[iDC] Monday Night -- 12.06.04 -- Participatory Mapping+ Stateless Nation

Fri Dec 3 13:27:24 EST 2004

Monday Night -- 12.06.04 -- Participatory mapping+ Stateless Nation

A. Participatory mapping beyond the point-and-click"

B. Stateless Nation

Contents:

A. Participatory mapping beyond the point-and-click"

1. About this Monday Night
2. About "Twenty-Four Dollar Island"
3. Interesting Links
4. About Trebor Scholz

B. Stateless Nation

5. About Stateless Nation
6. About The room of dreams
7. Passports / On the border / The book
8. About Sandi Hilal and AlessandroPetti

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Note: tune in -- Trebor on the Radio Tonight!
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Friday December 3, 9-10pm
Columbia University Radio / WKCR, 89.9 FM
As part of Live Constructions Archive--
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/wkcr/archives/newmusic/index.html
(with Anthony Townsend-- http://urban.blogs.com/)

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1. About this Monday Night

What: Workshop
When: 7:00pm, Monday December 6, 2004
Where: 16 Beaver St. NY, NY 4th Floor
Who: Open to all (As Always)

We are happy to have Sandi, Trebor and Alessandro at 16Beaver this Monday.

A lot of us know Trebor from an event, an exhibition, a conference or 
a panel discussion...Tonight he will facilitate an informal workshop 
on participatory mapping.

Trebor will start with a brief introduction to collaborative, 
situated mapping projects and "Twenty-Four Dollar Island," an online 
mapping project about Lower Manhattan in particular.
http://www.24dollarisland.net

Then you will be asked to contribute your stories, and images of Lower
Manhattan. More below.

We are also excited to have Sandi and Alessandro present, since they are
usually based in Venice. we will show the room of dreams, and they will be
present to discuss Stateless Nation which addresses the situation in 
the occupied Palestinian territories. See below.

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2. About "Twenty-Four Dollar Island"

"Twenty-Four Dollar Island" is an online participatory mapping project of
Lower Manhattan.

The goal of the project is to create free, complete, up-to-date and reliable
material about Lower Manhattan and to give everybody
the chance to share their histories and stories. This user-contributed
information can start to address misrepresentations of local histories.

With the 16BeaverGroup situated right amidst the geo-political
focus of this project, the workshop will give you an opportunity to add your
stories and images of physical changes in the rebuilding process of Lower
Manhattan, local job experiences, reports from demonstrations, labor
struggles, or alternative histories of the area. Bring your personal
narratives and photos to be scanned, or images already on a CD. We will read
stories to each other and add the material to the map.

For examples of stories that were already contributed:
http://molodiez.org/island/examples.php

We will discuss how this mapping tool could be developed further and for
different locations in New York and internationally. How can residents and
commuters be motivated to get involved in such public project? How could
artists use this mapping tool for their individual practice?
Collaborations with local communities in Singapore and Sao Paolo (Brazil)
are currently under way. These projects develop this mapping tool focusing
on the needs and desires of the people who will use it, involving them in
the development of the functionality of the tool beyond mere content
contribution.

For questions please write to: trebor at thing dot net

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3. Interesting Links

Scholz has facilitated several large scale programs on the intersection of
emerging technologies, art, and politics:

"Free Cooperation" (2004)
http://freecooperation.org

"Right2Fight" (2002)
http://www.molodiez.org/right2fight/slc.html

"At Walmart It Still Looks the Same" (2001)
http://molodiez.org/acc/

"Kosov@: Carnival in the Eye of the Storm" (2000)
http://www.mediachannel.org/arts/perspectives/eyestorm/index.shtml

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4. About Trebor Scholz

Trebor Scholz has exhibited and presented at dozens of international media
festivals, exhibitions, and conferences including Transmediale (Berlin),
Next 5 Minutes Festival (Amsterdam), Electronic Language International
Festival (Sao Paolo), Multimedia Art Asia Pacific Conference (Singapore) and
the Intersociety of Electronic Art (Helsinki, Tallin). His collaborative and
individual work was included in the Venice Biennial (with Martha Rosler/ The
Fleas), the Sao Paolo Biennial (with Carol Flax), and the Web Biennial of
the Istanbul Museum for Contemporary Art. Scholz is an East Berlin-born, New
York-based media artist, writer and organizer who works in the divergent
fields of socially situated new media art practices. Scholz is faculty at
the Department of Media Study, SUNY at Buffalo and is a research
fellow at the Hochschule for Kunst and Gestaltung, Zurich.

Recent texts and biography:
http://molodiez.org

"79 Days" (2003/2004)
A web-specific hypermedia piece about the media coverage of the wars in
Kosovo and Iraq.
http://79days.net

In 2004, Scholz founded of the Institute for Distributed Creativity. Its
research and events focus on collaboration in media art, technology, and
theory with an emphasis on social contexts. He is based in Brooklyn and
teaches media theory, and new media art at the Department of Media Study,
SUNY at Buffalo.
http://distributedcreativity.org

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5. About Stateless Nation

Stateless Nation is a long term research project and an exhibition on 
the frontiers of citizenship. Occupied Palestinian Territories are 
the place where to investigate and to observe the new relations 
between territory, State and populations, and to reflect the new 
meanings and implications of the physical and social space.
What is Palestine today and where are it's borders? Who are the 
Palestinians and which kind of citizenship do they posses? Why are so 
many peoples forced to live outside Palestine, in Lebanon, Syria, 
Jordan, in the countries of the Gulf, in Europe and United States? 
What dream do they share, no matter where they are?
The project at its recent state as it was shown in recent exhibitions 
is composed of 4 models: passports - the dream's room - on the border 
- senza stato una nazione_the book.

  www.statelessnation.org
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6. About The room of dreams

"What is your dream?" is the question asked to more than fifty 
Palestinians interviewed in the Occupied Territories, Israel and some 
of the Diaspora countries. The result is a frontal attack to 
stereotypes and simplified categories which often minimize the 
complexity and variety
of human experience, especially in the case of Palestinians. Stories, 
evidences and thoughts collected not only to focus on a tragedy but 
most of all to draw attention on the great cultural ferment that 
these tragic events have created. The room of dreams is the physical 
place where all dreams are collected.

___________________________________________________
7. Passports / On the border / The book

7.1 Passports
The Palestinians are people who find themselves simultaneously under 
military occupation and exile and are strangers in their own land. 
People that are rooted in the absence of the place, the path of this 
absence are evident in the documents which should represent them: 
Lebanese travel document for Palestinians refugees, Egyptian travel 
document for Palestinians refugees, Syrian travel document for 
Palestinians refugees, travel document by the Palestinian Authority, 
Israeli Passport, Jerusalem 's special identity card, stateless 
passport, Jordanian Passports, European or American passports, some 
have no documents at all. The installation is composed by ten huge 
travel documents and passports  (2,20x3,00m), are the singe, the 
trace of the negation of the Palestinian citizenship.

7.2 On the border
It is in the planning of the territory more than any other political, 
religious and economical field, that the different strategies and 
tools of the Israeli occupation appear clear. The places, their 
conquest and their conservation, are the theatre of a daily life 
conflict. The installation presents the territory of the West Bank 
through a new topography that use three different point of 
observation: daily life practice, the mental maps and the satellite 
photo. The attempt is to represent the consequences of the Israeli 
occupation.

7.3 The book

Stateless Nation is a book who seeks answers to a very simple 
question "who are the Palestinians?" and attempts to familiarize the 
reader with Palestinians point of view, often almost unknown and 
mystified by stereotypes, ignorance and incorrect information. Even 
in recent and
current years when Palestine and Palestinian are a daily topic. 
Through the direct contributions from intellectuals, artists, 
doctors, sociologists, architects, workers and poets this books tries 
to articulate a message, a point of view, an attitude and a 
philosophy spoken through the voices of the protagonists.

___________________________________________________
8. About Sandi Hilal and AlessandroPetti

Sandi Hilal, Bethlehem 1973, Architect, researcher in "transborder 
policies for daily life" in the University of Trieste.
Alessandro Petti, Pescara 1973, Architect, researcher in urbanism in 
the University of Architecture IUAV Venice.

information: www.statelessnation.org; info at statelessnation.org