Where We Are Now Issue #1: The Aesthetics and Politics of Intimacy :: Launch Celebration and Performance/reading by Jill Magid and Eddie Vas: June 25, 2009; 6:00 - 8:00 pm :: The New School, Vera List Courtyard, 66 West 12th Street, NYC.

Where We Are Now (WWAN) is an open 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. For the inaugural issue of its online journal, WWAN examines the aesthetics and politics of intimacy through essays, projects, legal cases, and interdisciplinary research by a select group of artists and cultural practitioners.

Intimacy is often thought of in terms of as a feeling of rawness, confluence, and proximity. The space of intimacy often feels atemporal, privileging the safety of disclosure and heightened physiological, sexual, or affective response. But how does a geopolitical and micropolitical understanding of the conditions that frame intimacy questions notions of the body and self? The contributors to Issue #1 examine these questions from the perspectives of art, architecture, film, and law.

In addition to these main contributions, WWAN invites public commentary on what it puts out. It also welcomes suggestions and listings about events, lectures, workshops, and public projects that pertain to art and politics in New York City.

Contibutions by Svetlana Boym, Rene Gabri, Joseph Grima, Ed Halter, Jill Magid, Dave Rankin & Marisa Jahn, Mary Anne Staniszewski; edited by Marisa Jahn & Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy.

Where We Are Now’s journal was initiated by the steering group of WWAN: Beka Economopoulous and Jason Jones, activist, artist and co-founders of The Change You Want to See Gallery and Not An Alternative; Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, independent curator; Marisa Jahn, artist and activist; Carin Kuoni, curator, Vera List Center for Art & Politics, The New School; Lydia Matthews, dean of academic affairs, Parsons The New School for Design; Max Schumann, artist; and Nato Thompson, curator, Creative Time.