Ok first, the audience was actually responding and laughing, but it sounds strange because the only mic is on the stage so it’s difficult to hear. But they were there…. Also, this is taken from a stream, so the quality is as good as it’s going to get – sorry about that.
Excerpted from the Liquid Democracies discussion at Transmediale 10 in Berlin.
Start: Sun, 7.2.2010 – 17:00
End: Sun, 7.2.2010 – 19:00
Location: Auditorium, House of World Cultures, Berlin
Participants: Matteo Pasquinelli (it), Steve Lambert (us), Sascha Lobo (de)
Moderator: Tiziana Terranova (it)
To raise a question about the future always also implies to ask for the actualisation of the political and, in particular, ethical concepts for the society that we live in today. We are about to lose our operational sense for ethics, politics and culture. Rather, we see ourselves confronted with a depersonalised politics and a ‘desubjectified’ communication as the result of two factors: the disappearance of the political body with institutions capable of acting on the one hand; and increasingly faster digital social media tools that reduce the space for reaction and reflexion on the other hand. This is a moment of crisis where we must think about the role of social media.
Due to the recent events in which social networking sites have replaced traditional news coverage it seems worthy to closely examine the ‘radical’ role of tools like Twitter and Facebook as ‘revolutionary’ media. Are we dealing with a new force, a new social mechanism for the exchange of information, a new truth? Or are we only listening to a new siren song?
Monday, November 2, 7:30pm (free /by donation)
The Change You Want To See Gallery and Convergence Stage
84 Havemeyer Street, Storefront
Brooklyn, NY 11211
Live-streamed for remote participants at http://livestream.com/notanalternative
Please join us this Monday as we continue our exploration of symbols, branding and persuasion as they relate to activist and creative practice.
At the intersection of semiotics and psychoanalysis lies advertising, most often deployed in service of selling stuff. For this installment of our series, author Carrie McClaren and artist Steve Lambert will present projects that engage a sense of play as they leverage principles of the persuasion industries, to both critique consumer culture and question the power structures at work in our daily lives.
ABOUT STEVE LAMBERT
Steve Lambert is currently a Senior Fellow at Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in New York and teaches at Parsons/The New School and Hunter College. He founded the outdoor, guerilla art gallery, the Budget Gallery, in 1999 and the Anti-Advertising Agency in 2004. Steve’s projects and art works have won awards from Rhizome/The New Museum, the Creative Work Fund, Adbusters Media Foundation, the California Arts Council, the Belle Foundation, and others. He earned the Best Public Art award from the San Francisco Weekly in 2008. His work has been shown nationally in cities like Detroit, New York, and throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as internationally in Havana, Canada, Barcelona, and Rotterdam. Writings about his work have appeared in multiple publications such as the New York Times, Punk Planet, Artweek, and Newsweek magazine and featured on National Public Radio.
ABOUT CARRIE MCLAREN
Carrie McLaren is the founder of the now defunct Stay Free! magazine, and editor of Ad Nauseam: A Survivor’s Guide to American Consumer Culture, a compendium of new and previously published material on the impact of consumer culture on our lives (June, 2009). A longtime blogger, she is currently at Consumerist, a website owned by the publishers of Consumer Reports. She is the curator of Adult Education, a “useless lecture series” based in Brooklyn, New York. In a previous life, she organized the Illegal Art Exhibit, a traveling multimedia art show and website devoted to copyright reform. A former advertising columnist for the Village Voice, her writing has also appeared in Newsday, Mother Jones, Time Out NY, and SPIN magazine, among others. Carrie lives in Brooklyn with one each of husband, son and cat.
The Change You Want to See Gallery and Convergence Stage is home to Williamsburg Coworking and a project of Not An Alternative, a non-profit organization whose mission aims to integrate art, activism and theory in order to affect popular understandings of events, symbols and history. The multi-purpose venue hosts free and low-cost lectures, screenings, panel discussions, workshops and artist presentations. The space also houses a production workshop, filming studio and video editing suite for Not An Alternative’s Communication Department. During the day it is a collaborative office space (aka coworking) for like minded cultural producers.
via Everything You Want w/ Steve Lambert and Carrie McLaren | the change you want to see.
This is a video from my presentation for Prix Ars on the New York Times Special Edition. I talk about how the idea was generated, developed, and a bit about the purpose of the project as well as some of the ramifications. It’s about 30 minutes total and you can watch it below.
See other Prix Ars presentations on their site.
Stephen Duncombe and I led a think tank on creative activism called The College of Tactical Culture at Eyebeam’s Summer School this year.
Summer School is an annual workshop and public presentation series designed to encourage the creative use technologies for personal expression, activism, communication, and community involvement. The College of Tactical Culture was established within this context to create an opportunity for creative activists to get together within a focused period of time to discuss ideas and develop strategies.
The College of Tactical Culture (CTC) examined questions such as:
* How can we measure the impact of our work?
* What lessons can we learn from popular culture?
* How can we use humor to broach difficult content?
* How can we reach new audiences?
* How can we use new tools and technologies to organize and connect with audiences?
Participants in CTC were encouraged to draw from and build off of each other’s experiences to inform their practices, build new relationships, and create space for new projects and collaborations. The group met in close-door sessions twice per week over the course of three weeks (June 30 – July 16, 2009).
EYEBEAM’S COLLEGE OF TACTICAL CULTURE, CLASS OF SUMMER ‘09
• Larry Bogad, Writer/Perfomer/Activist; Associate Professor of Theatre and Dance, University of California at Davis
• Andrew Boyd, DIY, BYOB, FtGPhD*; NYC
• Rebecca Bray & Britta Riley, Eyebeam Residents, Artists, NYC
• Ava Bromberg, Spacemaker, PhD Student @ UCLA Urban Planning Department; Los Angeles
• Anne Frederick, Executive Director, Hester Street Collaborative, NYC
• Packard Jennings, Artist, Oakland CA
• Kristin Horton, Freelance Director/Clinical Assistant Professor of Theater, NYU’s Gallatin School, NYC
• Aaron Hughes, Artist and Organizing Team Leader Iraq Veterans Against the War, Chicago, IL
• Laura MacCleery, Deputy Director, Democracy Program, Brennan Center for Justice, NYC
• Ricardo Miranda Zuniga, Artist, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies, CUNY Hunter, NYC
• Eve Mosher, Artist, NYC
• Brooke Singer, Artist and Assistant Professor of New Media, Purchase College, NYC
• Ella Turenne, Artist, Activist & Educator, NYC
*Forgot to Get his PhD
Conflux 2009
Date: Friday 9.18
Start Time: 2:00pm
Location: NYU Einstein Auditorium, Rm. 105, Barney Building
The CTC is a think tank on creative activism led by Stephen Duncombe and Steve Lambert, where participants traded experiences in order to inform practices, build relationships, and create space for new projects and collaborations.
The College of Tactical Culture workshop will kick off with a panel of participants, including Brooke Singer, Britta Riley, Eve Mosher, Stephen Duncombe, and Steve Lambert, who will summarize lessons taught during the college in the first 75 minutes. The remaining 45 minutes of the workshop will be a discussion about the purpose of the CTC, the lessons taught by each panelist, and an open dialogue with Conflux participants.
The College of Tactical Culture (CTC) examined questions such as:
How can we measure the impact of our work?
What lessons can we learn from popular culture?
How can we use humor to broach difficult content?
How can we reach new audiences?
How can we use new tools and technologies to organize and connect with audiences?
Steve Lambert is a Senior Fellow at the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in New York, and teaches at Parsons/The New School and Hunter College.
Stephen Duncombe is the author of Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy and editor of Cultural Resistance Reader and is an Associate Professor at New York University.
Brooke Singer is a media artist, an Assistant Professor of New Media at Purchase College, State University of New York, and co-founder of the art, technology and activist group Preemptive Media.
Britta Riley is a social media strategist and co-founder of Submersible Design, an interaction design company. She studied Social Entrepreneurship at NYU Stern and computer programming at NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program.
Eve Mosher is an artist and interventionist whose work has been profiled in international media including the New York Times, ARTnews and Le Monde.
Possible surprise guest: Larry Bogad
The New York Times Special Edition received an Award of Distinction at the 2009 Prix Ars Electronica. I will have more images, video, and details here soon. In the meantime…
Installation of The NY Times Special Edition at the OK Centre in Linz, Austria
Video podcast of Steve Lambert’s presentation on behalf of Because We Want It. (under 4.9.09 at 3:45)
More coming.
Artist’s Talk: Steve Lambert
Thursday, Aug 27 4:00p
Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC
Steve Lambert talks about bridging the divide between museum visitors and his own practice. Lambert’s, “I Will Talk With Anyone About Anything“, 2006/2009 is currently featured in “Our Subject is You”.
Freedom: Do It Yourself
A conversation between artists Sam Gould and Steve Lambert
Monday, July 20, 2009 – 6:30 to 8:00 p.m.
The New School, Malcolm Klein Room
66 West 12th Street, 5th floor
New York City
Admission: Free
Further information: 212.229.2436 or www.newschool.edu/vlc.
A tricky word, Freedom is usually considered the cornerstone of democracy. All too often the concept is warped, mangled, and spun to benefit those using it to control and usurp power for their own political and monetary gain. Artists Steve Lambert and Sam Gould display what they acknowledge is an unhealthy obsession with other kinds freedom, concepts that will fuel the conversation among them.
Using art as a hybrid of collective action, public demonstration, comedy, and the discussion of what America, and the world, could be—if only we were willing to ask questions, and to fail—Lambert and Gould’s practice aims to dismantle and flatten common notions of power, history, and individual responsibility.
Over the last ten years, Gould and Lambert have staged collective public discussions; produced innumerable free publications; created illegal bars and restaurants; looked to the creative disruption of military recruitment; systematically shut down every McDonald’s in New York City; and distributed over one million copies of a special edition of the New York Times announcing a utopian future.
In this public discussion the pair highlight their projects (through groups such as Red76 and the Anti-Advertising Agency), which often borrow from other disciplines and genres, including history, marketing, consumerism, punk rock, indie rock, and entertainment. The two also discuss artists and groups who utilize similar models of action and process, teasing out a picture of a murky strain of aesthetic practice that, while not shunning the benefits of the traditional art world, sees the greatest benefit when it adapts its language to engage a broader audience (or, to be more accurate, everyone in the entire world).
* Presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2008-2009 annual theme “Branding Democracy”
Sam Gould
Founded in January of 2000 in Portland, Oregon, Red76 is the moniker for collaboratively based initiatives conceived, most often, by Sam Gould, and fleshed out by a group of collaborators across the United States and abroad, who have included; Khris Soden, Zefrey Throwell, Paige Saez, Colin Beattie, Jen Rhoads, Laura Baldwin, Gabriel Mindel Saloman, Dan S. Wang and many others. Often situating themselves in public space, or creating an atmosphere wherein the definition of space may have an opportunity to redefine itself, Red76 initiatives utilize overlooked histories and common shared occurrences as a means of creating a framework in which to construct their public inquiries.
Gould is a founding member of MessHall, an experimental social space on the North Side of Chicago. He is also the editor of the Journal of Radical Shimming and co-editor, along with John Vitale, of “…….” (dots and quotes), a free arts publication, that is distributed internationally and was last sponsored by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. In 2006 Gould was one of nine nominees’ for the Menil Collection’s Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement.
Along with producing many independent initiatives, Gould and Red76 have engaged in projects commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, the Drawing Center, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, SF MoMA, Printed Matter, Creative Time, the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Gallery at Reed College, 01 San Jose, and many others.
Steve Lambert was born in Los Angeles in 1976 and moved to the Bay Area four days later. His father, a former Franciscan monk, and his mother, an ex-Dominican nun, imbued the values of dedication, study, poverty, and service to others—qualities which prepared him for life as an artist.
Steve Lambert recently made international news with the New York Times “Special Edition,” a replica of the grey lady announcing the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other good news. He is the founder of the Anti-Advertising Agency, lead developer of Add-Art (a Firefox add-on that replaces online advertising with art) and has collaborated with numerous artists including the Graffiti Research Lab and the Yes Men. Steve’s projects and art works have won awards from Rhizome/The New Museum, Turbulence, the Creative Work Fund, Adbusters Media Foundation, the California Arts Council, and others. His work has been shown at various galleries, art spaces, and museums both nationally and internationally, and was recently collected by the Library of Congress. Lambert has appeared live on NPR, the BBC, and CNN, and been reported on in multiple outlets including Associated Press, the New York Times, the Guardian, Harper’s, The Believer, Good, Dwell, ARTnews, Punk Planet, and Newsweek. He is a Senior Fellow at the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in New York, and teaches at Parsons The New School for Design and Hunter College. Lambert studied sociology and film before receiving a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2000 and a MFA at UC Davis in 2006. He dropped out of high school in 1993.
I’m calling it a lecture/performance because I don’t know what exactly to call it. I’ll just say I’m taking my talks further into a direction they were already going. Come see at the Figment Festival. You will learn things and you will be entertained.
I will also be participating in a collaborative project on Saturday near the Ferry Dock. Keep an eye out.
“Everything You Want, Right Now!” How advertising distorts culture.
Sunday 2:30-3pm – come early, there are some great lectures including fellow Eyebeam Fellow Jeff Crouse at 4pm.
Figment Festival, Pershing Hall, Governor’s Island, NYC
What’s wrong with advertising? Steve Lambert makes the case with a fast moving lecture that’s as funny as it is informative. Steve’s anarchist/sociologist take on how modern, non-stop persuasive messages have distorted and altered our culture will leave you plenty to ponder on the ferry ride home. Steve Lambert recently made international news with the The New York Times “Special Edition,” a replica of the grey lady announcing the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other good news. He is the founder of the Anti-Advertising Agency, lead developer of Add-Art (a Firefox addon that replaces online advertising with art) and has collaborated with numerous artists including the Graffiti Research Lab, and the Yes Men. Lambert has appeared live on NPR, the BBC, and CNN, and been reported on in the New York Times, Harper’s, The Believer, Good, Dwell, and Newsweek. He is a Senior Fellow at the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in New York, and teaches at Parsons and Hunter College.
About Figment
FIGMENT is an annual arts event on Governors Island, with artwork in every medium, from installation to performance to music to games and many things in between. Participation is open to any artist who would like to share their work. It is a free, non-profit endeavor run by volunteers.
FIGMENT’s vision for art looks past the white-walled galleries and into the realm of participation. Art is not just something that you stand still and quietly look at – it is something you participate in. You touch it, smell it, climb it, write on it, talk to it, dance with it, play with it, learn from it… Interactive art creates a dynamic collaboration between the artist, the audience and their environment.
As a free, public, non-profit event, we aim to advance social and personal transformation through creativity. FIGMENT is uninterrupted by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. Selling or advertising goods or services is not permitted. Neither our artists nor our planners and staff are paid – everything that you see at FIGMENT is born from a simple desire to share imagination with each other and the public.
In these challenging economic times, it is important that artists devise new ways to create, share, think, and dream about what is possible. FIGMENT is an alternative to many of the shortcomings of the commercial art world— exclusive, expensive, impersonal, untouchable and often simply boring.
Famous for his role in New York’s artistic heritage and the Pop Art movement, Andy Warhol believed that everyone had it in them to be a star for fifteen minutes. Through his own art, he defined his identity and shaped the world around him. He once commented that he’d like his tombstone to say only one word: “Figment.”
