August 5, 2003                                                Contact: Luther Blisset (312) 515-7364  dtucke@artic.edu

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Counter Productive Industries presents COLLECTIVE PRANKS, PROTEST GRAPHICS, AND SPACE RECLAMATION

Where/When:

August 17, 8-10pm @ CellSpace, San Francisco; 2050 Bryant St. www.cellspace.org

August 18, 7pm @ AKPress Warehouse, Oakland; 674-A 23rd Street  www.akpress.org

August 20, 7pm @ Arts in Action, Los Angeles; 1919 W 7th St (4th Floor) artsinactionla.org

August 21, 7:30 @ C-Level, Los Angeles 963 N. Hill Street (back alley entrance) in

     Chinatown  www.c-level.cc/

Why/Who/What:

Counterproductiveindustries.com presents COLLECTIVE PRANKS, PROTEST GRAPHICS, AND SPACE RECLAMATION, a west coast tour of Retooling Dissent, the video documenting creative resistance projects from protests against the World Economic Forum.  It features collaborations and tactical media by The Institute for Applied Autonomy, The Bikewriters, StreetRec, and Spain’s Las Agencias/New Kids On The Black Block.

Accompanying the video is a series of presentations drawing on a network of critical art projects and activism from Chicago.  These projects range from large-scale political actions, spontaneous events, flexible collaborations, and temporary collectives.

One of the projects presented is the Department of Space and Land Reclamation (DSLR), an ambitious three-day campaign which sought to reclaim all the space, land, and visual culture of Chicago back to its public citizens.  DSLR brought hundreds of artists, activists, and community groups together for a weekend of interventions, presentations, graffiti, trespassing, pirate radio, community meals, loitering, hacking, guerrilla gardening, public performances, parties, and discussions.

The infectious energy of DSLR catalyzed a number of other initiatives such as the utopian festival of local community groups, The Autonomous Territories of Chicago.  These growing critiques of economic globalization and its familiar relative, gentrification, spawned the construction and installation of a fake affordable housing development Daley Village and another project involving the critical marketing of a real property by a our very own real estate agency Pioneer Renewal Trust.

Other tactical media organized around Israel/Palestine, 9/11, Chicago’s graffiti abatement policy, the "war on terror", and the Trans-Atlantic Business Dialogue (TABD) will be shared, as well as video and discussion of the wild, spontaneous street occupation and direct actions against MTV’s The Real World Chicago.  These projects represent a unique strain of activist cultural practice which should be of interest to artists, activists, and students alike.  Project organizers and participants will be available for discussion.

For more information about the tour see: http://www.counterproductiveindustries.com/tour .

Retooling Dissent is distributed by AKPress and has been showing around the world at venues like the IMPAKT Festival (Utrecht, The Netherlands), Version>03 Digital Arts Convergence at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago) and Artists Television Access/Other Cinema (San Francisco). Retooling Dissent has continued to serve as a useful tool for organizing actions as well as highlighting alternative and creative tactics that various radical arts collectives have been pursuing. For more info, see: http://www.counterproductiveindustries.com/retoolingdissent .