New York participants: Beka Economopoulos and Jason Jones of Brooklyn-based non-profit organization, Not An Alternative.
Branding strategies are the object of extensive critical research, mostly from the area of urban sociology. This research tries to figure out how such large scale urban and regional product-packaging strategies are affecting local economic structures, land and real-estate, local tax provisions, social housing, traffic flows, and other conditions that have an immediate impact on the daily life of residents.
In this debate, designers, artists, activists, architects and sociologists will look at the relation between branding and sustainability. Citybranding - or nation branding - attempts to hook up a location to the international flow of tourists, goods, workers and capital. It makes a lot of sense from a short term economic point of view. From the point of view of sustainability, however, these branding strategies are highly questionable. They add to the problematic of hypermobility that is under discussion in the Electrosmog festival.
In a broader sense the critique of city branding addresses the question of whether it is a good idea to profile places as products in an international market instead of living environments for their inhabitants. On the other hand, one could ask, whether cities and regions are economically viable at all without effective branding and promotion strategies. Are there alternative branding strategies?
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.
Not An Alternative recently teamed up with Picture The Homeless, Reclaim NYC and others to stage an intervention on the urban landscape. The collaboration involved the production and deployment of a homeless tent city in a vacant bank-owned lot in East Harlem.
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.
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.
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.
Not An Alternative is a non-profit organization with a mission to affect popular understandings of events, symbols, and history. We curate and produce work that questions and leverages the tools of advertising, architecture, exhibit design, branding, and public relations. Programs are hosted at a variety of venues, including our Brooklyn-based gallery No-Space (formerly known as The Change You Want to See Gallery).
No-Space is host to free lectures, screenings, panel discussions, workshops and artist presentations. The space also consists of a production workshop, filming studio and video editing suite. During the day it is a collaborative office space (aka coworking) for freelancers and cultural producers.
