Tara Raye Russo

Performance art and video proposal, a request for a performance art venue to recreate the second in the series PROTEST: Stand Up in Solidarity (Farmers vs. Monsanto) No. 2

Background of the original performance

PROTEST: Stand Up in Solidarity (Farmers vs. Monsanto) No. 1 is a contained protest, a march in place, a studio practice that allows participants to feel the energy roused by protest.

In addition to being broadcasted live for Low Lives: Occupy! this performance (No. 1) was recorded so that it could then be made available to publicly recreate sequentially by a process of taking the prior recording and projecting it onto the current protest/performance, recording, so on

and so forth. This series of layering of each protest from venue to venue will increase the awareness of the matters at stake as well as the number of protesters documented. While the names of the protesters remains clear and concise what remains to be seen and is of interest to me is how the layering of recorded audio and video will develop and transform. What remains to be

seen is if the audio and video abstract and become the quintessential energy of protest, from awareness, to frustration, to anger and catharsis. Although a public call out was made for

participants to come to my studio in Newark, NJ to protest, one person was in attendance. Some questions that remain unanswered are: Outside of city centers why don’t people protest in this

country? When, why and how did Americans become so apathetic?

This protest is to show our support for farmers utilizing organic practices. Whether it is 2 people or 50 this performance is to make a stand and let the world know we are conscious citizens

aware of where our food comes from and what it entails to get it from farm to plate. The protest is to help expose the monstrosities of corporate agriculture by demanding the labeling of GMO

foods and to support sustainable practices and a local economy.

Requirements for the performance

A wall to project (original performance on) approx. 10’H x 14’W

An announcement prior to the event to ready anyone interested in Protest to wear white or very light colored clothing. People participating can bring signs or drums. The project is

experimental in nature; my direction is contingent upon how many people participate.  Participants will view the projection of the prior performance before hand. The first take is played

back for evaluation the second is most likely the final cut. Runtime of performance is 6 minutes.Live Performance, Protest: Stand in Solidarity No.1 (Farmers vs. Monsanto) for Low Lives:Occupy!

PROTEST: Stand Up in Solidarity (Farmers vs. Monsanto) No. 1 performance by Tara Raye RussoLow Lives: Occupy! March 3, 2012. program starts at 6pm.
My performance is scheduled for 9:28pm. Stand Up!
http://www.occupywithart.com/llo-live-channel/ 

This protest is to show our support for farmers utilizing organic practices. Whether it is 2 people or 50 this performance is to make a stand and let the world know we are conscious citizens aware of where our food comes from and what it entails to get it from farm to plate. This protest is to help expose the monstrosities of corporate agriculture by demanding the labeling of GMO foods and to support sustainable practices and a local economy.

The concept and its future: PROTEST: Stand Up in Solidarity (Farmers vs. Monsanto) No. 1 is a contained protest, a march in place, a studio practice that allows participants to feel the energy and anger roused by protest. We stand for conscious action in our determination to fix what is wrong and make it right.

In addition to being broadcasted live for Low Lives: Occupy! This performance (No. 1) will be recorded and made available to the public to sequentially recreate and to build upon in strength by numbers. This will be accomplished by a process of taking the prior recording and projecting it onto the current protest in a series of layering of each protest.

This material is copyrighted and may not be reproduced without prior consent from the artist.

About Low Lives: Low Lives: Occupy! will be in partnership with Occupy With Art and The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics.

Low Lives: Occupy! Is an international platform designed to enable artists, audiences, and presenters in alliance with the Occupy movement to support the occupation, will transmit live performances, actions, and happenings online as they occur in real time around the world. The Occupy protests, and the myriad of perspectives and experiences related to this unique moment, will be amplified, explored, and experimented with, through Low Lives’ internet-based creative platform. Low Lives: Occupy! recognizes the powerful opportunity that is the presentation of performances from around the world, and invites artists to open eyes and minds by presenting a radical re-imagining of possible ways of existing and relating.

Over the past 4 years Low Lives has developed a platform that invites and enables artists, audiences, and presenting venues to "plug in and participate" from anywhere an internet connection exists. This technological platform brings a history of supporting artists’ full creative freedom to imagine new worlds and is now offered to artists interested to present work in solidarity with #OWS. Online documentation of the live event will allow Low Lives: Occupy! to inspire online audiences far into the future.

video stills

Yulia Tikhonova, Ninja Artists vs. the 1%

I am a Moscow-born, Brooklyn-based curator who promote public awareness and practices that strengthen art and culture’s central role in civic life. 

Group exhibition NINJA Artists vs. the 1% brings together the artists who responded to an unstable job market and a precarious economy. Tens of thousands of art school graduate enter the scene every year, and each wants to make a living from their work, while pursuing a meaningful career. The prospects for success are slim, yet the flow of new talent continues unabated. The soon graduating students will face the forces of the art market which is currently near its lowest ebb. 

Paul Talbot, Exhibit

3 different projects in one space.


- Photograph from different sources, also video to run in a loop. The video would run through actions and marches from different aspects of the movement.

http://www.youtube.com/user/NEREphotography?ob=0


- signs from occupy archives that would hang from the ceiling so people could simulate themselves in a rally. They would be able to hold the sign and get photographed or a group of people could be photographed together to look like they are in a march.


- the third part of the project would be collages of a large scale put together of many 4x6 photos with plywood as the substrate. Along with the collages would be scrapbooks made by OWS material from marches and rallies.

Glenn Leisching and Violet Snow, African Seminar/Workshopr

2012: Catastrophe or Opportunity? – An Indigenous Perspective

Whether you're heeding the Mayan prophecies of cataclysmic change in 2012 or witnessing the upheavals of climate change, seismic tectonic shifts, the Arab Spring, and worldwide economic recession, you may be wondering what's happening to our planet.

How can we prepare for fundamental change and help to create a constructive revolution rather than a disaster?

Glenn Leisching, an initiated elder of the West African Dagara tribe, offers solutions based on ancient teachings about our relationshipswith nature and our familial ancestral heritage . A friend and ally of shaman Malidoma Somé and other indigenous African wisdom keepers,Glenn has been to Africa three times in the past year, bringing back powerful insights from his visits with respected medicine men and women.

Glenn is available to give talks to the public, emphasizing empowering yet practical steps we can take as individuals to harness and direct this energy of change.

He will address such concepts as:

• a new yet ancient paradigm for envisaging a new society
• tools for finding each person's life purpose, essential to the flourishing of our communities
• deepening community ties to a level almost unknown in the West
• honoring the seen and the unseen worlds, and how this practice enlarges our understanding and intimacy within our lives
• participating in the truth of nature's unfolding as our birthright
• simple everyday acts for expanding personal power and insight

Franc Palaia, Sustainable Energy Workshops/Demos

Since 1990, my mixed media works have been about light. I make illuminated photo-sculpture using found and recycled materials and fitting these constructions with photographic transparencies and light. Since 2005 I have shifted my light source from a traditional power grid electricity source to a natural sunlight and solar powered light.  I have been striving to make my illuminated photo works as natural as possible.

I can add a more obvious art component to my Occupy Bottle Bulb project by incorporating photo or hand painted transparencies to the illuminated bottle bulbs. Doing this also relates the project to my own illuminated photography works which I have been making for over 20 years.

My Occupy Catskill project proposal is a continuation of this philosophy. I recently became aware of an amazing simple way to create a lighting device that is as  green as possible. It is called the “Bottle Bulb”. 

The Bottle Bulb was invented by a Brazilian named Alfredo Moser in 2002.

The plight of the poor is an overwhelming global ordeal in terms of lack of food, water, shelter, healthcare and electricity.  However, the bottle bulb is a simple and easy solution for the approximately 35% of the world’s population without domestic electricity.

The Bottle Bulb is made of recycled two liter plastic soft drink bottles. They are  filled with clean water along with an added soda capful of chlorine bleach which prevents algae growth over a long period of time.   When the bottle is exposed to sunlight a prismatic reaction occurs and magically, this creates a luminescence equivalent to a 50-60 watt incandescent bulb. The water in the bottle simply defuses sunlight so it spread out after passing through the water rather than in a straight sunbeam if the light was going through a hole in the roof.

   The process of making a bottle bulb is very easy. The bottle is fitted with a 12”x12” metal skirt that fits around the middle of the bottle, then the bottle is inserted vertically with the top half the bottle sticking out above a tin or similar thin roof and the bottom half the bottle hangs down inside the structure below the roof. The skirt is then screwed or glued to the roof and the holes filled with water- proof sealant or caulking and that is all there is to it.  A soft glowing natural illumination will automatically come from the bottom half of the bottle and brightens a dark interior living or work space. This only works during the day when the sun is shining, however there are always interior spaces that are dark during the day for lack if windows or sky lights.  The Bottle Bulb will assist in lighting sheds, club houses, tree houses, tents, cabanas, any small structure and even homes and work spaces with a thin penetrable roof exposed to sunlight.

My Occupy project will consist of workshops in an unused storefront or empty building where we can set up tables and teach people how to make Bottle Bulbs. An extra salient bonus of this project is clearing the environment of empty discarded plastic bottles.

The materials involved are basic and easily procured such as scrap metal, metal snips, drills, sealants, putty knives, plastic bottles, water and chlorine bleach.

My part will consist of one or several demo workshops with a short power point on the history of the Bottle Bulb and then the workshops can be conducted with assistants and community artists and volunteers.  The finished Bottle Bulbs can be distributed to local citizens who need them and we can ask for a nominal donation in return to help with supply costs.  This idea can be taken to a national level because even today there are many places in the United States where electricity is still a luxury.

Jessica Eis, video/audio

I have created two video/audio pieces that would be installed in a storefront or isolated room. The images will be displayed in the storefront window by video projection or in an isolated room/space in a larger exhibition and would be on a loop. While, speakers strategically placed outside, or within the room depending on location, will be playing an audio loop as well, creating a micro-environment of what life through my eyes was like at Zuccotti Park, a functioning village in the heart of New York City, created by people that could no longer stand idly by as our society yearns for change.

The first piece is called Sights&Sounds, 30min video piece, which is the combination of still images from a day at Zuccotti Park as well as audio from another day. My hope with this piece is to put the observer in the heart of Occupy Wall Street, the village and the movement created in the middle of a bustling city, where everyone was fed, sheltered, and nurtured, and where the possibility for change was palpable and ideas for that change were welcomed. Images will be inter dispersed between black screen or “empty spaces” forcing the viewer into a closed eye state, which encourages the observer to listen and feel what an amazing environment was forged at Zuccotti Park, creating a moment of imagination and interaction for the viewers to place themselves in the OWS movement.

http://vimeo.com/jessicaleis/sightsandsound

                 http://vimeo.com/jessicaleis/take-back-11-15-11

The second piece, Take Back, 16min video piece, during the day after the NYPD had raided the park, while everyone awaited the court’s decision and then eventually the inevitable re-taking of the park. And although Zuccotti Park never got back to its previous incarnation of what I like to call “Village of the People”, it was a incredibly symbolic moment, that no matter what the government organizations would do, they could not stop the movement of enlightenment and change that had begun. This piece too has both audio and visual components that would be set up in a loop just as the previous piece. However, Take Back has an expanded format- in addition to the black screen there are quotes by Thomas Jefferson interspersed throughout that address the need for public dissent- forcing and focusing the listener/viewer into both a closed eye state as well as a reflective state on our society and its founding ideals and principles.

Both pieces, Sight&Sound and Take Back, create a space that transports the viewer back to a moment of origination of Occupy Wall Street, and shows how ideals and change can reverberate through time, people, and space.

Sparrow, Poetry Workshop/Performance

 

"Listening to Poetry, Speaking to the Gods"

 

This workshop combines listening to and reading great poetry -- by Longfellow, Shelley, Milton, Langston Hughes, and others -- with honest talking. Participants may speak to the group about their political struggles, their spiritual life, their personal difficulties. It will be a "conversation" between ordinary people and great poets. Simultaneously, we will take notes, and make drawings, and by the end will have an art show, which we will tape to the wall.

 

"The Politics of Silence"

 

In this lecture/demonstration, I explore John Cage's essential musical composition, 4' 33", which consists entirely of silence. In particular, I will discuss silence as a political act.

 

 

 

Sparrow lives with his wife in a doublewide trailer in Phoenicia, New York. One of his "jobs" is writing bumper stickers. Probably Sparrow's greatest achievement in life was creating the slogan I'M ALREADY AGAINST THE NEXT WAR. Soft Skull Press has published three of his books, including America: A Prophecy -- The Sparrow Reader. TheNew York Times ran three of his op-ed pieces. Sparrow plays ocarina in the post-Buddhist pop band Foamola.