Amnesty International Firefly Project (AI Firefly) is a New York City-based collective of artists and activists affiliated with Amnesty International USA as local group #704. In an effort to support Amnesty International’s global advocacy and educational work and provide a forum for critically considering the intersection of the human rights framework and contemporary artistic practices, AI Firefly has announced a juried $3,000 commission for the creation of a new art work to be presented on or around International Human Rights Day, December 10, 2006.

Application deadline: Friday, August 4, 2006

http://www.aifirefly.org/commission/index.html

GASOLINE
Hubert Dobler
Friday, June 2 – Sunday, July 2, 2006
Opening, Friday, June 2, 7–9pm
Jack the Pelican Presents
487 Driggs Ave, bet N. 9 and N. 10
Brooklyn, New York

In “Gasoline,” Hubert Dobler’s first NY solo show, he assaults the polite electronic façade of our postmodern service-industry landscape with his mean machine Honda CB550 Four, 1976. It is gasoline, the return of the repressed. No brakes. Muscular energy.
http://www.jackthepelicanpresents.com/doblerpr.html

Be sure to check out the video on the site.

Thanks to Gregg Bordowitz for reminding me of the brilliance of William James. It's not enough to take a stand that war is bad, you have to deliver a moral and ethical alternative to engage people. That was the lesson I learned from ACT UP and why the colab model doesn't work. To quote Peter Fend, pointing and saying BOO HOO (a la Jenny Holzer) isn't enough. The question now is what is adequate, how do we negotiate?

Hillsborough County Commissioner
Ronda Storms

When I lived in Florida the St. Petersburg Times was the one sign of liberal hope in an increasingly right wing area. Seems like even that paper has given in:

From MTAA:

MTAA knows this very nice pop culture/art/music writer down in Florida named Gina Vivinetto. She also runs a gallery/ music space called Bombshell. Gina makes us laugh.

New video performance work by Cary Peppermint and Christine Nadir on DVblog

This video is the first in a series of forthcoming performance-art videos by Peppermint & Nadir which engage issues, ideas, and mythologies of the American concepts of wilderness, space, the frontier, and humans’ ethical relation to animals, forestlands, and nature.

http://restlessculture.net/practicalperformance/

Congratulations are in order for Matthew Coolidge, director of the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) and winner of the 2006 SAAM Lucelia Artist Award. The Center is a bold choice, if only for the obvious fact that an institution is a tricky pick for an artist award. But that’s what makes Coolidge’s organization such a compelling project—CLUI straddles the borders distinguishing artist and collective, observer and activist, micro and macro.

contributors:
0100101110101101.ORG & [epidemiC] | Josephine Berry Slater | Geoff Cox | Alexander R. Galloway & Eugene Thacker | Olga Goriunova & Alexei Shulgin | Beryl Graham | Eva Grubinger | Piotr Krajewski | Jacob Lillemose | low-fi | Franziska Nori | Matteo Pasquinelli | Christiane Paul | Trebor Scholz | Grzesiek Sedek | Tiziana Terranova | Marina Vishmidt

London based experimental media centre 'Backspace' opened in 1996. Through its provision of web services for locals and enthusiasts it became a place frequented by artists and those wanting to experiment with the emerging internet technology. It closed in late December 1999 and is now a Starbucks coffee shop.

As part of Node-London a 'reanimating' of Backspace took place at the Starbucks on Sunday 5th March 2006.

Via Mute:
http://www.metamute.org/en/radio-buckspace

Long and informative article from Wired's Webmonkey about what's coming up and what's just the same old BS.

A selection:

Internet Hype

Hype has very few positive uses and tends to cloud arguments and fool people. Avoid internet hype if you can. If it helps you get investment for your startup, all the power to you.

What it is
Because the internet still has the potential to revolutionize industries, and because winners tend to grow exponentially big, every stage of the internet since the Mosaic browser launch has been filled with hyperbole and hype. Plus, Silicon Valley venture capitalists make a living by burning other people's money, and this creates hot air. We have seen several waves of internet hype before (do VRML or "The Long Boom" ring a bell?) Web 2.0 just is the latest example.

"Where all your rights have become only an accumulated wrong, where men must beg with bated breath for leave to subsist in their own land, to think their own thoughts, to sing their own songs, to gather the fruits of their own labors, and, even while they beg, to see things inexorably withdrawn from them – then, surely, it is a braver, a saner and a truer thing to be a rebel, in act and deed, against such circumstances as these, than to tamely accept it, as the natural lot of men." - Roger Casement, Irishman, (1864-1916).