Dedicated to critical cultural production at the intersection of art and activism.

Heather and Ivan Morrison’s How to Survive the Coming Bad Years

Sweet Release | Autonomedia’s dropping their new book, Critical Strategies in Art and Media, and throwing a big party. [Eyebeam]

Eponymedia | The conference that inspired the book, also titled Critical Strategies in Art and Media, featured Steve Kurtz, Bifo, Brian Holmes, and more.  The video documentation can be watched online. [World-Information Institute]

We ♥ Geo-Affinities | Spend some time with this experimental mapping project exploring the interrelation of gender, ethnicity, race, class and sexualities in contemporary European art. [GenderArtNet]

Groundswell Gains | We wrote a piece on how we work, and what we do when we work. [Sheepless]

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Seeding the City, another in an impressive line of Eve Mosher‘s large-scale, socially-concerned public projects, functions as a sort of modular green roof installation. Small garden plots, sized 4′x4′ and marked by green flags, spread over the urban environment, joining NYC rooftops in a remedial network.

Seeding the City sites across New York City can be seen here.

The advantage of this decentralized approach, according to Mosher, is awareness-raising.  One green roof installed on a private building is of little concern to passers-by, whereas a system of visible interventions, however small, raise questions and highlights the potential for collaborative work to make a difference.  What’s more, green roofs frequently require architectural considerations that are prohibitively costly and time-consuming.  Mosher’s project offers an immediate option.

Seeding the City relies on kinship networks to spread new nodes around the city.  Each primary participant identifies two to three others they’re familiar with, who would be interested in joining.  The sites are then mapped, as in the above image.

Interested in joining?  Find out more here.

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(Artist and Groundswell guest blogger Chris Kennedy makes projects for the land and for situated communities. His ongoing projects include Artiscycle, Groups and Spaces, and the Institute for Applied Aesthetics.)

The annual Conflux festival starts today in New York City…oddly sponsored by NYU an institutional monopoly of real estate and education in New York. But there are some great workshops to check out! Particularly Steve Lambert’s College of Tactical Culture: The CTC is a think tank on creative activism led by Stephen Duncombe and Steve Lambert, where participants traded experiences in order to inform practices, build relationships, and create space for new projects and collaborations.

Conflux is the annual New York festival for contemporary psychogeography, the investigation of everyday urban life through emerging artistic, technological and social practice. At Conflux, visual and sound artists, writers, urban adventurers and the public gather for four days to explore their urban environment.

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Tactical media artist Paolo Cirio, whose past work includes Google Will Eat Itself, presents the Open Society Structures tryptic as a framework for “direct, participative and processual democracy,” literally mapping elements of a society and flows of power for future use.

It includes a basic taxonomy of social, economic and political concepts relevant to the creation of a perfect society, showing the direction of dependencies, feedback interactions, and the relative significance of qualities and activities.

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The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) opened the six-month environmental art project LAND/ART on Saturday with a guided bus tour through New Mexico’s built landscapes.   Appropriately set in the American Southwest, where pioneering land-based artists created the first generation of works, LAND/ART brings together arts organizations from across the state, and

explores relationships of land, art and community through dozens of new exhibitions, community-based projects, site-specific art works, speakers series, performances, tours, excursions and a culminating book.

CLUI Visits Desert Christ Park, 2007. Photo courtesy of CLUI.

The first exhibition, Experimental Geography, opened Sunday with a symposium and reception at the Albuquerque Museum.  The group showing is a survey of this burgeoning field, curated by Nato Thompson and organized and circulated by Independent Curators International. Experimental Geography is on through September 20, 2009, and includes work by the following artists:

Francis Alÿs
AREA Chicago
The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI)
The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP)
kanarinka (Catherine D’Ignazio)
e-Xplo
Ilana Halperin
Julia Meltzer and David Thorne
Lize Mogel
Multiplicity
Trevor Paglen
Raqs Media Collective
Ellen Rothenberg
Spurse
Deborah Stratman
Daniel Tucker, The We Are Here Map Archive
Alex Villar
Yin Ziuzhen

LAND/ART continues through November 2009, with a calendar full of events.

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