The Studio for Urban Projects

3579 17th Street, San Francisco 94110

Wednesday February 17th 7:00 pm

for a conversation withIain Boal on Reinventing the Commons

Space is limited. Please RSVP to <rsvp@studioforurbanprojects.org>

Suggested donation $5-$15

Iain Boal will introduce for discussion the major themes – enclosure and common – that inform two forthcoming books. The Long Theft: Episodes in the History of Enclosure (Faber and Faber) traces key episodes in the history of ‘enclosure’ – the fencing off, literally and figuratively, of the world’s commoners from their means of livelihood. The dispossession of commoners worldwide continues under the banner of neoliberalism’s “structural adjustments”, justified as a necessary measure to avoid the “tragedy of the commons”, even though the result is a planet of slums. The enclosures of late modernity take unexpected and protean forms – for example, the criminalization of street life in favor of traffic circulation, the privatizing of the airwaves and the electromagnetic spectrum, brazen claims of ownership under new regimes of intellectual property, the sequestration and poisoning of immense tracts of land by the world’s military and nuclear powers (creating a global geography of sacrifice), the barcoding and expropriation of germplasm via the technologies of transfection, the trading of the atmosphere in an attempt to combat ecocide. The Long Theft is ultimately an argument for the restauration of the commons and an end to the commodity’s unhappy reign.

The Green Machine (Notting Hill Editions) offers a new history of the bicycle adequate to the 21st century. It traces its heterogeneous origins (busting some Eurocentric myths along the way), celebrates its freewheeling sociability and the part that human powered mobility must play in the settlements of the future, but refuses to disavow the bicycle’s entanglement with capitalist modernity’s brutal labor process and its complicity with the automobilism that has paved the planet, rendered cities unconvivial, and now threatens the biosphere itself.

Berkeley Center for New Media
New Media RoundTable

Judy Malloy: Paths of Memory and Painting
– Authoring New Media Narrative Poetry on the Web,

Thu, February 11, 12:30pm – 1:30pm
340 Moffitt, UC Berkeley

For details visit:  http://bcnm.berkeley.edu/events/upcoming

Created between 2008-2010, Paths of Memory and Painting
— http://www.well.com/user/jmalloy/luminous_landscape/paths.html —
is a three part work of new media narrative poetry. Set in Berkeley,
it is told by Bay Area artist, Dorothy Abrona McCrae, who recollects
the development of her work — from landscape painter to the Bay Area
Figurative style for which she is known.

Paths through the work that might normally be somewhat concealed in hypertext
interfaces (where the reader makes link choices and moves between unseen
narrative structures) are simultaneously visible in this work.
This talk documents the creation of the contrapuntal arrays that
comprise this work and discusses how these arrays were varied in the
three different parts. It looks at the role of the “lexia” as a
molecular unit in the creation of hypernarrative. And it also
sets forth how color, design and time dependent display contribute
to the reading experience.

Judy Malloy is a new media poet and information artist whose work has
been exhibited and published internationally. A pioneer on the Internet
and in electronic literature, in 1986 she wrote and programmed the seminal
hyperfiction “Uncle Roger,” and in the ensuing years she created a series
of innovative hypernarratives, including “l0ve0ne,” the first selection
in the Eastgate Web Workshop. In 1993, she was invited to Xerox PARC,
where she worked in the Computer Science Laboratory as the
first artist in their artist-in-residence program. In 1994, she created
one of the first arts websites, “Making Art Online”. (currently hosted
on the website of the Walker Art Center) Her recent work includes
“where every luminous landscape” that was short listed for the 2009
Prix poesie-media, France, and featured at The Future of Writing,
UC Irvine, on Cover to Cover on KPFA radio, and at the 2009 E-Poetry
Festival in Barcelona.

She is the editor of “Women, Art & Technology” (MIT Press, 2003)
and the host of the Authoring Software project. She is also the host
of the Art California Web Project, in partnership with the
California Studies Association.

Judy Malloy has a mobility disability and has walked on crutches/cane for
over fourteen years.

For details visit:  http://bcnm.berkeley.edu/events/upcoming