Complement to an earlier post on a panel on sports, politics and race at the US Social Forum in Detroit, below is a link to the audio of the event.

KPFA | Hard Knock Radio

Featuring Author Dave Zirin, hard knock contributor and artist Favianna Rodriguez, South African Trevor Ngwane, an activist and organizer, and Mike James, co founder of Athletes United For Peace. The panel is moderated by  Davey D.

Listen

[Graphic from HKR website. NB: catch it while you can – KPFA notes that the audio archive will only be available until July 12, 2010. Cross-posted to the blog of Goal 2010!, a soccer and social media project. Thanks to HP for the tip. ]

Free Speech TV has been providing free live video streams and video clips of the US Social Forum.

Click here to go directly to the live stream and view other video clips from the event.

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.

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:

On April 8th & 9th, Chicago’s Columbia College presents a free summit looking at shifts in policies relating to art, media, and technology that threaten the future of democracy in America specifically relating to access to a free and open Internet.

Read an interview with Malkia Cyril, Executive Director for the Center for Media Justice about her efforts to ensure that people of color’s rights are defended as regulations are passed determining how much power and control corporations have over the Internet.

This, and events like it around the country, aim to organize responses against the recent circuit court ruling that could cripple Internet neutrality.

EFA Project Space
323 W 39 Street, 2nd Floor
New York, New York

Tuesday March 2, 2010 | 6:30pm

A Video Serenade:
Selected works by artists from Norway, Serbia, Russia, and the UK

Recent works selected by ArtVideoExchange (AVE) and Format Network.

A VIDEO SERENADE presents a wide range of contemporary video, from the performative to the personal to the fictive and the documentary. The program aims to reflect the unique mix of themes and approaches to video as exemplified by the artists supported by these two groups.

AVE – Serbia
Program selection by Bojana Romi?

Big Bang / Bojana Romi? / 2009 / 2:30 min.
Never Gonna Give You Up / Goran Micevski / 2006 / 4:00 min.
Exhaustion of Europe / Jovan ?eki? / 2005 / 8:07 min.
Clay Pigeon / Milos Tomi?, 2005 / 6:41 min.
Atomic Watch / Nenad Kosti? / 2006 / 1:13 min.
FPS (First Person Shooters or Frames Per Second) / Wim Janssen / 2006 / 3:08 min.

Format Network, UK
Song Archive / Yvonne Buchheim / 2009 / 5:00 min.
Weightless / Matt White / 2008 / 7:55 min.
A Hard Place / Ronnie Close / 2009 / 4:54 min.
Curtain / Peter Bobby / 2009 / 4.52 min. (extract, HD Video)

AVE–Russia
Program selection by Vika Ilyushkina, CYLAND Media Lab

Son of King / Julia Zastava / 2008 / 4:29 min.
Little Black / Nikolay Kurbatsky / 2008 / 1:51 min.
I want to live through your death / Olga Jitlina / 2009 / 5:44 min.
Storage / Anton Hlabov / 2009 / 2:20 min.
Expulsion from the Paradise / Andrey Ustinov / 2003 / 2:01 min.
Vertigo / Kirill Shuvalov / 2003 / 1:43 min.
Never ending / Masha Sha / 2005 / 2:12 min.
Mom / Yuri Vasiliev / 2002 / 0:55 min.
Feedback / Maksim Svishev / 2009 / 5:42 min.
Purification / Veronica Rudyeva-Ryazantseva / 2008 / 4:30 min.

AVE – Norway
Program selection by Mona Bentzen

Amerika / Ane Lan / 2003 / 3:15 min.
Che Guevara’s Rolex / Birgitte Sigmundstad / 2009 / 4:40 min.
Par Hasard / BULL.MILETIC / 2009 / 5:15 min.
Opacity / Farhad Kalantary / 2005 / 5:30 min.
Erase / Margarida Paiva / 2009 / 3:30 min.
Felix Culpa, A Handmade Massacre / Martin Skauen / 2007 / 5:06 min.
RUR / Mona Bentzen / 2010 / 2:16 min.

A VIDEO SERENADE is organized by Madeline Djerejian, AVE-USA, in cooperation with ArtVideoExchange and Format Network, with support from the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), CYLAND Media Art Laboratory (St. Petersburg, Russia), and the St. Petersburg branch of the National Center of Contemporary, Art (NCCA).

AVE is an international exchange program and initiative between artists and curators that promotes the production and circulation of video programming worldwide. Format Network is an artists’ group based in Bristol, UK that focuses on staging activities of exchange and engagement, including screenings and exhibitions, lectures by invited artists, critics and theorists, and open-mic performance evenings.

[Text and graphic from EFA website. Cross-posted to The Data Stream.]

Avatar has become a pop culture nexus for Palestinian rights activists.  The film portrays the struggle between a heartless interstellar corporation and the Na’vi, lithe and luminescent aliens indigenous to a planet rich in the lucrative mineral “unobtanium.” The Na’vi live atop a rich deposit of this shimmering ore, so the corporation and its thugs want to remove them, by any means necessary. For activists, the film is an apt analogy to Israel’s annexation of Palestinian territory. So what do these idealistic youth do? Dress up like the aliens.

The protestors appeared in Bil’in, a Palestinian town cut in half by the Wall (whatever adjective, security or Apartheid, no one on either side disagrees that the structure is a wall) and Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in East Jerusalem which Israeli settlers have laid claim to and from which Israeli authorities have evicted Palestinians.

When I was in Bil’in in April 2009, the buzzword on the banners was “Occupation Flu,” play to the now-almost-forgotten H1N1 craze. Demonstrators gathered every Friday after prayer to confront Israeli soldiers who meet Palestinians’ stones with tear gas and flash-bang bombs. I was there to write a story, here, which explains more about this weekly protest.

A protestor shields his nose and eyes from the effects of tear gas.

The most striking aspect of this re-appropriation of a distinctly American, Avatar meme, is the irony. And right across the barbed-wire fence opposite from Bil’in are Israeli soldiers whose weapons supplied by American taxpayers. So, as Joseph Nye would explain, that’s an example of U.S. “hard power.”. Then, on the other side, the Palestinians to score by appropriating imagery siphoned with sophistication from the mighty currents of American “soft power.”

Are you sick of being bombarded by countless advertisements in your daily life?

Do you want to check your email or look up the definition of epistemology without being lured into a dating site or convinced of some obscure disease that you don’t actually have (and obviously don’t need insufficiently tested prescription drugs for)?

Well fret no more.

Add-Art has saved the day.

Add-Art is a FireFox add-on which not only blocks internet ads, but replaces those ads with thoughtfully curated art exhibitions, commonly with social change themes.

Add-Art is an open source project and is run on a day-to-day basis by Hana Newman and Steve Lambert.

Go to http://add-art.org/ to add it to your FireFox or just to check out the very fitting current exhibit:

Merchandise (you are not what you own):

“The artists in this show appropriate and subvert the language of marketing, using its tools of photography, costuming and set dressing, digital manipulation, and data tagging. By copying these strategies, they create transparency where obfuscation is usually found. By bringing the sublimated messages of consumer culture into question, these artists offer the possibility of a more critical engagement with the image.”

Curated by Anuradha Vikram

Enjoy detournement, not marketing, and make better use of your space, time, and eyes.

On the occasion of the U.S. national holiday in his honor, below is a recording of Dr. Martin Luther King most well-known speech.

From the Wikipedia entry for Martin Luther King: “I Have A Dream” is the popular name given to the public speech in which Dr. King spoke of his desire for a future where blacks and whites among others would coexist harmoniously as equals. Dr. King’s delivery of the speech on August 28, 1963, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, was a defining moment of the American Civil Rights Movement.”

[Cross-posted to The Data Stream.]

And from another great address:

“And the leaders of the world today talk eloquently about peace. Every time we drop our bombs in North Vietnam, President Johnson talks eloquently about peace. What is the problem? They are talking about peace as a distant goal, as an end we seek, but one day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means. All of this is saying that, in the final analysis, means and ends must cohere because the end is preexistent in the means, and ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.”

Martin Luther King, Jr., “A CHRISTMAS SERMON” 24 December 1967