March 2006

NYC Immigrant Rights Marches: April 1, April 10

Posted March 31, 2006 by in Events

Sorry for the short notice, but I just got this myself. These marches are of the utmost importance: at least 500,000 people turned out in Los Angeles --- let's match it in NYC!

Beautiful folks:

The attacks on immigrants in the US have been very clear as of late. Millions across the country are saying NO to HR 4437 and NO to punitive measures against Immigrants. Say YES to Immigrant Rights and Legalization:

In keeping with the spirits of momentum from Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Dallas, San Antonio, Denver, and the entire country, New York City is going to support Immigrants, Human Rights, and Civil Rights with marches on both April 1st and April 10th. Please pass this information along to any one/group/listserv that might want to participate in New York on these days. This is the watershed moment in the movement to support Immigrants -- some are calling this a continuation of the great legacy of Civil Rights Movements in the US!!!

Please attend both rallies if possible. The April 10th rally is said to have widespread community support, but both are extremely great ways to demonstrate solidarity and support for Immigrants. Let's go out there and support our friends, family, and neighbors!!!

Saturday April 1st:

--- Meet at Cadman Plaza, Brooklyn by 11 AM

--- A,C Train to High Street Station

--- F Train to Jay Street Borough Hall Station

--- 2,3,4,5 Trains to Borough Hall and Clark Street Stations

--- Buses for Brooklyn: B25, B38, B41, B45, B51 Tillary Street Station

--- Route: Brooklyn Bridge

--- Rally Ends: 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan

Monday April 10th:

--- City Hall, Manhattan 3 -- 7 PM

--- 4,5,6 or J,M,Z trains to City Hall / A,C,E trains to Broadway-Nassau

--- NOTE: LOCATION CHANGE! Although early announcements listed Battery Park, the rally has been moved to City Hall. Organizers are asking people to wear whie shirts as a sign of peaceful protest

Details at April10.org and NoHR4437.org. See you there.

UPDATE 4/3/06: Photos from the march on flickr. See NoHR4437.org for updates and more events, including the April 10th march and May 1st national boycott.

Image at top: No Human Being is Illegal by Mark Vallen. Originally created in 1988 as a bilingual poster to bring attention to the plight of Central American war refugees. Limited edition print available for sale here.

Support the SHAC7

Posted March 28, 2006 by in Free Speech

goreb wrote us a few days ago and sent us a picture of this beautiful wheatpaste that he had made in support of one of the SHAC7, Kevin Kjonaas. He, along with 5 others, have been found guilty of multiple federal felonies for advocating for the closure of the Huntingdon Life Scienes animal-testing lab. The charges brought against them are the first to be tried using the Animal Enterprise Protection Act of 1992 (formely known as the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act) and the consequences for activist communities and free speech rights are serious.

The following comes from Shac 7 webpage explaining the indictment:

Originally, seven individuals were charged, along with the organization Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty USA. The individuals were Kevin Kjonaas, Lauren Gazzola, Jacob Conroy, Joshua Harper, Andrew Stepanian, Darius Fullmer, and John McGee. McGee was eventually dropped from the case.

All of the defendants were charged with conspiracy to violate the Animal Enterprise Protection Act, a never-before-applied 1992 statute. Kjonaas, Gazzola, Conroy, and Harper were also charged with conspiracy to harass using a telecommunications device (sending black faxes). Kjonaas, Gazzola, Conroy, and SHAC USA were charged with conspiracy to commit interstate stalking and three counts of interstate stalking via the Internet.

While the charges themselves sound alarming, the defendants are not actually accused of having personally engaged in terrorist or threatening acts. Instead, the government’s case centers around the idea that aboveground organizers of a campaign are responsible for any and all acts that anyone engages in while furthering the goals of the organizers. In this case, the claim is that the SHAC7 should be imprisoned because underground activists took illegal actions against companies with ties to H.L.S.

If it weren’t so serious, this distortion of the law would be laughable, and yet somehow the defendants were convicted and are now facing years in federal prison based on the claim that being part of an activist campaign is tantamount to being a member of a global conspiracy.

Here is the rest of the background.

This story has not received much press and your support is needed to help spread the word and to raise funds so that a succesful appeal can be mounted. For more info about the case and for ways to offer support go here.

To donate money for the appeal click here.

LED Throwies at Astor Place cube

Posted March 21, 2006 by in Street Art / Graffiti

Last weekend, a few of us ventured up to the Chelsea headquarters of the infamous Graffiti Research Lab and helped build 600 or so LED throwies. GRL agents Q and 005 had devised a way to write with the LEDs and wanted to try out a field test on the cube scuplture in Astor Place.

After they wrote a message of solidarity with Borf, we let loose with a few hundred of the little gizmos. A crowd gathered and was really into it. A group of 7-or-8 year old kids started picking the throwies off the cube and throwing them back again. At one point a belligerent touristy guy demanded to know what the point of this spectacle was and his wife yelled, "Oh Harold! Shut up and throw the thing already!"

Making throwies is easy and fun. You can find step-by-step instructions at Instructables. Check out GRL's video here and Visual Resistance's photos on flickr.

Many thanks to GRL for the invite and for letting us explore all their high-tech graffiti inventions. Expect nothing but great things from them in the future!

Repression and resistance in Barcelona

Posted March 10, 2006 by in Political Art

Via ekosystem comes word of a crackdown against so-called "quality of life" offences in Barcelona. Zosen writes:

[The] new law says is illegal to skate, do graffiti, posters, stickers, give flyers, eat or drink on the streets, put your wet clothes on your window (to get dry), prostitution, throw up on the streets, street sellers (like cd's, dvd, artesany, food,,,,), musicians (without permission), malabars, acrobacies, jump,,,,etc...

is fuckin' crazy our city now is grey!!

A wide coalition protested the new laws in December. Orianomada writes on flickr:

ManiFESTAacción contra la ordenanza cívica (algo así como el TOLERANCIA CERO de New York) que quiere aprobar el ayuntamiento de Barcelona, el 23 de Diciembre de 2005, promueve limitar y reprimir el uso del espacio público. En esta manifestación estuvimos, prostitutas, skaters, grafiteros, movimientos sociales y vecinales, artistas callejeros, etc.

Rough translation: Protest/party/action against the civic ordinance (something like New York's ZERO TOLERANCE) that the Barcelona City Council wants to approve on December 23, 2005, aims to limit and to repress the use of the public space. In this manifestation we were prositutes, skaters, graffiti writers, local and social movements, street artists, etc.

You can check out photos of the protest on flickr, and a short video on YouTube.

For all you Spanish and Catalan readers out there, here are some links to more info on the new ordinance and acts of resistance them: El carrer és de tothom (a bilingual blog in Catalan and Spanish), Cinismo, and Barcelona Indymedia.

All you English-only readers better enroll in some Spanish classes quick, because all I could find was this one English blog that covered the issue: Mudd up!

Visual Resistance at the Whitney Biennial

Posted March 1, 2006 by in VR Projects

Last weekend, members of Visual Resistance installed a mural at the Whitney Museum. Our friends at Deep Dish TV had been invited to show their Shocking and Awful series at the Whitney Biennial. They were assigned a 20-inch TV mounted on a 20-foot wall, which they wanted to spice up a little bit. They called us about 10 days ago and asked us to come up with a mural based on Picasso's Guernica.

Picasso painted Guernica in response to Nazi Germany and fascist Italy's savage bombing of the civilian population of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. The painting was toured throughout Europe to raise awareness of republican Spain's cause, and after the war was exhibited in New York to raise money for Spanish refugees. It has been an inspiration to antiwar activists and political artists for decades. Colin Powell had a tapestry reproduction of the painting at United Nations headquarters covered up before his speech selling the Iraq war. Artist Mary Frank created hundreds of placards with images from Guernica for people to carry during the massive February 15, 2003 protests against the war, and World War 3 Arts in Action created similar placards for the March 22, 2003 protest. Deep Dish interviewed Mary Frank for their Art of Resistance segment.

In 7 days, we created paper cutouts of four figures from Guernica and mounted them on a background of wheatpasted stock ticker on a wall measuring 21' x 10' on the Whitney's lower level. Here are some photos of the installation:

More photos on our photolog and flickr. One of our goals in this project was to create the images using common street art techniques so that they would be easily reproducible for use on the street. The paper cutouts turned out the be very intricate and fragile and took a long time to paste up, but I am including below two images that I quickly Photoshopped from pictures of the installation that you can download and use to create stencils, silkscreens, or cutouts:

The lamp is by far the easiest figure to recreate -- for stencils and paper cutouts, you just have to bridge the lightbulb to the top curve. The other figures are progressively more complicated, but each can be reproduced with any number of common printing techniques.

Several months back, John Unger proposed an open-source art project called American Guernica. The idea was to put Picasso's painting on billboards throught the US as a protest against the current wars being waged by the US. While billboard space is probably out of our range, working on this Whitney installation has gotten VR folks talking about using Guernica images on the street in New York. If you're interested, drop us a line. I'd especially like to talk to talented graphic designers who can transform some of the figures into ready-to-cut stencil templates using Illustrator.

Counter-Recruitment Comics

Posted March 1, 2006 by in Free Speech

We recieved news about this amazing project from comic artist Sabrina Jones, contributer to World War 3 Illustrated and Wobblies! :

"Mixed Signals" - a counter-recruitment tool in comic book form - is now available for use in activism, outreach, counseling, education, starting conversations and saving lives.

For sample copies email me your address and how you'll use them.

Or send me a snail mail to:

Sabrina Jones

811 Cortelyou Rd #6O,

Brooklyn NY 11218

Suggested donation is $2 per copy. If you are a no-budget group - we can send you some free copies, otherwise, please contribute what you can to keep this thing rolling. Currently the comic is 16 pages, black and white. We're hoping to raise funds to print it with color covers (any leads?) but for now, let's get the message out! If you have access to a good quality copier, you can order one copy, remove the staples, and make your own multiples.

Mixed Signals contains specific information on the enlistment contract, benefits and obligations. It proposes alternative sources of college money and job training, and non-violent forms of community service. Stories about fictional characters alternate with illustrated fact-sheets about military life and non-military opportunities. I questions today's militaristic climate by raising the issue of conscientious objection, through a fictional character, then two recent cases and a brief history. The comic offers useful, concrete, legal facts, as well as prompting deeper reflection on the role of militarism in our lives and society. Mixed Signals takes vital information from flyers and web sites, and puts it in an appealing, easy-to-pass-along format, to catch the eyes of our most vulerable young citizens.