Comprehensive and sly, “Change Encounters” is a new project by Lin + Lam, developed over the course of the duo’s 2009-10 Vera List Center at the New School Fellowship and now making its debut.

Conceived in response to the Vera List Center’s focus theme “Speculating on Change,” Lin + Lam have collected an interdisciplinary array of cultural and historical predictive devices, appropriations from popular culture, historical sources, and academic scholarship, including original interviews with professionals from diverse backgrounds, and arranged this archive into an interactive website. “Change Encounters” offers multiple vantage points on the nature and the process of change and speculation and is accessed through a random number generator based on the 64 hexagrams of the I-Ching, one of the oldest books in the world and a predictive device that is still commonly used today.

The project takes its name from the title of René Clair’s 1944 film It Happened Tomorrow, a comedy in which a journalist longs for the ability to know the future in advance in order to get a jump on breaking news. This desire for precognition determines human behavior across many fields of experience. Many a head of state – emperors, presidents and dictators, including Napoleon, Hitler and Reagan – has turned to oracles to authorize and consolidate their power. The capacity to aspire to a different future is, as anthropologist Arjun Appadurai writes, critical to the possibility for the underprivileged to overcome dire conditions. Can the capacity to aspire be learned and shared? What enables future thinking that is not a product of denial, defense or mere fantasy, but is constructive to change? For contemporary forecasting on our current recession and repressions, professionals from divergent fields join Lin + Lam and present their perspectives on how the future is speculated and formed.

Program
2:00-3:00pm
Premiere Showing “It Happened Tomorrow” by Lin + Lam

3:00-4:00pm
Panel Discussion

Patricia Ticineto Clough
Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at the Graduate Center and Queens College of the City University of New York

Mitch Horowitz
Editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin and author of Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation

Orit Halpern
Assistant Professor of Department of History at The New School for Social Research

H. Darrel Rutkin
Independent scholar, historian of science with an emphasis on the history of medieval, Renaissance and early modern astrology

4:00-5:00
Demo with Refreshments

Presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2009/2011 focus theme “Speculating on Change.”

Posted on August 10, 2010

In January 2009, artist and Parsons faculty member Melanie Crean launched The Shape of Change, an ongoing project consisting of two interconnected works that examine the ephemeral nature of change, independence and the formation of identity. The first work tracks change on an international scale on the Web site www.shapeofchange.com, an online archive of American and Iraqi desires for political change. Through the presentation and visualization of  opinions of artists, writers and the general public, this part of The Shape of Change seeks to countermand the empty political brand that the term ‘change’ was reduced to in recent American and Iraqi elections. The second project looks at change on a personal scale, documenting an infant’s early development as it learns to walk and speak, thus establishing itself as an independent social subject. In this conversation, scholars and practitioners from the fields of art, science and religion discuss how their concepts of change both correspond and differ. Participants: AA Bronson is an artist and healer living and working in New York City. In the sixties, he left university with a group of friends to found a free school, a commune, and an underground newspaper. This led him into an adventure with gestalt therapy, radical education, and independent publishing. In 1969 he formed the artists’ group General Idea with Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal; for the next 25 years they lived and worked together to produce the living artwork of their being together, in addition to undertaking over 100 solo exhibitions, and countless temporary public art projects. In 1974 they founded Art Metropole, Toronto, a distribution center and archive for artists’ books, audio, and video. From 1987 through 1994, they focused their work on the subject of AIDS. He is currently the President of Printed Matter, Inc., in New York City, and Artistic Director of the Institute for Art, Religion, and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary. Melanie Crean is Assistant Professor of Media Design at Parsons The New School for Design, teaching classes in experimental time-based work, mobile media and gaming. As the former Director of Production at Eyebeam, she founded a studio that worked with socially based moving image, sound, public art and open source software. She designed special effects at MTV Digital Television Lab and produced documentaries in Nepal, on subjects that include women trafficking and the spread of HIV along trucking routes. Crean has received commissions from Art in General, Bronx Arts Council, Harvestworks, NYFA, NYSCA, Rhizome and Creative Time. Sensei Jules Shuzen Harris is a Soto priest who has been practicing Buddhism for more than twenty-five years. He holds an Ed.D. with a concentration in applied human development from Teachers College of Columbia University and a MSW from New York University. As a psychotherapist, Shuzen has found creative ways to synthesize Western psychology and Zen to achieve dramatic results with his patients. He also focuses on the relationship between Zen and the martial arts. He is a fourth-degree Dan Black Belt in Iaido (the art of drawing and cutting with a samurai sword) and a Black Belt in Kendo (Japanese fencing). He also founded two schools of Japanese swordsmanship in Albany, NY and Salt Lake City, UT. Alaa Majeed is a reporter, producer, and translator. She received her BA from Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. Majeed has co-produced segments for Al-Jazeera International and PBS. She has also reported for United Press International, Pacifica Radio, the BBC, National Public Radio, “60 Minutes,”and The Sunday Times (London). Her experience as a translator includes work with news services, conducting/translating classes for Iraqi civil servants, and a position with Nature Iraq, a non-governmental, environmental organization. She is currently also working as a researcher, monitoring news wires, documenting press freedom violations, and conducting investigative interviews with journalists overseas for the Committee to Protect Journalists, which is based in New York. In 2007, she received the International Courage in Journalism award from the International Women’s Media Foundation. Presented as part of Streaming Culture / Art & Politics, a new interdivisional initiative organized by Victoria Vesna, Visiting Professor, UCLA, and Director of Research, School of Art, Media and Technology, Parsons The New School of Design, in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School. If you are not able to join us in person, log on to: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/parsons-the-new-school-for-design

Posted on April 19, 2010

The Vera List Center is pleased to host a number of web-based artist projects as a prelude to The Internet as Playground and Factory, a conference organized by Eugene Lang faculty member Trebor Scholz that will take place at Eugene Lang College (The New School), from November 12 to 14, 2009 (www.digitallabor.org).

Burak Arikan, Meta-Markets (2007)

Ursula Endlicher, Website Impersonations: The Ten Most Visited #8 – www.facebook.com (2009)

Scott Kildall and Victoria Scott, No Matter (2008)

Aaron Koblin, The Sheep Market (2006)

Stephanie Rothenberg and Jeff Crouse, Invisible Threads/Double Happiness Jeans (2008)

Posted on September 23, 2009

For the complete conference schedule and registration

This conference, organized by Lang faculty member Trebor Scholz and, among others, supported by the Vera List Center, confronts the urgent need to interrogate the concepts of labor and value in the digital economy and seeks to inspire proposals for action. There are currently few adequate definitions of labor that fit the complex, hybrid realities of the digital economy. The Internet as Playground and Factory poses a series of questions about the conundrums surrounding labor (and often the labor of love) in relation to our digital present. It is the first in a series of biennial conferences titled The Politics of Digital Media.

The conference was preceded by a panel on September 29 entitled Changing Labor Value that featured Andrew Ross, Tiziana Terranova and McKenzie Wark and presented as annotations in space Web-based art projects by Burak Arikan, Ursula Endlicher, Scott Kildall and Victoria Scott, Aaron Koblin, and Stephanie Rothenberg and Jeff Crouse.

Sponsored by Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts and presented in cooperation with the Center for Transformative Media at Parsons The New School for Design and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics on occasion of the center’s 2009/2010 program cycle “Speculating on Change.”

Posted on September 20, 2009

In celebration of the release of the second issue of Where We Are Now’s online journal, edited by Joseph Grima, Marisa Jahn and Vera List Center director Carin Kuoni, contributors gather to discuss their explorations of this issue’s guiding theme: Speculating on Change.

Explicitly tied to difference, change as such is perhaps most clearly measured in terms of chronological time, comparing a “before” to an established “after.” Speculation on change, however, entails projection, prognosis and risk into the future, and corresponds to the fluid, divergent and simultaneous time space continuum of our contemporary existence.

The launch will feature a presentation by journal contributor Melanie Crean. “The Shape of Change,” her ongoing web project featured in the second issue, investigates how people perceive, measure and represent change over time, in both personal and political contexts, through two distinct approaches. The first component of the project is a public web archive that tracks American and Iraqi citizens’ desire for political change as the two countries attempt to extricate from one another politically and militarily. The second component documents an infant’s early development as it learns to walk and speak, and thus establish itself as an independent social subject. The two approaches serve as counterpoint to one another, creating a portrait of the ephemeral nature of change, independence and identity formation, from a macro and micro perspective.

Other journal contributors include Tom Angotti, Daniel Bozhkov, Celine Condorelli, Bryan Finoki, Beatrice Gibson, Jean Gourley, Carlos Motta, Andrew Ross, Ben Shepard, Mark Tribe and Merve Unsal.

Where We Are Now was founded in November 2007 by an ad hoc group of representatives of many arts organizations in the city, among them The Change You Want to See Gallery, Creative Time, Cooper Union, Parsons the New School of Design and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. It is a discursive and loosely organized platform with the mission to illuminate, deepen and amplify the discourse around an aesthetic practice with political content in New York City.

More information on Where We Are Now.

This event is presented as part of the Vera List Center’s program cycle, “Speculating on Change.”

Posted on September 20, 2009