[Image: The Aesthetic Face(s) of Anonymous, owni.eu) AMT Lecture Series: Gabriella Coleman – e pluribus Anonymous: in lulz we trust :: November 10, 2011; 5:00 pm :: Parsons New School for Design, Room #1200, 12th Floor, 6 E16th Street, New York City. Continue reading

[Pro-test Lab at the Occupy Boston, Dewey Square, Boston, 2011. Photo by Nomeda Urbonas.] Disobedience Archive Continue reading

[Public Movement, 2010. Performance documentation: The Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon] Positions by Public Movement: (1) November 4, 2011; 1:00 pm :: Washington Square Park :: (2) November 6; 1:00 pm :: Union Square South, New York City.

This November, the action and research group Public Movement will present Positions, a choreographed demonstration that invites people to take a stand on any number of urgent issues. Presented in Warsaw, Holon, Bat-Yam, Eindhoven, Heidelberg, Stockholm, and now New York, the Movement invites the public to embody their preferences, aspirations, and beliefs — manifesting political and philosophical ideas as physical positions in Washington Square Park and Union Square South. This will be Public Movement’s first presentation in the United States. Continue reading

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Tweeting the Revolution: Agency, Collective Action, and the Negotiation of Risk in a Networked Age — a talk by Beth Coleman (MIT) :: October 18, 2011; 12:30 pm :: Berkman Center, Harvard University, 23 Everett Street, Second floor, Cambridge, MA + webcast live :: RSVP required.

This paper looks at the impact of social media platforms on collective action. In particular, it focuses on spheres of activism where personal risk (bodily or otherwise) is the condition of participation. For this analysis, I discuss interviews conducted with Egyptian activists around the events of Tahrir Square. Issues of copresence, witness, and visibility are central to my discussion. This talk is based on a research paper developed with my coauthor Dr. Mike Ananny. Continue reading

American Plutocracy: A marker for the occupation of Wall Street and beyond by John Craig Freeman:

In September 2011 citizens began to gather and then occupy Liberty Plaza near Wall Street in Lower Manhattan, New York City. American Plutocracy seeks to mark occupation sites across the U.S. Wall Street is everywhere. Find an occupation site near you. Learn how here.

Returning Fire: Interventions in Video Game Culture screening + panel discussion with Fred Ritchin (moderator), Roger Stahl, Wafaa Bilal, Joseph Delappe, Anne-Marie Schleiner :: October 21, 2011; (screening) 6:00 pm (panel) 8:00 pm :: Tisch School of the Arts, 721 Broadway, Room 006 :: Free but RSVP required.

Returning Fire: Interventions in Video Game Culture (Media Education Foundation, 2011, 45 min.), written and directed by Roger Stahl, examines the culture of war-themed video games through work of three pioneering artists and activists: Joseph Delappe, Anne-Marie Schleiner, and Wafaa Bilal. Continue reading

Betabeat wrote: “For anyone who wasn’t aware, there are a few hundred protesters hanging out downtown in a park plaza two blocks from Wall Street. Despite allegations of Twitter censorship, tweets are collating around the hashtags #occupywallst, #occupywallstreet, #ows and #nycga. So when Betabeat walked past an iPad hooked up to a projector showing short hashtagged messages with the occasional photo, we assumed we were looking at a Twitter client. Turns out that’s not what it is. This app is called Vibe, the “new kid on the social media block,” and it’s something different: a Twitter-esque messaging system built by Hazem Sayed, a professional developer from California who built the app as an anonymous alternative to Twitter, reports the New York Daily News…” More >> Related: TXTmob (2004) by the Institute for Applied Autonomy.

Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts by Brian Massumi, MIT Press:

Events are always passing; to experience an event is to experience the passing. But how do we perceive an experience that encompasses the just-was and the is-about-to-be as much as what is actually present? In Semblance and Event, Brian Massumi, drawing on the work of William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, and others, develops the concept of “semblance” as a way to approach this question.

It is, he argues, a question of abstraction, not as the opposite of the concrete but as a dimension of it: “lived abstraction.” A semblance is a lived abstraction. Massumi uses the category of the semblance to investigate practices of art that are relational and event-oriented — variously known as interactive art, ephemeral art, performance art, art intervention — which he refers to collectively as the “occurrent arts.” Continue reading