Potluck chat: Not An Alternative

Hi everyone,
This week we’ll be talking with Beka & Jason from Not An Alternative about what they’ve been up to lately, including their recent Homeless Tent City Installation in NYC. It will be informal but fun (we opted away from the power point presentation they gave @ Conflux, for a more fluid conversation).

More about Not An Alternative
Not An Alternative is a volunteer-run non-profit organization based in Brooklyn, NY whose mission aims to integrate art, activism, technology and theory in order to affect popular understandings of events, symbols and history. Their work both questions and leverages the tools of advertising, marketing, public relations and spectacle production. Projects include The Production Company, Terra Incognita (an online tv show), The Real Estate Industry, and The Change You Want To See Gallery, a multi-purpose venue where free lectures, workshops, screenings and artist talks occur. During the day it is a collaborative office space (aka coworking) for like-minded cultural producers.

http://notanalternative.net

More about Homeless Tent City
Not An Alternative teamed up with Picture The Homeless, Reclaim NYC and others to stage an intervention on the urban landscape. The collaboration involved the production and installation of a homeless tent city in a vacant bank-owned lot in East Harlem.

As a diversion, folks dressed up as a film production crew shooting a music video. This was the cover story for the deployment of the tent city. More than 100 homeless people and allies occupied the lot for the duration of the day. The action resulted in 10 arrests by nightfall.

For more info, check out the NY Times story and video links below below - they both include a great blow-by-blow of the day’s events.

NY Times story: http://bit.ly/1T0tJ
Video: http://bit.ly/14D2Hy

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See you all Then!

Join us every Tuesday night – in person, or on Skype, skypename: ‘basekamp’
If you come to the potluck in person, be sure to bring a dish :)
(basekamp space: 723 Chestnut St, 2nd floor, Philadelphia usa)