephemeral nature of change, independence and identity formation, from a macro and micro perspective.

Other journal contributors include Tom Angotti, Daniel Bozhkov, Celine Condorelli, Bryan Finoki, Beatrice Gibson, Jean Gourley, Carlos Motta, Andrew Ross, Ben Shepard, Mark Tribe and Merve Unsal.

Where We Are Now was founded in November 2007 by an ad hoc group of representatives of many arts organizations in the city, among them The Change You Want to See Gallery, Creative Time, Cooper Union, Parsons the New School of Design and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. It is a discursive and loosely organized platform with the mission to illuminate, deepen and amplify the discourse around an aesthetic practice with political content in New York City.

More information on Where We Are Now.

This event is presented as part of the Vera List Center’s program cycle, “Speculating on Change.”