*Panel series: Performing Change.*
*Saturday October 19th from 4–8pm*. *At EYEBEAM, Chelsea. New York City. *
*
*
Live lectures and discussions on* Ontologies of Media Art Interventions;
Tactical Fiction for Alternative Realities;  The Art of Performing
Political Innovation*; *Performing Alternative Art Economies. *

Featuring speakers: *Vito Acconci, Wafaa Bilal, Stephen Duncombe, Peter
Macapia, Carne Ross, George E. Sánchez, Denisse A. Arévalo, Mark Amerika,
Marisa Jahn, Lina Srivastava, Laurel Ptak, Carlo Zanni, Jose Serrano-McClain
*.
*Curated and organized by Paolo Cirio.*

Details and full schedule of the panel series:
http://eyebeam.org/events/performing-change

*Performing Change* will be held in tandem with *What Do We Do Now? *
At EYEBAM on October 18th and 19th.
http://www.eyebeam.org/events/what-do-we-do-now-performing-change
The Alternatives Fair offers direct access to and dialogue around numerous
resources in NYC that provide alternative economic models for artists, art
workers, and more—based on practices of mutual aid and
cooperation. Alternatives Fair organized by Arts & Labor Alternative
Economies Group. More details here: http://whatdowedonow.info

*
*
*Performing Change* features panels intended to inspire alternative
aesthetics, interventionist tactics and economic models for critical art
practices. In a time in which the conventional economic, social and culture
values are in crisis, there is a need for new strategies and points of
reference in art and politics, while diversifying resources for living and
producing meaningfully.

*Ontologies of Media Art Interventions – 4:00PM*
Speakers: *Vito Acconci*, *Stephen Duncombe*, *Wafaa Bilal*. Moderator: *Peter
Macapia*.
The talk will consider the practice of media art interventions through the
lens of performance art – examining a number of Vito Acconci’s projects and
The First Work of Media Art in 1968, which was an art performance
consisting of pure information staged in the mass media. Wafaa Bilal’s
provocative performances with new media will make the case for today’s
expanded notions of space, body and audience, as flows of informational
entities orchestrated over digital networks still affect physicality.
Stephen Duncombe will present others form of performative media
interventions for socially engaged art that he studied and fostered for
decades. Artist, scholar and curator Peter Macapia will facilitate a
discussion among the speakers to define informational bodies and arenas
through post-structuralist theories.
*Tactical Fiction for Alternative Realities – 5:00PM*
Speakers: *Lina Srivastava*, *Marisa Jahn*, *Mark Amerika*. Moderator: *Paolo
Cirio** *.
The talk will explore the potential of inventive forms of storytelling to
penetrate and change reality. Captivating plots and characters who perform
via pervasive media can actively engage the public in alternative scenarios
that inform, educate and inspire. Lina Srivastava will introduce Transmedia
Activism in order to design social change through storytelling in NYC. Mark
Amerika, a pioneer of interactive fiction, will explain the critical
qualities of mediated realities and his recent transmedia fiction within
the art world and its fads. Writer and artist Marisa Jahn will tell the
story of the living legend of El Bibliobandido, which was produced in a
region of Honduras with an 80% illiteracy rate.*

The Art of Performing Political Innovation – 6:00PM*
Speakers: *Carne Ross, George E. Sánchez, Denisse A. Arévalo*.
Moderator: *Paolo
Cirio*.* *
The talk will examine forms of political innovation as a potential art
form. During accelerated ideological and economic crises, society still
possesses powerful tools and knowledge that can be applied towards radical
social change as never before. Today, reinventing social structures is a
crucial creative challenge, which is a process of experimentation dedicated
to a renewed political project. Carne Ross will discuss a form of
participatory radical democracy through decentralized leadership and
alternative banking. Performer George Emilio Sánchez will present projects
that engage with participatory budgeting and learning through performances
as a means to foster social engagement. Curator Denisse A. Arévalo will
talk about art practices that, from a critical standpoint, evoke
collectivity and suggest an engagement with - directly or indirectly -
oppositional movements.* *
*
Performing alternative art economies – 7:00PM*
Speakers: *Laurel Ptak*, *Jose Serrano-McClain* of Trust Art, *Carlo Zanni*.
Moderator: *Paolo Cirio.*
The talk will look at cases of alternative economic models for contemporary
art. In a time of high speculation in the secondary art market and with a
shortage of funding for young artists, new models are emerging that
challenge the notion of consuming and collecting art. Laurel Ptak will
present ideas regarding mutual aid for art labor and critique of art
economies, while Jose Serrano-McClain will introduce a new platform for
sharing resources and means of production among artists. Carlo Zanni will
present his project PeopleFromMars.org to experiment new distribution
models for media art and to share revenues on the sale of artworks among
the artists involved in the platform.


------------------------------

*Bios speakers:
*
*Ontologies of Media Art Interventions – 4:00PM

**Vito Acconci*’s design & architecture comes from another direction, from
backgrounds of writing & art. His poems in the late 60’s treated language
as matter (words to look at rather than through) & the page as a field to
travel over; his performances in the early 70’s helped shift art from
object to interaction; later in the 70’s, his installations turned museums
& galleries into interactions between spaces & people; in the early 80’s,
his architectural-units were meant to be transformed by users. Most of his
early work incorporated subversive social comment. His performance and
video work was marked heavily by confrontation and Situationism. By the
late 80’s his work crossed over & he formed Acconci Studio, a design firm
that mixes poetry & geometry, computer-scripting & sentence-structure,
narrative & biology, chemistry & social-science. The Studio uses computers
to give form to thinking; they use forms to find ideas. They make not nodes
so much as circulation-routes, they design time as much as space. His work
has been shown and collected by the major art museums worldwide.

*Wafaa Bilal* is Iraqi-born artist and Associate Arts Professor at New York
University’s Tisch School of the Arts, is known internationally for his
on-line performative and interactive works provoking dialogue about
international politics and internal dynamics. For his 2010-2011 project,
the 3rdi, Bilal had a camera surgically implanted on the back of his head
to spontaneously transmit images to the web 24 hours a day. Bilal’s 2007
installation, Domestic Tension, also addressed the Iraq war. Bilal spent a
month in a Chicago gallery with a paintball gun that people could shoot at
him over the internet. The Chicago Tribune called it “one of the sharpest
works of political art to be seen in a long time” and named him 2008 Artist
of the Year. Bilal suffered repression under Saddam Hussein’s regime and
fled Iraq in 1991 during the first Gulf War and spent two years in refugee
camps in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. His work can be found in the permanent
collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA;
Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; MALTAF: Arab Museum of
Modern Art, Doha, Qatar; amongst others.

*Stephen Duncombe* is an Associate Professor at the Gallatin School and the
Department of Media, Culture and Communications of New York University
where he teaches the history and politics of media and culture. He is the
author of Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy and
Notes From Underground: Zines and the Politics of Underground Culture
amongst other books. He is a life-long political activist, co-founding a
community based advocacy group in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and
working as an organizer for the NYC chapter of the international direct
action group, Reclaim the Streets. In 2009 he was a Research Associate at
the Eyebeam where he helped organize The College of Tactical Culture. With
funding from the Open Societies Foundations he co-created the School for
Creative Activism in 2011, and is presently co-director of the Center for
Artistic Activism. Duncombe is currently a Senior Research Fellow of
Theatrum Mundi, an international consortium of artists, designers and
scholars.

*Peter Macapia* is an architectural designer and artist, founder of
labDORA, and adjunct assistant professor at Pratt. He focuses on advanced
computational design and the politics of urban space. He has taught at
Columbia University and Sci-Arc, as well as ESA Paris, TUS Tokyo, and TU
Delft. His work is collected by such institutions as FRAC Orleans and
published in Architectural Record, Log, Domus, A+U, and PinUp. He is
currently preparing exhibitions in Guadalajara Mexico on immigration and
space and Zagreb Croatia on economies of borrowing and robbing space. He is
completing a book on the history of force in the work of Foucault and
Deleuze. Macapia studied at RISD and Harvard, and received his PhD from
Columbia.

*
Tactical Fiction for Alternative Realities – 5:00PM*

*Mark Amerika* is a pioneer of net art and hypertext fiction since 1992.
His work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as the Whitney
Biennial of American Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Institute of
Contemporary Arts in London, and the Walker Art Center. In 2009-2010, The
National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece, hosted Amerika’s
comprehensive retrospective exhibition entitled UNREALTIME. He is the
author of many books including remixthebook (University of Minnesota Press,
2011) and his collection of artist writings entitlesd META/DATA: A Digital
Poetics (The MIT Press, 2007). Amerika is a Professor of Art and Art
History at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

*Marisa Jahn* is an artist, writer, and activist of Chinese and Ecuadorian
descent. Jahn is the Executive Director of REV- (as in to rev an engine), a
nonprofit studio whose public art projects combine creativity, bold ideas,
and sound research to address critical  issues. REV- is a women and
minority-led team of artists, techies, media makers, low-wage workers,
immigrants, and teens seeking to impact the immediate and long-term. A 2013
Open Doc Lab Fellow at MIT and former MIT graduate, Jahn’s work has been
presented at venues such as The White House, Studio Museum of Harlem,
Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center; received grants and awards such as
Tribeca Film Institute’s New Media Fund, Rockefeller Cultural Innovation
Fund; and received reviews in media such as ArtForum, The New York Times,
The Wall Street Journal, BBC, and more.

*Lina Srivastava* is a social innovation strategist, working at the
intersection of social impact, transmedia storytelling, and design. Lina
has been involved in social engagement campaigns for several documentaries,
including Oscar- winning Born into Brothels, Emmy-nominated The Devil Came
on Horseback, Oscar-winning Inocente, and Sundance-award winning Who Is
Dayani Cristal?. The former Executive Director of Kids with Cameras, and
the Association of Video and Filmmakers, Lina has taught design and social
entrepreneurship at Parsons, The New School of Design, and is on faculty in
the Masters of Fine Arts Program in Design and Social Innovation at the
School of Visual Arts.


*The Art of Performing Political Innovation – 6:00PM*

*Carne Ross* is a writer and political activist. A former British U.N.
diplomat who resigned over the Iraq war, Carne founded and now leads
Independent Diplomat, an expert team of former diplomats which advises
democratic but marginalized governments and political groups so that their
views are heard internationally. His recent book, The Leaderless
Revolution, analyzes the current failure of governments and alternative
forms of political organization, including anarchism. Carne has also been
heavily involved in an Occupy Wall Street initiative to offer a new kind of
banking – The Occupy Money Cooperative.

*George Emilio Sanchez *is a writer, performance artist and educator. For
the past six years he has directed Henispheric Institute's Emergenyc
program that aims to explore the intersection between arts and activism.
Since 2011 he has worked with New York City Council Member Brad Lander's
Participatory Budget Committee as a delegate and facilitator. He is the
chairperson of the Performing and Creative Arts Department The City
University of New York/College of Staten Island.  He is currently
collaborating with Patricia Hoffbauer on her piece, "Para-Dice" which will
premiere at St. Mark's Church and Danspace in November. His most recent
solo performance, "Buried Up To My Neck While Thinking Outside The Box"
will be presented at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in fall 2014.

*Denisse Andrade Arévalo* is an activist, and an independent curator
currently pursuing a PhD in Geography at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She
also teaches at Hunter College. In 2012 Denisse co-curated the exhibition
Creative Destruction at The Kitchen in NYC, regarding the economic
recession and related global outcries.


*Performing alternative art economies – 7:00PM*

*Laurel Ptak* employs curatorial, artistic and pedagogical modes to
critically attend to social and political dimensions of contemporary art
and technology. Based in New York City, she is currently a fellow at
Eyebeam, teaches in the Art, Media and Technology department at The New
School and together with artist Marysia Lewandowska is co-editor of the
recent book Undoing Property? which explores artistic practices in
relationship to immaterial production, political economy and the commons,
published by Sternberg Press in 2013.

*Jose Serrano-McClain* is an organizer and artist interested in the
economics of the creative spirit. He started his career as an economic
analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In 2009 he co-founded
Trust Art (trustart.org) to experiment with economic models for public and
socially-engaged artistic practice. In 2010, he joined the Queens Museum of
Art in a unique role that reports to both the curatorial and community
engagement departments of the museum, identifying opportunities for
commissioned artist projects to make meaningful connections with community
organizations in Corona. Through the museum, he is also one of the lead
visionaries of Social Practice Queens, a partnership with Queens College to
develop an MFA concentration in Social Practice. Jose has presented at the
TED Conference in California, the Feast Conference in New York, and the
Open Engagement conference in Portland. Jose graduated with a BA from the
University of Pennsylvania in 2001, where studied literature, theater,
politics, philosophy, economics. Jose has done graduate work in
architecture at Columbia University and is currently completing his MFA in
Social Practice at Queens College.

*Carlo Zanni* is an Italian new media artist. Since the early 2000’s his
practice involves the use of Internet data to create time based social
consciousness experiences investigating our life. Carlo Zanni has shown
worldwide in galleries and museums including: Hammer Museum, Los Angeles;
New Museum, New York; Tent, Rotterdam; MAXXI, Rome; P.S.1, New York;
Borusan Center, Istanbul; ACAF Space, Alexandria; PERFORMA 09, NY; ICA,
London; Science Museum, London.

* *

*Curator's bio:*

*Paolo Cirio *is a media artist known for his controversial and innovative
artworks. Cirio explores the idea of information’s power through
rearrangements of flows and structures of social, legal and economic
networks. His artworks unsettled Facebook, VISA, Amazon, Google, Cayman
Islands and NATO, among others. He won several awards such as Ars
Electronica, Transmediale, Eyebeam fellowship among others and his projects
are often covered by global media such as CNN, La Fox, Toronto Standard,
The Age, Der Spiegel, Libération, Apple Daily HK, among many others. Cirio
artworks has been presented in major art institutions such as at Museum of
Contemporary Art Museum of Sydney and Denver, 2013; Museum of Modern Art,
Rio de Janeiro, 2012; Wywyższeni National Museum, Warsaw, 2012, SMAK,
Ghent, 2010; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, 2009; Courtauld
Institute, London, 2009; PAN, Naples, 2008; MoCA, Tapei, 2007; Sydney
Biennial, 2007; NTT ICC, 2006 Tokyo; among others.