Series of free talks/ Screenings including RTS, Greg Palast and 'Injustice'

national | miscellaneous | news report Thursday February 14, 2002 22:14 by eamonn ecrudden at hotmail dot com

Free public talks and screenings at NCAD

Over the next few weeks The Students Union of the National College of Art and Design, Dublin is holding a series of five public talks and screenings focusing on various aspects of Art, New Technology, Politics Journalism and Activism. All talks / screenings are free and open to everyone, student or not. Highlights of the series include a talk from Greg Palast on his forthcoming book ‘The Best Democracy Money can Buy’, a rare Irish Screening of the controversial documentary on deaths in Police custody in the UK - ‘Injustice’ - and a lesson on modern history and it’s creation from Reclaim the Streets, London.

Over the next few weeks The Students Union of the National College of Art and Design, Dublin is holding a series of five public talks and screenings focusing on various aspects of Art, New Technology, Politics Journalism and Activism.

All talks / screenings are free and open to everyone, student or not.

Highlights of the series include a talk from Greg Palast on his forthcoming book ‘The Best Democracy Money can Buy’, a rare Irish Screening of the controversial documentary on deaths in Police custody in the UK - ‘Injustice’ - and a lesson on modern history and it’s creation from Reclaim the Streets, London.

The talks/screenings will take place on Thursday evenings beginning at 7pm in the main Lecture Theatre in NCAD.

The line-up is as follows

Thursday Feb 21st - Conor McGarrigle on Net Art, Surveillance and his ‘Spook’ Project.
Thursday Feb 28th - Ken Fero presents a rare Irish screening of ‘Injustice’, a controversial documentary on deaths in Police custody in the UK.
Thursday Mar 7th - Greg Palast on GW Bush, Enron, Argentina and his new book - ‘The best Democracy Money can Buy’.
Thursday Mar 14th - Fiona Raby on the fusion of information space and urban territory.
Thursday Mar 21st - Reclaim the Streets (London) on changing the world with cunning direct action, crowd empowerment, fun, humour and raving.

Further information/links on speakers etc. below.

CONOR MC GARRIGLE IS a net artist based in Dublin, Ireland. His work deals with a diversity of themes from issues of identity and virtual personas to search engine interventions, surveillance and cyber performance. His key projects are PLAY-lets (1999) and Spook... (2000) and two major anonymous ongoing projects.

He is the founder of Stunned, online artists space and is a key advocate for net art in Ireland. He is currently artist in residence at Dublin's Arthouse Multimedia Centre for the Arts.
His work has been shown at SIGGRAPH (1999 Los Angeles, 2000 New Orleans and SIGGRAPH99 touring exhibition) CyNet Art 2000 (Dresden) dART00 (Sydney) X-00 Festival (Lorient) InterMedia 2000 (Cork) Darklight Film Festival (Dublin) Art on the Net (Machida City Museum, Tokyo) and online at stunned.org.

His work has won Netscape and USA today Cool site of the day awards and has been featured widely in the print media in Ireland and the UK (The Guardian, The Independent on Sunday, The Irish Times and The Irish Independent). He has spoken on net art on Irish national radio (Artshow, Future Tense) at SIGGRAPH99 and as guest lecturer to MSC classes at Dublin City University.

More info at www.stunned.org

INJUSTICE / DIR: KEN FERO. There have been more than 1,000 cases of death in police custody in Britain since 1969 but no single officer has been convicted of wrongdoing. Injustice is an account of four such cases: Joy Gardner (28 July 1993), Shiji Lapite (16 December 1994), Brian Douglas (3 May 1995) and Ibrahima Sey (16 March 1996). The film - made over a seven-year period by Ken Fero and Tariq Mehmood - focuses on the painful journey undertaken by the victims' families to expose the circumstances of their deaths. In 1997 the families joined together to form the United Families and Friends Campaign and it's the story of their fight for justice - charted through vox pops after hearings and footage from demonstrations - that drives the narrative. It's punctuated by moving interviews, sometimes running uninterrupted for as long as two minutes, and descriptions of Brian, Shiji, Ibrahima and Joy that ensure they are perceived not just as statistics but as individuals whose families mourn them amid their growing anger.

Fero and Mehmood don't employ any technical trickery to intensify the atmosphere or deliver punch. They don't need to; their film's power lies in the families' experiences and words and the mounting case against the police. A voiceover from actress Cathy Tyson (Mona Lisa, Priest) threads the elements together and a haunting hymn sung by Violet Corlis sends shivers over the skin.

More info at www.injusticefilm.co.uk

GREG PALAST is an internationally recognized expert on the control of corporate power working with labor unions and consumer groups in the USA, South America and Europe. In America, among his more noted cases, Palast directed government investigations and prosecution of racketeering by nuclear plant builders and, for the Chugach Natives of Alaska, probed charges of fraud by oil companies in the grounding of the Exxon Valdez.

His lectures at Cambridge University and the University of Sao Paulo will be released this spring by the United Nations International Labor Organization and Pluto Press in a book, Democracy and Regulation, co-authored by Theo MacGregor and Jerrold Oppenheim.

Pluto Press will release Palast's book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, in March in the US and in April in Britain.

Five years ago, Palast turned his investigative skills to journalism. His 1998 undercover exposé of corruption at the heart of Tony Blair's cabinet, "Lobbygate," earned him the distinction of being the first journalist in memory attacked personally on the floor of Parliament by a prime minister as well as an award for Story of the Year. Palast's column for Britain's Observer newspaper, "Inside Corporate America," and other writings have won him the Financial Times David Thomas Prize (1997) and nomination as Business Journalist of the Year (1999).

In America, Palast broke the story of how Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush removed thousands of Black and Democratic voters from registration roles prior to the presidential election. The series of revelations appeared in The Nation, The Washington Post, Harper's, The Guardian and in Salon.com which named the exposé Politics Story of the Year.

Palast's investigative reports can now be seen on BBC Television in Britain, "Newsnight's own Sam Spade" and in the USA on BBC World.

Palast divides his time between London and New York.

More info at www.GregPalast.com

FIONA RABY: A senior research fellow and founding member of the Computer Related Design Research Studio at the Royal College of Art, Fiona Raby leads the Critical Design Unit with Anthony Dunne. She is also a partner in Dunne + Raby, a creative design partnership set up in 1994 to explore the relationship of industrial design, architecture and electronic media, through a combination of academic research and practical commissions. Recent projects include FLIRT, an EU-funded research project which investigates location-based WAP services for mobile phones, and a collection of furniture for the Victorian and Albert Museum, London, which explores mental well-being in relation to domestic electro-magnetic fields. At Doors 6, she will talk about her concept of 'Lo-Res Screen, Hi-Res City', arguing that the development of digital cellular structures by the mobile communications industry has generated a genuine fusion between information space and urban territory. City location, the time, day and date can all begin to shape relationships to information sources. The tight constraints of mobile displays, juxtaposed with the spontaneity, unpredictability and transience of everyday mobility, require a lightness of touch, rather than a broadband bombardment. "The screen is not the world, it's the trigger," she says.

For more info: www.crd.rca.ac.uk

RECLAIM THE STREETS: Cars dominate our cities, polluting, congesting and dividing communities. They have isolated people from one another, and our streets have become mere conduits for motor vehicles to hurtle through, oblivious of the neighbourhoods they are disrupting. Cars have created social voids; allowing people to move further and further away from their homes, dispersing and fragmenting daily activities and lives and increasing social anonymity. RTS believe that ridding society of the car would allow us to re-create a safer, more attractive living environment, to return streets to the people that live on them and perhaps to rediscover a sense of 'social solidarity'.
But cars are just one piece of the jigsaw and RTS is also about raising the wider questions behind the transport issue - about the political and economic forces which drive 'car culture'. Governments claim that "roads are good for the economy". More goods travelling on longer journeys, more petrol being burnt, more customers at out-of-town supermarkets - it is all about increasing "consumption", because that is an indicator of "economic growth". The greedy, short-term exploitation of dwindling resources regardless of the immediate or long-term costs. Therefore RTS's attack on cars cannot be detached from a wider attack on capitalism itself.
Our streets are as full of capitalism as of cars and the pollution of capitalism is much more insidious.
More importantly, RTS is about encouraging more people to take part in direct action. Everyone knows the destruction which roads and cars are causing, yet the politicians still take no notice. Hardly surprising - they only care about staying in power and maintaining their 'authority' over the majority of people. Direct action is about destroying that power and authority, and people taking responsibility for themselves. Direct action is not just a tactic; it is an end in itself. It is about enabling people to unite as individuals with a common aim, to change things directly by their own actions.

More info: www.reclaimthestreets.net