Toward the intersections of art, space and structure, and new media:

1) “Beyond the obsolete models of artist or author as genius and their fetish objects, what collective and collaborative practices are inventing new terrains and flows?”

In Autonomedia’s new book Critical Strategies in Art and Media: Perspectives in New Cultural Practices Ted Byfield, Steve Kurtz, Amanda McDonald Crowley, Claire Pentecost, and Peter Lamborn Wilson with the likes of Franco (Bifo) Berardi, Marco Deseriis, Rene Gabri, Brian Holmes, McKenzie Wark, Felix Stalder, and others gather to explore such questions.

2) “It was John Ruskin who claimed that the ‘measure of a city’s greatness is to be found in the quality of its public spaces.’ Looking around the London landscape – the 200-strong herd of fibreglass elephants currently roaming the streets, Banksy’s signature graffiti, the production line of fourth plinth sculptures – it’s hard to imagine the city even registering on Ruskin’s fastidious scale of “greatness’.”

In, State of the Art/Art of the State: Public Art in the UK Alexandra Coghlan explores the role of public art in a cities image and reputation.

3) “Two recently published books – Louis Moreno and John Alderson’s The Architecture and Urban Culture of Financial Crisis and Sarah Glynn’s Where the Other Half Lives – assess the damaging impact of financialisation on built environments and urban housing. In his double review, Owen Hatherley identifies architecture as a prime casualty of neoliberalism’s de facto Non-Plan.”

*Above Image: photo by Albert Renger Patzsch

The U.S. Social Forum begins this week. From June 22-26 non-profit organizations, artists, activists, socialists, anarchists, and capitalist social change entrepreneurs alike will be gathering from around the country in Michigan’s own Motor City. What will commence is a week of workshops, people’s assemblies, seminars, lectures, camaraderie, alliance building, and general social change brainstorming. Needless to say, Detroit will be serving as a venue for one of the largest change-makers assemblies to date.

The USSF website states, “The US Social Forum (USSF) is a movement building process. It is not a conference but it is a space to come up with the peoples’ solutions to the economic and ecological crisis. The USSF is the next most important step in our struggle to build a powerful multi-racial, multi-sectoral, inter-generational, diverse, inclusive, internationalist movement that transforms this country and changes history.”

With well over 20,000 people registered, the forum is looking to be a powerful, moving, and productive event.

Our very own Donald Russell will be attending this year as a Provisions Library delegate. As well, our friends at the Floating Lab Collective will be partaking in a plethora of events, interventions, performances, and workshops across the forum and the city proper, including the exchange of a Floating Lab currency with others at the forum, collaborations with poets for a projection project and a tentative ride on a grease powered bus through Detroit. Click here for Floating Lab’s Twitter feed, which will be updated frequently throughout the week on their highlights, thoughts, and adventures.

Provisions Library and Floating Lab will likely be attending many of the following workshops throughout the week:

Art Is Change: Art & Creative Practice for Cultural and Political Transformation

Reclaiming Place, Restoring & Sustaining Living Communities

Off Grid and Unplugged: Sustainable Lifestyle Choices & Renewable Resistance

Community Currencies, Microcredit, and Banks: The Banco Palmas Model

Ending Mountaintop Removal

Creative Think Tank

Creative Organizing: Using Puppetry and Performance to Move Your Campaign

And many more

Click here for a full list of workshops at the Forum.

If you are not able to make it to Detroit this year, you may be able to catch some of the action at the USSF audio and video feeds.

In response to the vast amount of poverty and struggle within Detroit, a direct result of capitalist failure and crises, Detroit itself has become a quickly transforming hub of grassroots and progressive social movements; however, there is much work to be done. One of the coolest aspects of this year’s USSF are the Work Projects and Work Brigades: “Leading up to the forum, hundreds of folks are coming in Work Brigades to support and work with Detroiters, from gardening to healing, screen-printing, exchanging organizing methods & retrofitting houses. During the forum there will be Work Projects where folks can go into the community and get their hands dirty making real-life, needed improvements here in Detroit which will last long after the Forum.”

As well, individuals will be able to partake in socially conscious tours of Detroit: “Detroit is a living historical center. We will be doing tours of the gardens of Detroit, labor tours, movement tours – there are so many ways to see this amazing place you will be in.”

Detroit, as one of the most economically devastated metropolises in this country, might not seem like an ideal canvass for positive thinking or change making at first glance; however, one needs to take note of, not a supposedly terrifying absence of capital flow, but the birth of social movements within Detroit, which have arisen in the chasm created by the abandonment of industry and the powers of capitalism therein, despite the concurrent struggle therein. Over the past couple of years, Detroit has slowly become a center of alternative community, economy, and green movements and is now serving as the birth place of a powerful and unified national force of social movement: another Detroit is possible, another world is possible.

A thoughtful and fascinating  social photography project by French-U.S. photographer Justine Graham and Colombian visual artist Ruby Rumié is on view until August 8th at the  Museum of Visual Arts (MAVI) in Santiago, Chile.

“We were both interested in the issue of domestic employment in the Latin American context, and over time we created this platform to show the points that these women have in common as they share the domestic environment in a hierarchical work relationship,” said Graham, who like Rumié has lived many years in Chile.

Inter Press Service article here.

Download PDF of the catalogue here.  The show is slated for exhibition in Washington in July 2011.

In keeping with the World Cup theme of the month: Today take a step back and examine some opposing vewpoints on the role of football, or sports in general, in our global society.

David Smith gives an account of the benefits of soccer in the world at large in World Cup Dreams by quoting Danny Jordaan of the World Cup organizing committee: “If you want to raise the social issue, ask them, ask those football fans who have no houses, no job. Ask them, ‘Do you want the World Cup in this country?’ You’ll hear an overwhelming yes because that is the lifeblood, that is the generator of hope, that is what puts a smile on many African faces. That is important on the continent. Football is a giver of hope and life and we must never argue that we must deny the fundamental pleasure and joy that football can bring.”

Yesterday Terry Eagelton gave us an alternative view in his Football: A Dear Friend to Capitalism: “Modern societies deny men and women the experience of solidarity, which football provides to the point of collective delirium….With football, by contrast, there can be outbreaks of angry populism, as supporters revolt against the corporate fat cats who muscle in on their clubs; but for the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine. Its icon is the impeccably Tory, slavishly conformist Beckham.”

Or if you really want to intellectualize the game, watch the following:

Below and above, excepts of a somewhat flat data-visualization of World Cup economics. Although it fails to go very far with the information it is an interesting starting point for some follow-up analysis and discussion.

“On June 11, nearly 100,000 soccer fans from around the world will gather at Soccer City stadium in Johannesburg to watch the opening game of the 2010 World Cup. Millions more will tune in their television sets at home. During the four weeks to follow, the world’s eyes and ears will be directed towards South Africa, following one of the world’s premier sporting events. Soccer may not be overwhelmingly popular in the United States, but on a global scale, the World Cup is the largest sporting event in terms of viewership. Collectively, more than 26 billion viewers watched the games of the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany…”

Full Visualization

Note that a link in the article to a Fifa Facts & Figures Marketing site proves to be just as interesting.

[Cross-posted to The Data Stream and to the blog of Goal 2010!, a soccer and social media project. Thanks to CDN in Napa for the tip.]

Today, contemplate potentials and a future more promising than the present world. We can hope for, imagine, and thus direct a future of our own. In this vein, spend some time exploring:

1) Shareable’s Shareable Futures: a call to arms in the discussion and story telling of “a future we can all believe in.”

2) “Theses on the Terrible Community” by The French Collective Tiqqun. “The question we must answer in a final manner is of a more ethical than political nature because the classic political forms and their categories fit us like our childhood clothing. The question is to know if we prefer the possibility of an unknown danger to the certainty of a present pain. That is to say if we want to continue to live and speak in agreement (dissident perhaps, but always in agreement) with what has been done so far – and thus with the terrible communities – or, if we want to question that small portion of our desire that the culture has not already infested in its mess, to try – in the name of an original happiness – a different path.”

3) The Unplugged: “A shareable future from Vinay Gupta: what would happen if millions of people defined “wealth” as access instead of ownership?”

Intermedia Arts
2822 Lyndale Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55408
phone(612) 871-4444

“This participatory art installation will ask what ideas and projects the community values, and what resources it will take to realize them. Our interactive Storefront for Ideas, Temporary Employment Agency for Creative Workers, and Exhibition Reading Room will inspire conversation and solicit creative ideas around the value of creative work to our lives, our economies and our communities.

We invite you to stop by during gallery hours to share a cup of coffee with exhibition organizers, take part in our brown bag lunches and creative dialogues, and exchange ideas through a series of playful interactions with the artists. On Saturdays, a “Sidewalk Sale” will feature special activities designed for you by Storefront artists.”

MORE

[Cross-posted to The Data Stream. Graphic and text from Intermedia Arts mailing.]

Collegium Hungaricum Berlin
Dorotheenstr. 12
10117 Berlin-Mitte
S+U: Friedrichstraße; Bus+Tram: Am Kupfergraben
t: +49 30 212 340-0
collegium [at] hungaricum.de

May 8
Le Grand Magasin

“Le Grand Magasin dedicated itself to the investigation of collective forms of production. This initiative not only facilitated cooperation between artists and European cooperatives, but for over a year also operated a model department store in Berlin, for goods manufactured by producer cooperatives. In conclusion, artists and curators introduce the results of the 2-year process and, with their invited guests, discuss the redefinition of the concept of work and artistic entrepreneurship.”

[Cross-posted to The Data Stream. Text and graphic from Magasin website. Caption: "'Plane / Flugzeug.'Moulin Roty. Nantes, F."]

From Boing Boing:

“It’s not surprising that the editors of Fortune rejected cartoonist Chris Ware‘s fantastic cover for the May 2010 issue. It contains too much truth for comfort. Also, it hearkens back to the golden age of Fortune as an exemplar of beautifully designed and illustrated magazines, and so would have invited unkind comments about the magazine’s typical current level of design aesthetics.”

From Indie Pulp, reporting on the C2E2 [Chicago Comics and Entertainment Expo] panel that Ware participated in:

“[Ware] showed a cover he did for Fortune magazine which was supposed to be on the Fortune 500 issue. He accepted the job because it would be like doing the 1929 issue of the magazine, and he filled the image with tons of satirical imagery, like the U.S. Treasuring being raided by Wall Street, China dumping money into the ocean, homes being flooded, homes being foreclosed, and CEOs dancing a jig while society devolves into chaos. The cover, needless to say, was rejected.”

“Click image for big version so you can see the jokes.”

[Cross-posted to The Data Stream. Thanks to CDN in Napa for the tip.]

Owning land in Detroit just got even ‘cheaper’–increasing plausibility of a new commons therein.

“You’re invited to buy land and ‘move’ to Detroit,” says Loveland, a project which developed in the summer of 2009, “with a vision for combining the social fun of online games with the creative development of real land, and an open ‘let’s figure things out as we go along’ attitude.”

Combining both the fantastic and the real, part Farmville, part real life commune, Loveland allows individuals to purchase land in Detroit for $1 per inch along side other purchasers or, better, investors. The objective: to provide  access to land and space wherein the purpose of that space is  determined by the common; intent can span from conceptual project to tangible actual urban renewal.

Wrap your head around it all this Tuesday by tuning into Basekamp’s weekly Skype ‘potluck’ discussion on Plausible Artworlds wherein they will be conversing with the creators of Loveland and others who care to join in the discussion.

Here’s a video from Jerry, Loveland mastermind

*Above: Inchy, Official Mascot and spokesperson of Loveland