Occupied Real Estate property of the week. Beautiful former children’s school in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn. Up for foreclosure this Thursday, Jan 26th.

Coming soon to a bank near you...

For the last 7 years No↔Space, managed by Not An Alternative, has functioned as a base for art and activism in NYC. A few months ago, a staggering rent increase (240%) forced us out of our Williamsburg home. But that didn’t slow us down: we’ve happily found a new space in Greenpoint, and in the midst of the Occupy Wall Street movement we’re busier than we’ve ever been!

It's true we suffered a blow in losing our home base, we're starting over with a raw space, building it out from scratch. But we couldn’t be more excited about this new chapter. We’ve launched a Kickstarter fundraising campaign to help fund the new No↔Space, and our next year of events and projects.

Thanks to the support of our amazing community, we've just reached our goal of $10,000 this week! But why stop there? Now we're aiming to raise another $5,000 to cover upcoming projects related to Occupy Wall Street. And we have 2 days left to do it!

The $10,000 ensures that we can cover the costs of the move, the build-out, and core space-related expenses for a year. But anything we raise above that amount will go directly to new projects.

Occupy Wall Street has captured the public imagination like nothing
 in recent memory. This is the opportunity we have been waiting for: a 
chance to transform the existing social political landscape and build a mass
 movement for economic justice.
 For years Not An Alternative has collaborated with activists, artists, and community groups to produce aesthetics that function tactically and symbolically, and actions that serve to frame a message in a compelling and visual way.

We've got some mischief up our sleeves: interventions on privately owned public spaces, projects relating to eviction defense and home re-occupations, collaborations community groups like Picture The Homeless, Organizing for Occupation, and Take Back the Land and with artists and designers like John Hawke, DSGN AGNC, The Yes Lab, and others, and national level coordination and interventions with other #occupy cities.

While $5000 won't get us all the way there, it will allow us to roll out some of the ideas we've been cooking up immediately. Can you help make it happen?

Please watch our Kickstarter video, donate what you can, and spread the word!

Please join us this Thursday, December 1 for another installment of Creative Activism Thursdays: Revolutionaries Live!, a programming series by the Yes Lab, Not An Alternative, and the Center for Artistic Activism. This time the topic is the hacktivist collective Anonymous.

Over the last three years, Anonymous went from Internet pranking and trolling to a narrowly focused protest movement against the Church of Scientology to one that has now emerged in more general registers, attracting many geeks and hackers to its ranks, some who have entered the arena of activism for the first time. In this talk professor and author Gabriella Coleman will examine the transformations and tactics of the digitally-based protest movement Anonymous to examine various political and ethical facets of their operations, including their rhizomatic social organization, the ways they enact an ethics around their denial of service attacks, and the ways in which they are rooted in and parlay liberal commitments such as anonymity and free speech. In so doing, she will also visit a range of theorists entertaining the cultural politics of anonymity, spectacle, the commodification of dissent, and trolling in order to grasp the political and cultural significance of Anonymous.

Thursday December 1, 7:30pm | Gabriella Coleman
NYU Department of Performance Studies, Room 105, 34 Stuyvesant Street
bring ID to get into the building

Gabriella Coleman is a professor in NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication and a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study. Her book, Coding Freedom: The Aesthetics and the Ethics of Hacking, is forthcoming with Princeton University Press and she is currently working on a new book on Anonymous and digital activism. Gabriella will speak about the revolutionary humor the hacker group Anonymous uses as one of its key tactics.

http://kickstarter.com/projects/naa/nospace

Hi friends, as you may know, we recently lost the Williamsburg space that we've been in for the last decade. A 240% rent increase forced us to shut our doors. But we're excited to say we have a new space in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. A 1500 sq ft space in a beautiful industrial building on the waterfront. And we've been busy building it out so we can get ready to open our doors for public programming, and start producing the #OccupyWallStreet and related projects we've had up our sleeves.

To launch the new space and upcoming year of programming and projects we need your help! We're raising money from individual contributions via the fundraising platform Kickstarter.com. We've uploaded a video to the platform that tours you through the new NO↔SPACE, our ideas about the intersection of media and space, and our plans for the upcoming year.

How you can help:

1) Please watch our Kickstarter video! And donate if you can, every bit helps.
2) Please share! On Facebook, Twitter, and/or emails to friends or appropriate listservs.

Thanks!

Pics from a candlelight march on Sunday, November 20, with Occupy Faith NYC, a network of 1500 clergy from different faiths throughout the city, as well as the Council of the Elders -- leaders from the civil rights movement. Together we marched from Judson Memorial Church to a vacant lot on 6th and Canal that's owned by Trinity Church. The clergy and the Elders are calling on Trinity to give Occupy Wall Street the vacant lot as a new space from which folks can organize.

Additional mili-tent pics are from an installation above a bank on the facade of a building at the New School in NYC, the site of a recent occupation.

Sunday, November 6th, 5pm
Zuccotti Park - under the red sculpture
(directly after the multi-faith service.)

We are honored that three Middle Eastern and North African activists Esraa Abdel Fattah - Egypt, Jamel Bettaieb - Tunisia, Mahboubeh Abbasgholizadeh - Iran will be with us at OWS.

Esraa Abdel Fattah - Cyber activist and creator of the April 6th Facebook page which called for the first successful Egyptian general strike in 2008. Jailed for her efforts, she quickly became one of the most recognizable and prominent spokespersons for the Egyptian opposition. She was short listed for the 2011 Nobel Peace prize.

Jamel Bettaieb - Tunisian activist and labor leader from the birth city of the Arab Spring - Sidi Bouzid. He recently won the 2011 NED Democracy award.

Mahboubeh Abbasgholizadeh - Iranian women’s rights activist, journalist, and filmmaker - one of the founders of the Iranian Green Movement, the Stop Stoning Forever campaign, the Iranian Women's Charter Movement, and the coordinator for Meydan Zanan Network, Former Director of the women's NGO Training Centre (NGOTC), and editor-in-chief of Farzaneh Women’s Studies Journal.

For further information please contact:
Kobi Skolnick, kskolnick@gmail.com

#whOWNSpace is a collaborative started by DSGN AGNC with Not An Alternative and DoTank:Brooklyn, organizations that have been dealing with spatial politics. Other groups, organizations, and individuals will be joining soon, contact us if you are interested. Our goal is to gain many other collaborators and together learn from what has happened at Zuccotti Park (aka Liberty Square)-- using design and art as an advocacy tool so that community groups and activists can continue to use collectively owned and organized urban spaces to further their political, social, and economic agendas.

Project goals are:
1- TO REVEAL conflicting rules and ownerships in the increasingly privatized and commercialized spaces that make up the contemporary neoliberal urban condition
2- TO QUESTION those rules and the current state of our "public" space; discussing the intentions and conditions surrounding our open spaces
3- TO ADVOCATE FOR AND PROPOSE new uses and designs that encourage more public and open spaces for neighborhood uses in accordance to the Call to Action for the Rights of Neighborhoods

We Create Tools that Reveal Spatial Conflict / We Question Private Space / We Question Public Space / We Advocate for Change / We Conceive and Design Alternatives for Collective use

The 1% weOWNu map focuses on Privately-Owned Public Spaces (POPS) as well as institutions of private funding, specifying financial institutions that received bail-out funds in 2008. The goal of doing so, is to direct attention to the constitutions that control the flow of capital. These funding institutions are essential in the transfer of ownership from the city to private interests.

The 99% weOWNu map focuses on publicly-owned open spaces and the city agencies that control those holdings.

Both maps provide a framework for a larger study to:
-Comparatively map POPS and publicly-owned open spaces, identify their intentions, and understand the political, corporate, and economic entities that control them
-Organize with community and activist groups so that designers can collaboratively strategize to advance the use of these spaces.

In the next steps we will use interactive tools to gather information from a multitude of partners (RESEARCH), lead an event with The Public School NYC to begin to make sense of the information (PEDAGOGY), and work with designers and community groups to reclaim public space for the public good (#OCCUPY ACTIONS).

Please join us this Thursday, October 20 for the next installment of Creative Activism Thursdays: Revolutionaries Live, a series by the Yes Lab, Not An Alternative, and the Center for Artistic Activism.

This week Not An Alternative is hosting an artist talk and multi-media presentation by Spanish artist/activist Leonidas Martin. We'll get a visual tour of some of the most creative art/activist interventions performed in the context of the alter-globalization movement, and in contemporary urban struggles in Barcelona and beyond, including Las Agencias, Yomango, Pret a Revolter, and New Kids on the Black Bloc. Leo will also discuss his experiences as a participant/organizer in this Spring’s M-15 encampments in Spain, massive occupations that took hold throughout the country and lasted several months. These occupations were a direct inspiration for #OccupyWallStreet.

Leo will explore the relationship between art and activism, how creativity can be a powerful tool for social transformation, how we can have fun while fighting back, and why direct action is one of the fine arts.

Thursday, October 20, 7pm
@ NYU Department of Performance Studies
721 Broadway, 6th Floor
NY, NY 10003
(photo ID required)

P.S.: this programming series is hosted at NYU, as No↔Space recently got rentrified out of our Williamsburg home. Good news is we've lined up a new spot in Greenpoint, Brooklyn and we'll be ready for programming later this Fall.  We just launched a Kickstarter fundraising campaign to help pay for the build-out and upcoming programming and projects.  Please watch the video, share it on Facebook or Twitter, and make a contribution if you can, every bit helps! 

Leonidas Martin is a Professor at Barcelona University where he teaches New Media and Political Art. For many years he has been developing collective projects between art and activism, some of them well known internationally (Las Agencias, Yomango, Pret a Revolter). He writes about art and politics for blogs, journals and newspapers, has created several documentaries and movies for television and internet, and is a member of the cultural collective Enmedio; (www.enmedio.info). Last but not least, he is an expert telling jokes, often using this divine gift to get free beers and avoid police arrest. Leo will tell stories about the current upheaval in Spain, among other things.