NYC Critical Art Ensemble benefit, October 3

SCREENING, TALK & BENEFIT FOR THE CRITICAL ART ENSEMBLE:
(organized by Autonomedia and Marianne Shaneen)

Sunday October 3, 2004 at 7pm
Ocularis at: Galapagos Art & Performance Space
70 North 6th Street (between Wythe and Kent)
Williamsburg Brooklyn, NY 11211
tel/fax: 718-388-8713
http://www.ocularis.org/


Since May 2004, Steve Kurtz, founding member of the acclaimed Critical
Art Ensemble and professor in the Art Department at SUNY Buffalo, has
been under investigation by the FBI along with colleagues and friends,
on Grand Jury charges relating to bio-terrorism under the Patriot Act.
The ordinary biological equipment and bacteria seized by the FBI from
Kurtz's home can be found in any high school science lab, and was used
to create art that critiques the hazardous and unmitigated use of
biotechnology, and the history of US involvement in germ warfare
experiments, (including the Bush administration's earmarking of
hundreds of millions of dollars to erect high-security laboratories
around the country).
Since then the FBI has changed tactics and formally charged Steve Kurtz
of Critical Art Ensemble and his collaborator, Robert Ferrell,
Professor of Genetics at the University of Pittsburgh, with four counts
of mail and wire fraud, which each carry a maximum sentence of 20 years
in prison and a $250,000 fine.

The Federal charges have been met with a huge outcry from artists,
scientists, researchers, and professors.
Clearly the absurd and disturbing charges are an attempt to use the
Patriot Act to target and intimidate artists and researchers who are
critical or controversial, and to curtail artistic and intellectual
freedom.

please visit http://caedefensefund.org

Speakers for this event will include:
–Nato Thompson (MASS MoCA curator of May 2004 show "The
Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere - a brief survey of
interventionist political art practices of the 90s" which was to
include work by the CAE.
–Greg Sholette- artist, writer and activist. He was a founding member
of the REPOhistory artist's collective and of Political Art
Documentation and Distribution, a graduate of The Cooper Union, The
University of California San Diego and the Whitney Museum Independent
Studies Program in Critical Theory as well as Chair of the Master of
Arts in Art Administration at the School of the Art Institute of
Chicago and a former Curator of Education for the New Museum of
Contemporary Art in New York City.
–Keith Sanborn- artist, theorist and curator, has been working in
film, photography, digital media and video since the late 1970s. He has
also translated several of the films of Guy Debord into English.
–John Henry of the Institute for Applied Autonomy, an art and
engineering collective that develops technologies for political
dissent. Projects include the development of robots that can leaflet or
draw graffiti, and the text messaging " TXTmob" tool used by protestors
at the RNC.

We'll be showing video pieces including:

Critical Art Ensemble:
TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zone), 9 minutes
Gender Crash, 5 minutes
Exit Culture, 6 minutes
Body Without Organs, 4 minutes

Peggy Ahwesh:
She-Puppet 2001, 15 min, color, sound
Re-editing footage collected from months of playing Tomb Raider, Ahwesh
transforms the video game into a reflection on identity and mortality,
acknowledging the intimate relationship between Lara Croft and her
player. Moving beyond her implicit feminist critique of the problematic
female identity, she enlarges the dilemma of Croft's entrapment to that
of the individual in an increasingly artificial world.

Eric Henry:
Bear Witness III
This music video for Dan the Automator is a four-part study in hubris.
Each
section explores a different ego trip- military, cosmetic, scientific,
and engineering/industrial-and takes it to its logical conclusion. Pride
cometh before the fall.

Pirates & Emperors (or, Size Does Matter)
P&E is a wry political cartoon about bullies big and small. It is set to
original music and animated in a style reminiscent of the popular
"Schoolhouse Rock" educational video series. It illustrates the notion
that if you are a successful enough bully, you can pretty much write
your own
ticket and go by the name "emperor" or "president" instead.
Critiques U.S. involvement in the 1980's Contra war in Nicaragua as
well as the current situation in Iraq.

Rachel Mayeri:
STORIES FROM THE GENOME

Part cloning experiment, part documentary, STORIES FROM THE GENOME
follows an unnamed CEO-geneticist whose company sequenced the Human
Genome in 2003 - a genome that secretly was his own. Not satisfied
with this feat, the scientist self-replicates, producing a colony of
clone-scientists to save himself from Alzheimer's.
The cloudy future of our genetic understandingand the suspected map
of human history contained in the smallest piece of every one of us
is on display in a collection of ideas ranging from Nature vs.
Nurture to cloning to psychoanalysis to homunculus theory to Mortal
Kombat to the semi-conscious act of sexual selection. Mayeri's video is
intended to comment upon the dangers of short-sighted, self-interest in
contemporary biotechnology and its appropriation for profit of human
genetic information.

Keith Sanborn:
"Operation Double Trouble" involves detourning a US government
propaganda film.

Eli Elliott:
"ASSCroft", a hilarious 4 min.PixelVision piece that touches on the
Patriot Act.

Dara Greenwald:
"Strategic Cyber Defense", 4 mins. of jaw-dropping paranoid pathology
from the Dept of Defense, a warped 'in-house' training video which Dara
has chopped up into the perfect mix of shredded clueless hysteria.

The Dept of Defense:
What You Should Know About Biological Warfare, 1952
How can we protect ourselves against the threats of germs and toxins?
Cold War America gears up to fend off threats from unconventional
bioweapons.

Manuel deLanda:
A rare screening of his Ism-Ism (16mm. 1979).
Manuel deLanda- contemporary Mexican philosopher and renown author of
War in the Age of Intelligent Machines and A Thousand Years of
Nonlinear History who has written on topics as diverse as warfare,
linguistics, economics, evolution, chaos theory, self-organizing
matter, nonlinear dynamics, artificial life and intelligence, the
internet and architecture.
Ism-Ism (16mm. 1979)
This film documents Manuel DeLanda's graffiti activities between 1977
and 1979. Instead of tags and other more familiar forms of art
interventions on the street, DeLanda attacked commercial billboards,
morphing the faces of people in ads into bizarre looking monsters.