Occupational Art School at Co-Lab [Austin, TX], #a7-14

[Click the image for info.]

OwA co-organizer Paul McLean travels to Austin for a week of occupational art & BBQ. The expo Tumblr is HERE.

Wall Street to Main Street [Essay for Brooklyn Rail]

Wall Street to Main Street [pre-publication draft]
By Paul McLean

"Americans don’t really think that other places are as real as America." [1]

"It is more and more difficult for us to imagine the real, History, the depth of time, or three-dimensional space, just as before it was difficult, from our real world perspective, to imagine a virtual universe or the fourth dimension [la quatrieme dimension]." [2]

Now Main Street's whitewashed windows and vacant stores
Seems like there ain't nobody wants to come down here no more
- Bruce Springsteen, "My Hometown"

1

In my hometown of Beckley, West Virginia’s downtown, “Main Street” is several streets coursing square-wise through Beckley’s nucleus. One of the streets is Main Street. Downtown for me was an afterschool and weekend destination, and I was willing to draw a few dollars from my dad’s wallet and dodge bands of hellions to get a burger at Fred Yost’s diner, comics and candy at the newsstand, or window-shop for guns and knives at the pawn shop. After I moved away Richard Haas was commissioned to do a trompe l'oeil painting on one side of the Federal building there. Like the Peck Slip one between Front and South streets here. I interviewed Richard once for an art radio program I hosted in Nashville. He talked about artists “looking at the same thing we’re all looking at, but looking at it so differently.”

I would suggest that American artists look at Main Street, the same way you look at a sunset.

Click to read more ...

OWS Stories in the Brooklyn Rail, Dec 2011

The 99% Bat Signal: A Cry from the Heart of the World

by Mark Read

Photos by Brandon Neubauer.

BR Ed.’s note: On November 17, a series of projections—including what has come to be known as the “99% Bat-Signal”—flickered on the Verizon Building in Downtown Manhattan (see the YouTube video, “#Occupy Bat-Signal for the 99%”). Tens of thousands of marchers witnessed and interacted with the projections, and many more have watched them online.

Click HERE to read the story at the Brooklyn Rail.

OCCUPY GO ROUND: The Dimensional Nature of the Movement

by [Occupennial co-organizer] Paul McLean

 “BLOOMBERG, BEWARE. ZUCCOTTI PARK IS EVERYWHERE.”

—November 17 #OWS chant

Click HERE to read the story at the Brooklyn Rail.

New Occu-ganda Posters

Click the image to go to the Occupennial free downloads area.

Concentricity/OWS

An animation by Occupennial co-organizer Paul McLean

Concentric Circles

Occupennial co-organizer Paul McLean penned this essay on concentric circles and the structural dynamics of #OWS, plus related phenomena for his blog AFH2011. To read the essay, click the images above or below.

[NOTE: The final pre-publication draft version is HERE.]

Concentric Circles: A Conjecture about the Dimensional Nature of the Fast-Spreading Global Occupation, in Text and Images

∞

Interdiction is always a rule of the State; impossibility is a regulation of the real.” – Alain Badiou, “Highly Speculative Realism on the Concept of Democracy”

We’re living in a Post-9.17 World.

Two months + 1 after the #OccupyWallStreet movement (and it is one, now) congealed in Zuccotti Park, a sketch of the New World Order is in order. Last August, those of us who took Badiou’s seminar at the European Graduate School witnessed this trajabadore philosopher map infinity and finitude, using set theory, to assert a vision of the universe in which series of derivative values constituted a whole that itself existed as a beautiful, animated array of derivative components. The Omega of Badiou and the sets of finite phenomena, which are Its expression, are hinged in a conjecture. #OWS is such a conjecture: a being-event that impossibly de-regulates the real, and defies the parameters of superimposition. But how does such a moment work?

It’s my contention that Time is the only Object, and everything else is Subject. I asked Badiou during a coffee break whether Philosophy needed Art. It had become clear to me that art required the love of wisdom, the evaluative functions of philosophy, after encounters with the likes of Kittler, Lotringer, Agamben, Ronnell, Badiou and others. What wasn’t clear was whether philosophy, which could think about anything it seems, needed art. Badiou said, “Philosophy needs art, now.” I would suggest that #OWS proves this, because perceptually we appear to be spanning dimensions, and on this side of the void that attaches to progressive perceptual consciousness, we seem to have returned to the beginning. In the beginning there were concentric circles...