Our world is continually shaped and reshaped by patterns of mobility. In the United States, motorization and single-use zoning are the principal components of a system that depends upon long distance travel and cheap energy. In the developing world, the wasteful patterns of the West are being repeated in places like China and India where increased automobile and fuel use are quickly becoming the norm. In all parts of the world, city governments struggle to keep pace with the energy and mobility needs of their expanding populations. Tourism, migration, military conflict, and environmental disasters all keep human beings on the move. Many choose their destinations, while others are forced towards them. Our 21st century world may ride the precarious line between the temporary and the permanent, and the ecosystems plundered by our unquenchable energy needs might have the final word. Art, and other forms of cultural reflection, can help to make accessible the structures and! systems that propel us. It falls to all of us as global citizens to redirect our governing institutions and cultural perceptions ? or we may find ourselves facing the end of the road.

The International Guerrilla Video Festival (IGVFest) is a mobile festival integrating video art with the urban and social environment. The festival removes the technologically complex medium of video out of the institutional situation re-positioning it as open and reflexive in the public domain. The artworks have site-specific thematic relations to the space where they are shown, engaging and reflecting upon the unique architectural, historical, and interpersonal context of each area the festival travels to.

One of the aims of the festival is to create a continuous dialogue from the videos into the community, focusing on lapses in the current framework such as an absence of communication or invisible components of the area. Open to local and international artists, the festival widens the panorama of the discourse to include the perspective of communities elsewhere that have parallel circumstances.

A self-contained, transportable GPU (Guerrilla Projector Unit) facilitates the incursions into the public realm. Transforming public space into a fertile ground for experimentation toward new possibilities in the relationship between art and society.

Hop into a white limousine with eight strangers to converse about anything in art for one hour. Hosts, who are critics and curators, will guide conversations and offer refreshments.

Featuring: Laurel Beckman; Chris Barr; Julia Bradshaw, James Morgan, and Bennett Goble; Elisheva Biernoff; Cesar Cornejo; Holly Crawford; Sharon Daniel; Bryan and Vita Hewitt with Chuck, Inc.; Heike Liss and Ellen Lake; Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry; Neighborhood Sign Club with Alison Pebworth, Leigh Ann Martin, and Megan Saperstein; Nancy Nisbet; Jennifer Parker with Matthew McGuinness; Sasha Petrenko; Johanna Poethig with VPA Painting and Mural Class, CSU Monterey Bay; Alyssa C. Salomon; Randy Sarafan; and Sherri Lynn Wood.

Subversive Complicity brings together a group of artists whose work inhabits the interstices of contemporary life — physical, temporal, and conceptual gaps within existing structures — in order to subvert everyday systems and raise social awareness in subtle, humorous, and radical ways. What happens when artists working within these spaces adapt and co-opt the strategies, languages, mannerisms, and visualizations from divergent social personas and cultural sources to create alternative modes of action and expression?

The resulting range of projects presented in this exhibition suggests the myriad of possibilities for public and private transformation to emerge when artists assume such diverse roles as agent provocateur, broadcaster, political activist, conversationalist, oral historian, engineer, broker, trader, benefactor, gamer, and even evangelist. Through gallery documentation of past actions and a series of ongoing and special events these artists invite audiences! into a set of conversations, resistances, and exchanges at once real and imagined, geographic and social, local and global.

Come join us in this exploration of how art can disrupt, re-shape, and otherwise invigorate our daily existence through interventions enacted on the streets of San Francisco, across the landscape of the Bay Area, and within other cities and virtual realities far beyond.

This exhibition was developed in association with the Intervene! Interrupt! Rethinking Art as Social Practice Festival hosted by the University of California, Santa Cruz. Critical Conversations in a Limo was organized by Heather M. Mikolaj (Curator) and Clare Haggarty (Assistant Curator), in collaboration with University of California, Santa Cruz faculty Dee Hibbert-Jones and E.G. Crichton.

Presentations on the theory & practice of surveillance and contemporary protest art, by graduate students in the ITP program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. The presenters’ talks will be grouped into four panels, to be moderated by their Professor, Marisa Olson (Curator at Large, Rhizome), on topics ranging from voyeurism and play to intervention and networks of control. These panels will consist of both artist talks and critical essays, and audience members will be invited to give feedback on a few works in progress.

Program:

11:45 Open Seating
12:00 Welcome & Introduction, Marisa Olson

12:05-1:15 Voyeurism vs. Exhibitionism: Online and In the Streets
Panelists: Allistar Peters and Meng Li, Ana Maria Gutierrez, Heather Rasley

1:15-2:00 Watchful Intervening: From Scientologists to Spy Shops
Panelists: Amanda Bernsohn and Kacie Kinzer, Syed Salahuddin

2-3:30 Playtime: Games, Toys, and Entertainment
Panelists: Oscar Torres, Scott Hoffer, Shlomit Lehavi and Leah Gilliam

3:30-5 Looking at Control: From Candidate Self-Surveillance to Wireless Subversion
Panelists: Michael Clemow and Tom Jenkins, Alberto Tafoya, Emery Martin

The Change You Want To See is the gallery and convergence stage run by the activist arts collective Not An Alternative.

Introduction: SVEN … is a project developed by Amy Alexander, Wojciech Kosma, and Vincent Rabaud with Jesse Gilbert, Nikhil Rasiwasia, and Marilia Maschion. The following text focuses on SVEN’s approach to and issues surrounding computer vision. Cinematography, and its relationship to both software and surveillance video, is also important to SVEN, but it’s a topic for a different text. (Art is of course of particular importance to SVEN—but that should go without saying.)

SVEN is a piece of tactical software art. Tactical software art comes out of traditions of tactical media and software art. It’s a logical mix: tactical media is a response to the way mainstream media influences culture; software art is a response to the ways mainstream software influences culture. Tactical media often involves a combination of digital actions and meatspace—or street—actions. In SVEN, these are one and the same—digital actions that take place on the street (just off the curb in this case)…” Continue reading About… Software, Surveillance, Scariness, Subjectivity (and SVEN) by Amy Alexander [PDF] .

The Travel Office is also planning the second phase of our consultation, which is being planned as an exhibition and series of discussions at the University of North Florida sometime between Fall 2009 and Spring 2010. For more information about the Travel Office’s Not-In-Residence consultancy at the Preserve, go here.

The Center is pleased to host Fritz Haeg and his project Animal Estates. While at MIT, Haeg will give a talk on his work and, with the help of MIT students and artists, build one installment of Animal Estates, a new series of dwellings thoughtfully designed to welcome an animal back into the city. These environments are made for displaced wildlife or for animals that have been domesticated. The Center will host one of eight estates—the first was built in New York as part of the Whitney Biennial while others will appear at Arthouse, Austin, TX; the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, MD; The Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Cooley Gallery, Portland OR; Alaska Design Forum, Fairbanks, AK; and Casco Projects, Utrecht, The Netherlands.

Haeg writes: “As animal habitats dwindle daily, Animal Estates proposes the reintroduction of animals back into our cities, strip malls, garages, office parks, freeways, front yards, parking lots and neighborhoods… As the human domination of the planet continues, animals are alternately viewed as exotic specimens to be treated as spectacle, cartoon characters that are anthropomorphized, friendly companions to be coddled, objectified resources to be exploited, inconveniences to be tolerated, pests to be eradicated or anonymous unseen creatures to which we are indifferent. Animal Estates intends to provide a provocative 21st century model for the human-animal relationship that is more intimate, visible and thoughtful.”

Fritz Haeg is an architect and artist based in Los Angeles whose work combines strategies from architecture, art, ecology, and education. Known for his geodesic dome and the lively Sundown Salons that attract emerging artists, musicians, and performers, Haeg’s projects challenge conventional ideas about where art should go and what art can do.

Such thoughtful cues in the physical fabric of the exhibition mean it doesn’t take long to cotton on to the data cloud of this year’s festival: ‘Conspire’. This could at first be taken as a prim allusion to the still-unwieldy legacy of Stasi spookery in German social and political life, as well as contemporary control creep in our western security wings…” Continue reading Fear of Fear Itself by Marina Vishmidt, Mute Magazine.

Naturally coupling these running files with a nice domain can easily do the job (actually the result is a sarcastic http://financialtimes.isafake.org for example). The duplication of digital information on one hand has already celebrated the death of the “original”, and on the other hand it pushes on the impossibility of establishing quickly the information sources reliability. Reappropriating mainstream communication spaces and manipulating it extensively means not only to play with its corporate aesthetics, but also to make their established popular identity more fragile. In the daily media hype smorgasbord, the “perception” is what rules on the web economy of attention, so a fake proliferation, that could be triggered by projects like this, can seriously start to question the media veneration by the masses. In 1976 the Italian visionary political zine A/traverso published an inspiring article entitled “false information produce real events”. Should we assume then that a different reality is just ready to strike back? - Fake is a fake, false information produce real events, Neural.

Lecture 1: Tactical Media: Past, Present, and Future by Joanne Richardson, March 21, 7 pm :: Lecture 2: Social Media, Shared Culture, and the Hacker Movement in Italy by Francesca Bria, March 23, 7 pm :: Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF), 10 Hussein Hassab Street, Flat 6, Azarita, Alexandria, Egypt.

Tactical media is a concept and set of practices that emerged around the Next Five Minutes festivals in Amsterdam from 1993 to 2003. What is common to these practices is the artistic use of media technologies to subvert power. As part of the Cleotronica 2008 festival Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF) will set up a transient club for ‘Tactical Media’ inside its space. The club seeks to collectively explore ‘Tactical Media’ practices in the different contexts of Europe and Egypt, and conduct brainstorming sessions that investigate the possibility of new intersections between art, media, activism, and theory. Artists, activists, and collectives are invited to be members of the club and participate in its discussion and debate group meetings that will be moderated by Joanne Richardson (Romania) and Francesca Bria (Italy).

To become a member and participate in the club’s sessions please send us a brief paragraph about yourself and your interests or your collective in English or Arabic to acafspace [at] gmail.com and office [at] acafspace.org , please include your complete contact info and write “club” in the subject box. The meetings will be carried out on the 20, 21, and 22 of March. In addition to the club meetings Joanne Richardson will be delivering a public lecture on the past, present and future of Tactical Media at ACAF on Friday 21 March, while Francesca Bria will talk about social media, shared culture and the hacker movement in Italy on Sunday 23 March, both lectures will feature live Arabic translation and start at 7 pm.

Joanne Richardson was born in Bucharest, grew up in New York, currently living between Cluj, Romania and Berlin. Founder of D Media in Romania, an NGO for the production and dissemination of art and digital culture. Editor of Subsol webzine, and author of essays on social movements, postcommunism, immaterial labor, copyleft, tactical media, the history of the avant-gardes, and experimental film & video in Eastern Europe. Recent videos on nationalism, delocalization, migration, activism, precarity and borders.

Francesca Bria is a Film Maker, journalist and Independent Network Activist. Born and currently living in Rome . She teaches digital media and video journalism in Rome and she is active as a free lance video journalist. She is counsultant and expert on access to knowledge policy for the Region of Lazio and the European Commission. She has been coordinating an international cooperation project between Italy and Brazil on Digital Culture and she’s currently coordinating a cooperation project on free software in Venezuela. She is the author of different video documentaries and short experimental films on digital media technology, free knowledge, politics, precarity, migration and social justice. She’s active in different networking and grassroot projects for the promotion of shared culture and free technology.

The Cleotronica 08 program receives generous support from the Kingdom of the Netherlands Embassy in Cairo and the Goethe Institute Egypt // Extra Special thanks to Mohamed A. Fahmy AKA ganzeer.com for the Tactical Media Club identity. Tactical Media Club Alexandria is also part of 1001 Actions for Dialogue.