Brooklyn based artist Kevin Cyr inspires new ways of thinking about habitats and housing, recycling and ecology, exploration and mobility with his latest project, Camper Kart. While the thought of sleeping in a pop-up camper fused with a shopping cart may not seem practical for most people, it certainly takes the idea of a mobile home to a new level.

Video by Jason Jones of Surplus Productions and Not An Alternative. For information about Camper Kart visit www.kevincyr.net. For more episodes in this series, visit: New Urbanism

Date: Friday 9.18
Start Time: 4:00pm
Location: Rm. 101, Barney building, 34 Stuyvesant Street, New York NY 10003

Spray-painted orange markings on the street, actors dressing and working as construction workers, agents performing in place of spokespeople for realty corporations, homeless people adopting the tools and symbols of construction. At first glance, these may seem to share no relation. However if looked at from the correct perspective they become visible as an emerging movement.

The Real Estate Industry is an investigative project dedicated to the documentation and analysis of phenomena proliferating at the periphery of the real estate industry. Not An Alternative will present our findings from this research, offering a guided tour of occupations and interventions on the urban landscape and subversions of the symbols that structure or govern the use of space. This will provide a contextualizing frame through which to understand our work against the greater context of contemporary cultural practitioners working on the issue of land use.

We will also present our recent collaborations with Picture The Homeless, including a building occupation and homeless tent city installation. With video and images, we’ll unpack the projects as case studies of our practice as a non-for-profit cultural production company.

___________
Not An Alternative is a volunteer run non-profit organization based in Brooklyn, New York whose work involves both questioning the tools of advertising, marketing, public relations and spectacle production and also leveraging them to affect popular understandings of events, symbols and history. The group’s mission is not to promote alternatives, but to shift symbolic terrain, transforming the subject matters they engage so as to show them to be their own alternative. Projects include The Production Company, Terra Incognita (an online tv show), The Real Estate Industry, and The Change You Want To See Gallery, a multi-purpose venue where free lectures, workshops, screenings and artist talks occur.

As a diversion, we dressed up as a film production crew shooting a music video. This was the cover story for the deployment and installation of the tent city. More than 100 homeless people and allies occupied the lot for the duration of the day. The action resulted in 10 arrests by nightfall.

For more info, check out the NY Times story about the action (includes a good blow-by-blow of the day’s events), and the video below.

Picture The Homeless Tent City - parts 1 and 2 from Not An Alternative on Vimeo.

Please join us at The Change You Want To See Gallery on Thursday, August 13 at 7:30pm for a workshop on mobile SMS (text message) encryption.

The number of mobile phone users is expected to exceed the 4 billion mark by the end of this year – that’s more than two thirds of the world’s population. And the number of text messages is expected to reach a whopping 1.8 trillion in 2010.¹ From the U.S. to Moldova to Iran to Uganda cell phones have facilitated all kinds of activism. While mobile phones bring many benefits to social movements, it is important to be aware of the digital data trails they leave behind.²

This workshop has two parts:

First, a general introduction: why encrypt your SMS? Oli from CryptoSMS, based in Hamburg, will discuss the open-source project’s history and current state.

Second, you’ll have a chance to get your inner hacker on with a hands-on workshop. We’ll install the encryption software on our cell phones, initialize them, exchange keys, and send encrypted SMS messages.

ABOUT CryptoSMS
CryptoSMS.org is a GPL (general public license) open source application for cell phones running J2ME (Java for mobiles). It runs on a lot of phones. CryptoSMS provides public/private key encryption, key generation and key management. It sends and receives encrypted SMS and public keys, encrypts and de-encrypts files, offers key verification via fingerprints and provides a secure login.

CryptoSMS is based on encryption with elliptic curves, which is a modern solution for encryption with small and/or embedded devices. Elliptic curve encryption provides good performance and has low memory requirements. It encrypts only the contents of the messages, but does not in any way encrypt or scramble the identities of the sender or recipients. It is not an anonymizer — it does not hide the device’s id/number from where the SMS comes and where it goes to.

http://cryptosms.org

ABOUT THE PRESENTER
Oli has been involved with the CryptoSMS.org project since its inception, and mainly keeps the project organized, does the communication work and strongly enforces the support of many languages in the CryptoSMS.org user interface. At the moment he is traveling to a couple of global cities to conduct research on mobile media and dataveillance, interviewing participants in social movements, hackers and artists about their use of mobile media. He is based in Hamburg, where he suffers from bad weather but enjoys people and culture.

The homeless population continues to escalate at the same time that landlords and the city sit on empty buildings. In fact, the total volume of potential apartments in vacant buildings and lots in Manhattan alone exceeds the number of homeless households in shelters and on the street citywide.

From Miami to Sacramento to here in New York City, homeless people aren’t waiting around. This Thursday, July 23rd, Picture The Homeless and allies will liberate the lots and build a tent city installation.

We need you!

   Kick down. Money, tents, tarps, pylons, food, water, and money.  No amount too small, all donations are tax deductible. Material donations can be dropped off at The Change You Want To See Gallery, address below. 

   Show up. Come paint, drill, trace, cut, fold, spray and staple. No skills necessary. On the job training, food, folks and fun.

Sunday - Tuesday, 12pm – 7pm
@ The Change You Want To See Gallery
http://www.thechangeyouwanttosee.org
84 Havemeyer St, at Metropolitan Ave
Brooklyn NY 11211
917-202-5479

Spread the word. Download, print, copy, distribute, email, Twitter, txt, and MyFaceSpace it around. We’ll rendez-vous on the 23rd at Union Square South, 9:30am. See ya’s there!

FLYER:

More info:

Change the Rules: Democracy is a game in which we all make the rules. How do we make this serious game more inclusive, more fair, and more fun?

Participation Camp will provide the spark for an explosion of sharing, experimentation, and collaboration around this question. Participants may attend a wide range of physical and virtual presentations (or deliver one themselves), compete in a conference-wide participation game, or roll up their sleeves in a hands-on workshop.

Not An Alternative was profiled in Art in America’s coverage of the show, and we got a nice mention in the NY Times as well. Plus a quick hat tip from Jonathan Melbourne at the Huffington Post.

If you haven’t checked out the show yet stop by, we’ll be there through Sunday, June 28th on the 3rd floor from 1-9pm daily.

Not An Alternative Installation at No Soul for Sale: A Festival of Independents from Not An Alternative on Vimeo.

Not An Alternative will be participating in an upcoming show called No Soul for Sale: A Festival of Independents*.

June 24-28, 1-9pm daily
X-Initiave (former Dia space)
548 West 22nd Street
Chelsea, NY, NY 10011

From the press release:
Held at X from June 24 through June 28, NO SOUL FOR SALE – A Festival Of Independents will bring together the most exciting, creative and respected not-for-profit centers, alternative institutions, artists’ collectives and independent enterprises from around the world that contribute to the international art scene by inventing new strategies for the distribution of information and by supporting a diverse cultural program.

X has invited more than 30 art spaces to travel to New York City to present themselves, their programs and the artists they support. With associations and groups coming from Berlin, Milan, Dublin, Barcelona, Paris, Reykjavík, Hong Kong, Rabat, Trinidad, New York, Los Angeles, and many other locations, NO SOUL FOR SALE provides a unique occasion to foster creative exchange and to connect with international organizations that aren’t usually accessible in New York City. With free entrance and a rich program of daily activities, NO SOUL FOR SALE will be a celebration of the independent forces that animate contemporary art.

*Our installation is made possible with generous support in the form of equipment from Eyebeam. Thanks Eyebeam!

Please join us this Thursday, June 18 for the next installment of the 2009 Upgrade New York programming series.

This month’s featured speaker is internet theorist, consultant and author Clay Shirky. Clay will discuss the concepts of fork and failure in the open source process, and will open them to discussion in the context of activism and the creative process.

If you can’t make it in person, tune in to the live-stream at http://www.livestream.com/notanalternative

Clay Shirky is a writer, educator, and consultant on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. He is an adjunct professor at New York University (NYU) in their graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program, where he teaches courses on the interrelationships of social and technological networks, particularly how they shape culture and vice-versa. He consults to a variety of organizations on network technologies, and is an acknowledged expert on collaboration tools, social networks, peer-to-peer sharing, collaborative filtering, and Open Source development. Clay has spoken and written extensively on the Internet since 1996, with regular columns in Business 2.0, FEED, OpenP2P.com and his own shirky.com blogsite. He has appeared in The New York Times, Time, The Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, and others. In his new book, “Here Comes Everybody”, Clay explores how organizations and industries are being upended by open networks, collaboration, and user appropriation of content production and dissemination.

Upgrade! is an international network of autonomous nodes located throughout the world that are united by art, technology, and a commitment to bridging cultural divides. Upgrade! NY is a monthly programming series co-produced by Eyebeam and Not An Alternative. The 2009 curatorial theme explores open source activist and creative practices.