COMRADES
98weeks
98weeks research project is an artists organization and a Project Space (since November 2009) founded by Marwa Arsanios and Mirene Arsanios in October 31, 2007. It is conceived as a research project that shifts its attention to a new topic every 98 weeks. Focusing on artistic research, combining both theoretical and practical forms of inquiry, 98weeks' projects take multiple forms such as workshops, community projects, seminars, reading groups, publications and exhibitions.
The Book Thing of Baltimore
Begun by Russell Wattenberg in 1999, The Book Thing is a free bookstore in Baltimore dedicated to putting unwanted books into the hands of those who want them.
Center for Ongoing Projects and Research
Based in Columbus, Ohio, COR&P is, among other things, a gallery space dedicated to facilitating and investigating research-based art practices through exhibitions, events, and publications. It was founded by Ryland Wharton and Kris Paulsen in 2012.
Chinatown Storefront Library
The Chinatown Storefront Library transformed one of Boston Chinatown's vacant, commercial, street-level spaces into a temporary public library. Operating for approximately three months, the project created a memorable event for Chinatown, while providing a selection of urgently needed services for a community that has been without a library since 1956. The library offered books, Internet access, newspapers, a children's reading area, and a mix of programs and activities—all furnished within an innovative architectural design that allowed the Storefront Library to be repeated in other locations.
The Storefront Library was not a branch of the Boston Public Library, nor was it intended to be a substitute for a permanent branch. The project's purpose was to activate street-level space with an installation that will demonstrate the potential impact of a library in the neighborhood. It also provided a model for how cities can move forward in tough economic times to activate urban space.
The City Reliquary
Located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, The City Reliquary is a museum and civic organization that displays thoughtfully arranged artifacts of New York City’s rich history, which entice viewers to learn more about the five boroughs. Some of the highlights of the collection include architectural remnants of city buildings, Statue of Liberty memorabilia, a geological display of New York's underground composition, and a 1939 World’s Fair exhibit. In addition, The City Reliquary plans and hosts public events, which provide neighbors and visitors with a place to meet, exchange ideas, and celebrate the diversity of their community.
Elastic City
Elastic City intends to make its audience active participants in an ongoing poetic exchange with the places we live in and visit.
Artists are commissioned by Elastic City to create their own walks. These walks tend to focus less on providing factual information and more on heightening our awareness, exploring our senses and making new group rituals in dialogue with public space.
Elastic City has partnered with numerous organizations to co-present its walks and ways, including The Abrons Art Center, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Brooklyn Flea, Friends of the High Line, Le Petit Versailles, Museum of the City of New York, NY Art Book Fair, Open House NY, Pratt Institute, Printed Matter, Residency Unlimited, San Francisco Arts Commission, SculptureCenter, Staten Island Museum, Wave Hill and Urban Design Week.
Elastic City is directed by Todd Shalom. He realized the idea while suffering from altitude sickness in Cusco, Peru.
Flying Object
Flying Object is a volunteer 501(c)(3) nonprofit art and publishing organization with a storefront space in Hadley, Massachusetts. With a mission to provide a range of resources, opportunities and education to writers, artists, musicians, and publishers both locally and nationwideÑour storefront serves as a space where we host readings, lectures, performances, workshops, and artists' exhibitions, all of which are open to the public and the vast majority of which are free. In addition to public events and workshops, we function as a publisher of both an online and print magazine, as well as both limited and trade editions of contemporary poetry, fiction, artist's books, and audio recordings. Our publications are printed under the imprint Factory Hollow Press or Flying Object.
Flying Object is particularly interested in collaborative and interdisciplinary work of emerging, experimental, and often overlooked artists, writers, and performers that seek to expand the traditional boundaries of a given art-form and to see that work realized through performance and/or publication. Flying Object sees its storefront as a laboratory for creative development, performance, and publication that encourages both deliberate and chance encounters with the community that supports and engages our organization.
FreeCulture.org
FreeCulture.org is a diverse, non-partisan group of students and young people who are working to get their peers involved in the free culture movement. Launched in April 2004 at Swarthmore College, FreeCulture.org has helped establish student groups at colleges and universities across the United States. Today, FreeCulture.org chapters exist at nine colleges, from Maine to California, with many more getting started around the world.
GRIDSPACE
The purpose of GRIDSPACE is to provide an architecturally and sculpturally specific curatorial outlet that engages the rapidly changing neighborhood of northern Crown Heights. The non-traditional storefront gallery is in the front window of Charles Goldman's studio - POWELL. The "space" itself is a wooden grid of 12 individually lit 2 foot square by 8 inch deep "cubicles," custom built to fit into the specially designed storefront.
The Institute for the Future of the Book
The printed page is giving way to the networked screen. The Institute for the Future of the Book seeks to chronicle this shift, and impact its development in a positive direction. The Institute is a project of the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California, and is based in Brooklyn, New York.
Interference Archive
Interference Archive explores the relationship between cultural production and social movements. This work manifests in public exhibitions, a study and social center, talks, screenings, publications, workshops, and an online presence. The archive consists of many kinds of objects that are created as part of social movements by the participants themselves: posters, flyers, publications, photographs, books, T-shirts and buttons, moving images, audio recordings, and other materials. Through our programming, we use this cultural ephemera to animate histories of people mobilizing for social transformation. As an archive from below, we are a collectively run space that stresses the use of our collection over its preservation, offers open stacks and accessibility for all, works in collaboration with like-minded projects, and encourages critical as well as creative engagements with our own histories.
Lawrence Lessig
Lawrence Lessig is a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school's Center for Internet and Society. He is the author of The Future of Ideas and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. He also chairs the Creative Commons project. Professor Lessig is a boardmember of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a Board Member of the Center for the Public Domain, and a Commission Member of the Penn National Commission on Society, Culture and Community at the University of Pennsylvania.
Main Street Museum
The Main Street Museum is exploring the margins of alternative curation. It experiments in collections of material culture and non-interaction.
Machine Project
Existing to encourage the heroic experiments of the gracefully over-ambitious, Machine Project presents workshops, events, installations and performances on a semi-regular basis. Machine Project provides educational resources to artists working with technology; it educates and collaborates with artists to produce site-specific, non-commercial work; and it promotes conversations between artists, scientists, poets, technicians, performers and the communities of Los Angeles as a whole. With a wide array of cultural programming, Machine Project demonstrates the creative possibilities of technology to open up interdisciplinary conversations between disparate knowledge communities. With presentations and lectures, it offers rarified knowledge in a friendly, human manner, and fosters a greater understanding between art and science. And at the most practical level, Machine Project offers hands-on training in some of the skills presented in its exhibits and lectures, putting knowledge tools into the hands of its community and giving them the ability to create work of their own.
Morbid Anatomy
A blog created by Joanna Ebenstein that's dedicated to surveying the interstices of art and medicine, death and culture.
The New Inquiry
The New Inquiry is a space for discussion that aspires to enrich cultural and public life by putting all available resources—both digital and material—toward the promotion and exploration of ideas.
Office of Recuperative Strategies
The Office of Recuperative Strategies (OoRS) is a mobile research laboratory that explores new tactics to promote the reuse, perversification, reanimation, and reparation of precarious, outmoded, and correctable cultural phenomena. Opened in 2010 by Christian Hawkey and Rachel Levitsky, it grew out of a collaboratively designed and taught class at Pratt Institute titled Cultural Sustainability and Recuperative Poetics.
OoRS seeks to develop language, architecture, and poetic strategies (associational thought, close-observation, dissonance, ambiguity, urban wandering, generative slippage) that intervene in and repurpose the brutality of technocapitalism's obsession with speed, efficiency, able-bodiedness, originality, and novelty.
In using the word recuperative OoRS wishes to release it from its usual connotations in avant-garde discourse, where marginalized and outside experimentation is co-opted by dominant mainstream culture via a foreclosed process of capitalism. Recuperating recuperation, OoRS reclaims the term to foreground agency on the part of cultural producers, displacing outdated outside/inside, margin/center binaries in order to establish an ethics of making that is memory-based, research-oriented, and devoted to affirming and pushing up against the complexity of the world.
OoRS also supports a concept of cultural sustainability that is neither teleological nor rooted in Enlightenment ideas of preservation and reproductive futurism. Instead, we want to advance a memory-based politics and poetic practice that reactivates the past in ways that both denaturalize the present and open up new new modes of hybridity, activism, and dwelling.
Archive investigation and disruption. Field-research, field-notes, recording. Organized misuse and capture of technological accident. Conceptual pedagogy. Close listening and distant reading. Repetition as difference, divergence, disidentification. OoRS does not exist in institutional time, but Queer time. It is a glamorous underground cult that is here to abduct you.
Organism for Poetic Research
The Organism for Poetic Research (OPR) performs exactly what its names says it does. Propelled by poesis (making) as its investigative method, the OPR instigates events that open a field of relations between the natural sciences, artistic practices, and research in the humanities. The OPR appropriates and refashions diverse modes and objects of inquiry as instruments in a series of specific provocations that produce PELTs: the Organism's epidermal organ; a diffuse, reticular interface with the world. OPR projects take a number of forms, but in all cases the OPR acts in order to provoke and promote forms of poetic research and research in poetics. In addition to its events, the annual magazine, Pelt and webPELT, the OPR also produces occasional publications and projects, under the auspices of OPR Editions, and hosts "web residents" whose projects actively investigate and re-describe the boundaries of poetic and artistic forms, and disciplinary formations of knowledge. The OPR "Library" and "Index" (online) function as repositories for images, materials, and projectsÑdocuments and documented things that we find influential and foundational to our project.
Rick Prelinger
Rick Prelinger began collecting ephemral films in the 1970's and has amassed over 50,000 of them. They were acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002. He has written extensively on the importance of providing free public access to his collections and keeping these materials in the public domain. In addition to these films, Prelinger has collected printed materials which have recently been organized and made accessible at The Prelinger Library (see below).
The Prelinger Library
The Prelinger Library is an appropriation-friendly, browsable collection of approximately 40,000 books, periodicals, printed ephemera and government documents located in San Francisco. Its holdings include resources on the North American landscape, housing (building, design, and decoration), city planning, architecture, infrastructure, natural history, cultural relationships to nature, the history of industry, manufacturing, and extraction of raw materials, media and technology, advertising, marketing and consumerism, thousands of maps, and much more.
Primary Information
Primary Information is a non-profit organization devoted to printing artists books, artist writings, out of print publications and editions. Primary Information was formed in 2006 by Miriam Katzeff and James Hoff to foster intergenerational dialogue through the publication of artists' books and writings by artistsÑemerging, mid-career, and established. Our period of focus is from the early Sixties to the present, with an emphasis on the conceptual practice begun in the mid Sixties and the strategy of using publications as an extension of this practice.
Proteotypes
Proteotypes is the publishing arm of Proteus Gowanus, a collaborative interdisciplinary gallery and reading room in the Gowanus district of Brooklyn, dedicated to the assembling, in several media, of apparently incongruous ideas or forms to construct surprising yet meaningful compounds and dialogues.
Proteus Gowanus
Proteus Gowanus is a gallery and reading room located on the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, NY. The gallery develops interdisciplinary exhibits and programs that revolve around an annual theme. Proteus Gowanus incorporates the rich and diverse cultural resources of seven non-profit organizations into its exhibits and programming.
Provisions Library
The Provisions Library is a physical and virtual experimental arena where broad and diverse audiences, cultures and ideas intersect, sparking new possibilities for enacting peace, justice, sustainability, social responsibility and respect for the diversity of life. Provisions places great value on the power of the arts- literature, visual art, new media, theatre, music- to speak across national and cultural boundaries and provide a critical lens through which to see the world.
Public Collectors
Public Collectors consists of informal agreements where collectors allow the contents of their collection to be published and permit those who are curious to directly experience the objects in person. Participants must be willing to type up an inventory of their collection, provide a means of contact and share their collection with the public. Collectors can be based in any geographic location.
Public Collectors is founded upon the concern that there are many types of cultural artifacts that public libraries, museums and other institutions and archives either do not collect or do not make freely accessible. Public Collectors asks individuals that have had the luxury to amass, organize, and inventory these materials to help reverse this lack by making their collections public.
The purpose of this project is for large collections of materials to become accessible so that knowledge, ideas and expertise can be freely shared and exchanged. Public Collectors is not intended, nor should it be used, for buying and selling objects. There are many preexisting venues for that.
The Public Domain Review
The Public Domain Review aspires to become a bounteous gateway into this whopping plenitude that is the public domain. We aim to help our readers explore this rich terrain by surfacing unusual and obscure works, and by offering fresh reflections and unfamiliar angles on material which is more well known.
The Public School New York
THE PUBLIC SCHOOL is a school with no curriculum. At the moment, it operates as follows: first, classes are proposed by the public (I want to learn this or I want to teach this); then, people have the opportunity to sign up for the classes (I also want to learn that); finally, when enough people have expressed interest, the school finds a teacher and offers the class to those who signed up.
THE PUBLIC SCHOOL is not accredited, it does not give out degrees, and it has no affiliation with the public school system. It is a framework that supports autodidactic activities, operating under the assumption that everything is in everything.
Read/Write Library
The Read/Write Library is a project that aims to create a location-specific archive of self- and small press-published works from the Chicago area. Through a searchable online archive and a physical space, it will open new opportunities for research, inspiration, and collaboration among those in and outside of the publishing community. By putting fiction, critical journals, zines, poetry, comics, political pamphlets, and art books side by side, the Read/Write Library hopes to bridge the gaps resultant from stratification along the lines of content, production value, and commercial viability.
Recess
Recess is an artists' workspace open to the public. At once a studio and exhibition space, Recess presents ambitious projects that embrace experimentation and focus on process.
Triple Canopy
Triple Canopy is an online magazine, workspace, and platform for editorial and curatorial activities. Working collaboratively with writers, artists, and researchers, Triple Canopy facilitates projects that engage the Internet's specific characteristics as a public forum and as a medium, one with its own evolving practices of reading and viewing, economies of attention, and modes of interaction. In doing so, Triple Canopy is charting an expanded field of publication, drawing on the history of print culture while acting as a hub for the exploration of emerging forms and the public spaces constituted around them. Triple Canopy is a nonprofit 501(c)3 organization.
The State
The State is a print journal and sociohistorical forum based out of Dubai, U.A.E. It investigates South-South reorientations, problematised futurisms, transgressive cultural criticism, the space between print and audio-visual experiences, their transition to mediated online forms, and the sensuous architecture of this "printernet."
UbuWeb
UbuWeb is a completely independent resource dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts. All materials on UbuWeb are being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights belong to the author(s). UbuWeb is completely free.