The War of the Worlds

The War of The Worlds
File under: semiotic warfare, media activism, critical entertainment

Friday March 4th, 2005 at 4:30 pm
Saturday March 5th, 2005 at 2:00 pm
Einstein Auditorium - Barney Building
Department of Art and Art Professions, New York University
34 Stuyvesant Street (at 9th Street between 3rd and 2nd Avenues)
New York City

Featuring
The Yes Men
Yomango
Big Noise
Candida TV
Eddo Stern
retroYou/Nostalg

Presented by d-i-n-a <digital is not analog> in conjunction with the
New
York University Department of Culture and Communication and Department
of Art and Art Professions.

The War of The Worlds
The American Union and The United States of Europe: the old world, the
new world and the new world order. Do we really live in political
blocks
with conflicting interests and diverging ideologies, or are these just
interchangeable chessboards for the same transnational players?
d-i-n-a, the Southern European-born collective of media agitators,
travels to New York City, the historical bridge between the old world
and the new world, to present The War of The Worlds, a showdown of
projects and performances from both North America and Europe. During a
two-day session of open and direct confrontation, artists, activists,
engineers and pranksters will present their work in the fields of
semiotic warfare, critical entertainment and media activism.
The War of The Worlds, a title that echoes both the fiction of
civilization's clash and the media-induced illusion of its reality,
will
show how these actors are able to imagine and create new worlds, beyond
the boundaries of the Atlantic Ocean and the limits of the Atlantic
Pact.
The modification of widely available tools of communication and
entertainment, high and low profile forms of subvertising and semiotic
manipulations, the development of autonomous channels of communication;
these are the playing fields of our guests. The War of The Worlds will
have neither winners nor losers, just many enthusiasts playing a game
where creativity, knowledge and technology speak the language of
advertising, art and entertainment, to create the conditions to efface
boundaries and break fences, and ultimately to bring people together
and
back to reality.

Schedule of Events
Semiotic Warfare
Friday March 4th 2005
4:30 pm Introduction: Professor Nicholas Mirzoeff, Director, Visual
Culture MA Program.
5:00 The Yes Men presents "The Yes Bush Can!" (US)
6:30 Yomango (Spain)

Media Activism and Critical Entertainment
Saturday March 5th 2005
2:00 pm Big Noise (US)
3:30 Candida (Italy)
5:00 Eddo Stern (US)
6:30 Nostalg/retroYou (Spain)

8 pm Reception

Organizers

d-i-n-a is a cultural association based in Barcelona, Bologna, Rome and
New York developing projects and events related to arts, grassroots
media and communication. Since it creation in the year 2000, d-i-n-a
organized four international festivals dedicated to different forms of
direct intervention in the world through digital technology, arts, and
media. http://www.d-i-n-a.net

The Department of Culture and Communication is the premier center for
the study of media, culture and communication at NYU enrolling 1,000
undergraduate and graduate students. The alumni include media
executives, professors, scholars, journalists, media educators, and
activists. http://www.nyu.edu/education/dcc

The Department of Art and Art Professions brings together artists,
educators, therapists, administrators and visual culture innovators who
influence the visual arts at local, national, and international levels.
http://www.nyu.edu/education/art

Featuring:

The Yes Men
The Yes Men are a genderless, loose-knit association of some three
hundred impostors worldwide. Their feeling today can be summed up in
one
simple phrase: Value-Added in a Changing World. Although their name
contains the word "Men," it doesn't describe who they are, it describes
what they do: they use any means necessary to agree their way into the
fortified compounds of commerce, ask questions, and then smuggle out
the
stories of their undercover escapades to provide a public glimpse at
the
behind-the-scenes world of business. In other words, the Yes Men are
team players… but they play for the opposing team.
http://www.theyesmen.org

Yomango
Yomango is a brand name whose goal is not the sale of products but
lifestyles, just like with all the other big brands. However, in the
case of Yomango, the lifestyle is based on shoplifting as a form of
disobedience and direct action against multinational corporations. Just
as the market captures desires, expectations and experiences and sells
them back as products, the Yomango style promotes the "expropriation"
of
what was once part of the commons. Yomango is an open-ended process
generating tools, prototypes and dynamics that flow and proliferate,
waiting to be re-appropriated. http://www.yomango.net

Big Noise
Big Noise Tactical is a not-for-profit, all-volunteer collective of
media-makers around the world, dedicated to circulating beautiful,
passionate, revolutionary images. Big Noise crystallizes radical
community and weaves a network of skin and images, of dreams and bone,
of solidarity and connection against the isolation, alienation and
cynicism of capitalist decomposition. Big Noise is tactical because our
media is a part of movements, imbedded in a history of struggle.
http://www.bignoisefilms.com

Candida TV
Candida TV is the result of the encounter among different realities
such
as underground cinema, video production, rave parties, street theaters,
independent radios and counterculture magazines. Candida's vision is
inspired by a hacker attitude towards video technology: TV can become
something that everyone should be able to put their hands on. Candida
thus aims at uncovering the mainstream media mystification of reality
by
exasperating the form of TV shows and stretching them toward the
absurd.
The infiltration into mainstream media walks hand in hand with the
creation a grassroots information network, to give people the
opportunity to directly access communication technologies.
http://candida.thing.net

Eddo Stern
Eddo Stern was born in Tel Aviv and currently lives near Los Angeles.
His work explores new modes of narrative and documentary, fantasies of
technology and history, and cross-cultural representation in film,
computer games, and on the Internet. He works in various media
including
computer software/game design, kinetic sculpture, performance, and film
and video production. His short Machinima films include "Sheik Attack",
"Vietnam Romance" and "Deathstar". He is a founder of C-level, a
cooperative media lab in LA's Chinatown, where he co-produced the
physical computer gaming projects "Waco Resurrection", "Tekken Torture
Tournament", "Cockfight Arena", " and the internet meme conference
"C-level Memefest".
http://www.eddostern.com

retroYou/Nostalg
retroYou focuses on the manipulation and the reverse engineer of
software code, as a programmer and as an artist at the same time.
Videogames' code represents his favorite field of intervention,
especially car race games and flight simulators. retroYou discovers
hidden features of the code and alters them, including the fundamental
rules of functioning of whole games, thus irreparably distorting the
game experience. Videogames seem to be just a step in retroYou's wider
investigation, which goes towards a sort of continuous research and
experimentation with secret or background information, be it in form of
media archeology, former classified data or propaganda materials. The
hidden connections between techno-religious beliefs, military
apparatuses, hi-tech industry and corporate domination seem to be the
target of this investigation. http://www.retroyou.org


For further information, please contact:
[email protected]
call
212-998-5799
or visit:
http://www.d-i-n-a.net/wotw/