Dedicated to clever and innovative trends of art and design in activism.

Update: The HONK! press release posted earlier was an old version.  I’ve updated the post with the latest information.

Through October, I’ll be helping to coordinate the HONK! Festival in Somerville, MA. As we began to outline at last night’s meeting, the task will include local outreach, as well as online rabble-rousing. While this will mainly be channeled through the HONK! MySpace page and other HONK!-specific vehicles, I have created a dedicated space on Groundswell to begin the wider discussion about HONK! as both the event and the movement.

For those who are unfamiliar with HONK!:

HONK! is a revolutionary street spectacle of never-before-seen proportions. Joyous community bands have begun to emerge in every corner of the world from the ashes of modern-day gloom.

Twenty-four activist street bands from around the nation and beyond will convene for the third ever HONK! Festival in Davis Square on Columbus Day weekend, October 10–12, 2008.

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Odds are, your community suffers from oppression, monoculture, apathy, or boredom (or maybe all of the above.) If so, an infringement festival could provide inspiration and amusement - and help raise awareness for positive social change and global justice.

The infringement is a democratically run, non-hierarchical interdisciplinary arts festival open to all critical artists - theatre, music, film, street performance, visual arts, and more. It began in Montreal in 2004 as a protest against the co-option of experimental and DIY theatre by the Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals, and has since spread to Ottawa, Toronto, Buffalo, Regina, New York City and Bordeaux, France, with new communities joining regularly. They don’t charge a registration fee, and have guidelines to keep the festival independent.

Interested in hosting an infringment in your community? Click here for a PDF guide to starting one!

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Updated: Please leave your favorite political musicians in the comments section.

This morning I woke up to my neighbor blasting Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry” - it will be stuck in my head all day, and so has me thinking about political pop music. Since the 1960s, when politics first entered the pop fray in the United States, we’ve seen just about every genre flirt with protest songs. The medium was especially strong during the nascent days of punk and hip hop.

One couldn’t argue that it’s gone away - the war on Iraq has raised enough mainstream outrage by itself to produce a bevy of protest songs - so maybe it’s just less mainstream. Underground hip hop is probably the most politicized genre I can think of, and others as diverse as post-rock’s Godspeed You! Black Emperor and the radical folk music collective Riot Folk are creating album after album of strident protest music.

So, who would make your top ten? Leave your favorites in the comments section.

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I am very excited and happy to see a project like this happening in my hometown of Portland, Maine…

Founded in 1994, The Blunt Youth Radio Project produces a weekly call-in talk show that airs Monday nights from 7:30-8:30 on WMPG, Greater Portland Community Radio. High school age youth from the Portland area, both free and incarcerated, staff the show. Blunt Members are trained in all areas of radio production: interviewing, hosting, reporting, editing, and engineering. The show has won several Gold and Silver Reel Awards from the National Federation of Community Broadcasters and a number of First Place Radio News Awards from the Maine Association of Broadcasters.

Fifty high school-aged members of the program from nine area high schools, Portland’s Kennedy Park neighborhood, and the Long Creek Youth Development Center work together to produce the weekly program. Blunt-produced stories regularly air on National Public Radio and regional outlets around the country.

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The Institute without Boundaries is an interdisciplinary postgraduate program at the School of Design at George Brown College that challenges students to collaborate on global problems. They are the folks behind the Massive Change initiative, which Alix Rule credited for exploring the “utopian, as well as dystopian, possibilities” of design as an tool for social change.

They are now accepting applications for the 2008-2009 program, which begins in September. Deadline for submissions is March 31, 2008.

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