Great pics taken yesterday near Baltimore at Towson University! Thank you Occupy Towson and everyone involved!
The United States has fallen 27 places in the Press Freedom Index. The reason? The many arrests of journalists covering Occupy protests.
(via theatlantic)
Follow @MarylandICGA on Twitter
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If you’re a Maryland student or teacher with a Facebook, let us know if you’ll be attending our Feb. 11 intercollegiate GA
Maryland ICGA was established by a coalition of colleges in the Baltimore-Washington area to determine how student activists would respond to grievances articulated by Occupy Wall Street. This organization seeks to address concerns and demands of students specific to Maryland, and to localize national issues such as student debt, campus spending, unemployment, and the corporatization of education. We encourage students, who are both enthusiastic activists and also politically timid, to come together and confront problems within our universities and our nation. Please join MICGA on Towson University’s campus in our first event to begin forging our future.
Maryland Intercollegiate General Assembly (MIGA)
When I created @OccupyTowson on Twitter I was excited when I was contacted by @OccupyUMD for a potential meeting over the 2012 winter break. At this point, Occupy Towson had recently finished its first forum on Occupy Wall Street coordinated by a handful of student activists and supportive professors. Although there was a surprising amount of people who were interested in setting up an encampment on campus, I was apprehensive about such a move.
With the increase in evictions across the country, I noticed that occupiers had grown intensely attached to the physical spaces they inhabited. It is easy to understand why. With police circling encampments, mayors and governors attempting to oust them through legal authority, the dependance on face-to-face interaction, and the ability for encampments to provide shelter, there seemed to be a lot at stake if cities reclaimed these spaces. However, I was uncomfortable with how attached people had become and I grew concerned about the language of occupy. In the interest of making this a relatively short post, I’ll be brief. Although there was tremendous significance in occupying multiple cities around the U.S., we must realize especially with the onset of winter that this form of protest restricted the Occupy movement’s capacity to evolve and adapt to its circumstances. While people should continue to hold fast to spaces they have occupied, other forms of protest must emerge. So while I was excited that we were launching an Occupy Towson, I had no intentions of physically occupying or necessarily calling myself an occupier. The goal, as an institution of higher education, was to EDUCATE students on conditions that Occupy Wall Street speaks about, namely economic inequality, student loan debt, the entanglement between corporations and politicians, citizen journalism, and neoliberalism.
So after bursts of conversation here and there with student and faculty activists at Maryland schools (mostly Baltimore colleges) i set a date for Saturday at 3PM in Ellicott City. Given such a short notice I was surprised when 3PM rolled around and I began getting phone calls from students from UMD-CP, MICA, and Towson. We met at a place called Asian Court which just so happened to have Wi-Fi and a large seating area. There were 11 of us. This may not sound like a lot of people, but for students on winter break to organize a meeting in less than 2 weeks and have to drive 30 minutes to meet with strangers…that’s a big deal. After greeting one another, trading stories, and joking around for the first 20 minutes we got down to business and began talking about our next moves and what would be the outcome of this meeting. 2 hours later we decided that Towson University would host what we collectively named the Maryland Intercollegiate General Assembly (specifically avoiding the term occupy for specific reasons which i will explain in a later post).
The idea of MIGA is to 1) begin discussions on the role universities should play in this movement with a specific emphasis on student debt, 2) work with faculty on campus to gain support and resources, 3) how might we enlist the help and potentially endorse actions of and with organized labor, 4) specifically developing our needs to the geography rather and establishing local needs, 5) hold teach-ins to educate all students about a host of issues OWS speaks about, 6) and to rally around a direct action and critical mass in which we act on the ideas we speak of.
As students who have great skills and knowledge to offer, we decide to put this to use in supporting Occupy Wall Street and helping the movement evolve. Without students this movement may never expand beyond its typical portrayal in mainstream media.
***Notes from this meeting can be found here. Additional notes were also taken and will be posted soon.
Mohandas Gandhi: Dear Customer who stuck up for his little brother,
you thought I didn’t really notice. But I did. I wanted to high-five you.
Yesterday I had a pair of brothers in my store. One was maybe between 15-17. He was a wrestler at the local high school. Kind of tall, stocky and handsome. He had a younger brother, who was maybe about…
(Source: sweetupndown9)
BrainBarf: "The Girl in the Blue Bra" better named "The Woman of Tahrir"
For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, a picture from the recent round of brutality against protestors and especially women in Egypt is making waves.
“A veiled young woman is dragged and beaten by Egyptian military during a protest in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Her face is covered….
Breaking: LRAD used against Occupy Wall Street protesters in NYC today.
The Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) is a distance hailing device and non-lethal crowd control weapon developed by LRAD Corporation to send messages, warnings, and harmful, pain inducing tones over longer distances than normal loudspeakers.
According to the manufacturer’s specifications, the systems weigh from 15 to 320 pounds (6.8 to 150 kg) and can emit sound in a 30° beam at 2.5 kHz.
LRAD systems are used by maritime, law enforcement, military and commercial security companies to send instructions and warnings over distances, and to force compliance. LRAD is also used to deter wildlife from airport runways, wind and solar farms, nuclear power facilities, mining and agricultural operations and other industrial facilities.
(via socialuprooting)
Carlos Latuff, a political cartoonist, first caught my eye during the Egyptian Revolution. I was immediately moved by his provocative imagery, how deeply this imagery resonated with (and offended) his audience, its aesthetic appeal, and I remain inspired by the medium he chooses to distribute his art e.g., Twitpic & his personal website http://latuff2.deviantart.com/. Although native to Brazil, and while creating several cartoons depicting the negative outcomes of globalization on Latin America, Latuff has created heavily controversial art focusing on the Arab Spring, the Israel-Palestinian conflict (or as I prefer, the oppression of Palestine by the Israeli state), the post-9/11 atmosphere, the exploitative forces of corporate powers upon developing nations, and most recently Occupy Wall Street. It is clear from this resume, he is politically aware of many problems, debates, events, and criticisms occurring around the globe. His artwork has been printed on clothing, signs during protests, presented at forums and conferences, and is tweeted and retweeted by thousands on Twitter.
I stage this installation to evaluate the semiotic landscape in each image, attempting to tease out the various components of the “-scape,” their historical significance and development, and how each component, when interacting with another, becomes a multi-faceted text with a more expansive system of meaning. In other words, what can one extract from the image of the burning Twin Towers as a red ink pen? What is the historical development of Muslims post-9/11 in relation to terrorism, war, and the Middle East? How do both components of a targeted Muslim family and “Twin Towers as ink pen” work as vectors to complete the semiotic landscape? Additionally, one cannot simply look at the context of the image, but also the context of viewership. A high-school classroom in New York would clearly have different perspectives and understandings of what the Twin Towers represent as opposed to a high-school classroom in Baghdad, Irag. I hope to communicate to viewers of this instillation that an image has multiple representations as a result of human agency, the idea in this context that every individual is capable of being a cultural reproducer. Multiple meanings exist within an image because of the alternative representations of the semiotic landscape that humans create. Perhaps it would be better if I referred to an image as semiotic landscapes.
As a curator, firstly, I believe objectivity is an unattainable fantasy. This shouldn’t come as a surprise since I give so much attention to the idea of human agency and cultural reproducers. I can not be objective simply because I, as a human, perceive the world according to a system of laws, a paradigm. This system within itself is not neutral, natural, or objective but rather a cultural construction. How can I be objective if nothing is True or Pure? I would argue only subjectivity exists. I, and others, can attempt to distance ourselves from polarizing sides of a particular issue, however objectivity is out of the question. With that said, this installation is a product of self-reflexive expression. I mentioned earlier how I care to view the Israel-Palestinian conflict. My reasoning for choosing this artwork is its powerful and spot-on messages that deeply resonate with my understandings of globalization, war crimes, income inequality, and a host of political topics Latuff speaks to.
To represent the semiotic landscapes I will attempt to produce a video displaying each image, and a series of images that most likely depict the historical representations of the components that make up the semiotic text. For example, the image of the Palestinian boy sitting in the UNESCO seat will be followed by images of news clips of Palestine’s membership into UNESCO, images of Palestine’s conflicts with Israel, images portraying America’s foreign policy with Israel & Palestine, etc. This may seem confusing since I mentioned that images are not subject to a singular representation and they possess multiple meanings. However, this is precisely why I want to add more images to this already complex image. My desire is not to understand the True meaning, but to demonstrate how an image/component serves to condense multiple images/components into one relatively coherent semiotic text.
Mortville: The Queer Encampment at Occupy Baltimore
An article on the queer encampment at #occupybaltimore by Corey Reidy
