The Occupy with Art blog provides updates on projects in progress, opinion articles about art-related issues and OWS, useful tools built by artists for the movement, new features on the website, and requests for assistance. To submit a post, contact us at occupationalartschool(at)gmail(dot)com .
Thursday, December 13, 2012 at 11:39AM FYI: Occupy with Art [occupywithart.com], our OwA archive & nexus, is temporarily located HERE [at artforhumans.squarespace.com] while we do some needed maintenance.
Beckley, WV Christmas Parade [2003 by Paul McLean]
maintenance, occupy with art in updates Saturday, December 1, 2012 at 03:00PM 
click image for free download
Wednesday, November 28, 2012 at 03:53AM Occupy with Art has been contacted by Tamiment Library for the purposes of inducting the site into Tamiment's Web Archive. OwA is excited about the prospect, and we will keep you updated on the progress of our discussion with TL. YOUR FEEDBACK IS WELCOME AND ENCOURAGED.
[EXCERPTS FROM THE CONTACT EMAIL]:
Hello,The Tamiment Library, New York University (a special collection documenting labor and progressive social activity) has identified your website, Occupy with Art, http://www.occupywithart.com, as a vital publication for current and future researchers. I am an archivist working on the Economic and Social Justice web archive, which contains websites of entities concerned with promoting economic and social justice in the United States. A specific area of concentration is the Occupy Wall Street Movement that began in September, 2011.Materials in this archive are strictly for educational and scholarly research purposes....The archiving tools we use are provided by the California Digital Library (CDL), which is part of the University of California. These tools were initially funded by the Library of Congress in an effort to preserve our digital cultural heritage....We hope you will agree that your site is an extremely valuable part of the historic record. These materials will serve as a resource of lasting value for researchers, and the archive may well be of use to your own organization in the event that you should need to easily review older information.
[ABOUT TAMIMENT LIBRARY]
The Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University form a unique, internationally-known center for scholarly research on Labor and the Left. The primary focus is the complex relationship between trade unionism and progressive politics and how this evolved over time. Archival, print, photograph, film, and oral history collections describe the history of the labor movement and how it related to the broader struggle for economic, social, and political change.
In 1977 the Robert F. Wagner Archives was established as a joint program of the New York City Central Labor Council and the Tamiment Library. The Wagner is the designated repository for the records of the Council's more than 200 member unions. Today the Library has an extraordinary research collection documenting the history of organized labor in New York and the workers who built the City.
Tamiment has one of the finest research collections in the country documenting the history of radical politics: socialism, communism, anarchism, utopian experiments, the cultural left, the New Left, and the struggle for civil rights and civil liberties. It is the repository for the Archives of Irish America, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, and a growing Asian American labor collection.
Read more about the history of the Tamiment Library.
Tamiment's archival collections, manuscripts, oral histories, photographs, films, videotapes, books, serials, and pamphlets document the history of labor, socialism, communism, anarchism, utopian experiments, the New Left, and the post-New Left as well as the social and cultural contexts in which these movements functioned.
Full Collection Development Policy Statement
TAMIMENT LIBRARY, archives, occupy with art in archives Wednesday, November 28, 2012 at 03:15AM 
click image to download
click image to download
Wednesday, November 28, 2012 at 02:55AM 
The Men Who Work Under The Ground: An Experimental Reading, featuring the poems of Benjamin Nadler + audio by Blake Seidenshaw, Chris Moffett & Amelia Winger-Bearskin + Animations by Paul Mclean [+]
Co-presented by Human Relations Bookstore & Occupational Art School Node #1 on Saturday, December 8, 2012, 7-9PM
[About The Men Who Work Under The Ground]:
BEN NADLER
Ben Nadler is the author of the poetry chapbook, The Men Who Work Under The Ground (Keep This Bag Away From Children Press, 2012), and the novel, Harvitz As To War (Iron Diesel Press, 2011). He lives in central Brooklyn, and teaches writing at The City College of New York. He is the grandson of a coal miner.
[Excerpt from Brooklyn, the opening poem in The Men Who Work Under The Ground]:
I always knew we were working against the earth
with a foe like that the odds weren't in my favor.
You attack something for long enough
eventually it attacks you back.
Trespasses are not forgiven.
I do believe electricity
remembers being coal before it was burned.
[About Human Relations Books]:
Human Relations is a joint venture of some hopeful, fresh-faced youth and the jaded, scowling he-crones of Williamsburg’s Book Thug Nation.
[About Occupational Art School Node 1]:
Our dream is to open a building in Bushwick, Brooklyn with vegetable and flower gardens on the roof, studios of all sorts on another floor (painting, holography, photography, theater, film and all these working together) on another, living spaces and a childcare facility on another and all of these centered on a cooperative economy: food co-op, art and educational co-op, art offered in an alternative economic model. The doors to and in this place will open all ways— out to the community so all are welcome and within the space open to all rooms so people share and work together and create together. There will be teaching in this school, naturally, but no classes. Instruction will be through inspiration and guidance in open apprenticeships. We will practice the spirit of Occupy in the most constructive, joyous, healing way we can. We will step outside of capitalism, not confront or battle it. We will ignore the hegemony of institutions and corporate interests not try to overthrow or fight them. We will work outside of corporate time and within liberated time that flows as it will.
We are doing this. The process is in place. Artists are coming to the school to give lectures, for free. We are attracting people from the community and already we are engaging in an alternative art economy, exchanging services of various sorts for lessons and art. This is happening very fast. We are in deep rem sleep, dreaming hard, and it is a wonderful experience. - OASN1 founding member Chris Moylan
[About Chris Moffett & Blake Seidenshaw]:
Chris Moffett and Blake Seidenshaw collectively assemble, on occasion, as The New Ergonomics (thenewergonomics.com) only to collaborate in turn with other assemblages, reworking the nature of work.
Blake is a contributing editor at ecogradients.com, an online journal of interdisciplinary culture and education. A ceramicist and a musician, he is a cofounder of the Ashtanga Yoga Outreach network. Also: interdisciplinary edutecture; the history and practice of philosophy and the natural sciences; and contemporary (cosmo)political (ethno)ecology.
Chris engages the imagery, philosophy and architecture of education, the way we image forming and being formed by our environments. Sitting in a chair, or refusing to sit still, becomes a form of art making. A nomad scholar and movement educator, Chris is also a founding member of the artist collective ARE (aestheticrelationalexercises.com).
[About Amelia Winger-Bearskin]:
Amelia Winger-Bearskin is an assistant professor of Art and Film at Vanderbilt University in the area of Time Based Media Arts and Performance. She works with 'models' (as defined by agent-based computer programming) as a conceptual prompt in her performance work. She has developed a concept of Open Source Performance Art (OSPA) and has spoken about OSPA at various academic conferences and performance festivals since 2010. She performed at the 10th Annual OPEN ART Performance Art festival in Beijing, China, The Performance Art Network PANAsia '09 in Seoul, South Korea, and the TAMA TUPADA 2010 Media and Performance festival in the Philippines. Winger-Bearskin recently spent a month in Sao Paulo, Brazil performing at the Verbo Performance Art Festival (the first American performance artist to be invited to do so), through an international scholar exchange sponsored by University of Sao Paulo and Vanderbilt University VIO and Art Department. She was an Artist in residence at the University of Tasmania (Australia) school of Visual and Performing arts. Other recent performance credits include the Gwangju Biennial [three events: 1) main pavilion; 2) the Lotte Gallery Media and Performance Festival; and 3) the Women's Biennial in Seoul, Korea]. Currently, she is presenting a sound installation throughout the Nashville International Airport, and in Fall 2012 will be speaking about her work and OSPA as a visiting artist at universities in Portland, OR; Chicago, IL; and New York City, NY.
[About Paul McLean]:
Paul McLean is an artist accomplished in new media and traditional fine art, a pioneer in dimensional production and integrated exhibit practice. He has exhibited in one-man and collective shows extensively since 1986, and is currently represented by SLAG Contemporary Gallery in Bushwick (Brooklyn, NYC). His research interests include media philosophy, specifically pertaining to time and systems; individual and collective expression; and the convergence of 4D methodologies among military, political, business and social sectors. McLean holds a B.A. in English with a Fine Art concentration from the University of Notre Dame (South Bend, IN), two Masters degrees from Claremont Graduate University (MFA in Digital Media, Masters of Arts & Cultural Management) and is currently a doctoral candidate at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. He is a contributing writer for the Brooklyn Rail and other publications and has been blogging since 1999. McLean has been a co-organizer of Occupy with Art since September 2011, and is a founding member of the Occupational Art School Node #1 in Bushwick. He creates moving images for projection, art environments and the web; net.art, web and print graphics; paintings and drawings; poems, commentary fiction and non-fiction. McLean lives and works in Bushwick.
Sunday, November 25, 2012 at 03:56PM Documentation by Jenjoy Roybal
Wednesday, November 21, 2012 at 01:44PM 
Side Effecting
“It is a safe guess that not more than one human in 10 million is conceptually familiar with and sensorially comprehending of the principle of ‘precession’ [orthogonal side effects].”
—Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path
Kinesthetics of Precession
Set 1 | Play Lab
A play/work/lab on how to feel, recognize, pick up, and send spinning, the ripple effects of artistic endeavor through movement, theory, and drawing. Gain a working, sensory facility with the potency of side effects, and join us in envisioning the collective effects of coming together as part of the Occupational Art School.
What are the ways in which an experience of precession can generate an immediate effect? Say through a movement exploration that then translates into a sketching process of precessional effects themselves. Feel precession in movement, and then, while it is happening, touch charcoal to paper. This would be one level of resolution, coupled with a documentary effect. Or drawing as a trace of precessional awareness.
Relational Drawing
November 24th, 1-4pm. Movement, charcoal, words.
∞
Variations on Spin.
Set 2 | Temporary Formation
And then you keep it going… Infinitely resolvable, it is something to be continually set in motion. One can set it back out into the world, as a ripple effect, seeing how this appreciation would effect art works and movement to come. The collective traces can be gathered into an exhibit, a temporary formation, a rippling rather than traveling show. At another level of resolvability, we can begin to play with the collective formation itself. How can we image different organizational axes for precessional effects? What is the precessional effect of art-production, of occupation, of schooling, of architecture?
November 30th, [TBD]: A showing of traces, and talk on the occupation of art.
@Art House | chashama [Hosted by Christopher Trujillo]
Chris Moffett and Blake Seidenshaw collectively assemble, on occasion, as The New Ergonomics (thenewergonomics.com) only to collaborate in turn with other assemblages, reworking the nature of work.
Blake Seidenshaw
Blake is a contributing editor at ecogradients.com, an online journal of interdisciplinary culture and education. A ceramicist and a musician, he is a cofounder of the Ashtanga Yoga Outreach network. Also: interdisciplinary edutecture; the history and practice of philosophy and the natural sciences; and contemporary (cosmo)political (ethno)ecology.
Chris Moffett
Chris engages the imagery, philosophy and architecture of education, the way we image forming and being formed by our environments. Sitting in a chair, or refusing to sit still, becomes a form of art making. A nomad scholar and movement educator, Chris is also a founding member of the artist collective ARE (aestheticrelationalexercises.com).
Tuesday, November 20, 2012 at 12:02PM 
NY Arts Magazine just published an excellent article online, which will appear in the printed winter issue, scanning some important markers in Occupy art's evolution over the past year, including documentation and review of some of Occupy with Art's contributions (such as Occupy Printed Matter, pictured above).
[EXCERPT]:
In a movement often criticized for failing to come up with concrete propositions, OwA is scrupulous in trying to do something positive. For me the most heartening art project associated with the movement was Occupy’s Wall Street to Main Street, in Catskill, NY. Stores on the town’s Main Street offered their windows, and both local and NYC-based artists exhibited their works, events, and exhibitions over three months. After the attention which the venture brought to the town, a factory which had been in the process of being foreclosed for three years was finally bought out—talks are currently underway about using the space for the public good. Catskill provides a great model of what the art of the 99% should do: bring people together and lift communities.
Tuesday, November 20, 2012 at 02:53AM 
Sunday, November 18, 2012 at 05:58AM 
Manager-in-Chief
By Paul McLean
How did Barack Obama win re-election? The philosopher Jean-Claude Milner recently proposed the notion of the "stabilising class": not the old ruling class, but all who are committed to the stability and continuity of the existing social, economic and political order – the class of those who, even when they call for a change, do so to ensure that nothing really will change. The key to electoral success in today's developed states is winning over this class. - Slavoj Žižek, “Why Obama is more than Bush with a human face”
Liberals, by voting for Barack Obama, betrayed the core values they use to define themselves—the rule of law, the safeguarding of civil liberties, the protection of unions, the preservation of social welfare programs, environmental accords, financial regulation, a defiance of unjust war and torture, and the abolition of drone wars. – Chris Hedges, “The Presidential Election Exposed, Again, the Death of the Liberal Class”
It seemed that out of the battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which Titanic wars had groined.
Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands as if to bless.
- Wilfred Owens, “Strange Meeting”
Tom, you know you surprise me. If anything in this life is certain - if history has taught us anything - it's that you can kill anyone. – Michael Corleone, The Godfather Part II
War - Nations do have to go to war sometimes, but that Iraq thing was pretty bad, to put it mildly. Somebody should have been, I dunno – FIRED for bad performance. Aren’t you the party of good corporate managers or something? This topic could get 10,000 words on its own. Let’s just leave it at: You guys suck at running wars. - Eric Garland, “Letter to a future Republican strategist regarding white people”
In the 2012 election, we have a winner. Management won.
Slavoj Žižek is almost right to cite Milner in his analysis. He would have been more correct to point to Peter Drucker, whom George W. Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002. Drucker wrote the book on Management, literally. The culture of management won the culture war this time. No one seems to have noticed management was a combatant. So, no one seems able to figure out the margin of victory, or explain the results, and consequences.
Chris Hedges is right, too, about what the election was not about, but should have been. Hedges, too, is almost right to slam the liberal class for its passivity with respect to Obama’s “betrayal” of liberal “core values” in his first term. He would have been more correct to consider the values (or lack thereof) of the management class, because that is the key to electoral victory in the United States currently, not the performance of the “Other” voter classes that the professional political punditry claim pushed Obama’s campaign over the electoral finish line ahead of Romney.
Really, the non-drama of 2012 is how boring, banal and mediocre political realities are in the United States. From a management perspective, the Obama victory is the safer bet.
My theory is that the outcome of the election is in fact a story about behavior and demography, but not the story we’re being told via corporate monopoly media, or by the “alternative” media. Voters who swung the election to Obama chose him, because they realized the Republican candidate was a corporate raider whose fortune derived from purging middle-management and labor, outsourcing jobs or destroying them, wiping out pensions, “streamlining” benefits and the social safety net, increasing cost burdens on all but management and owner classes, and prioritizing the owner’s or corporation’s or organization’s bottom line over all else.
Romney is dedicated to making everything from the Olympics to America run more like a business. The problem the voters discovered by reading between the lines or watching Obama’s attack ads is that Romney’s business was Bain Capital.
Plus, Romney is a 1%-loving, 47%-hating superrich asshole.
∞
Paul McLean, election 2012 in essay Saturday, November 17, 2012 at 02:12PM 
Concept sketch by Lavinia Nannini for OAS Node 1
Over the past month, Occupy with Art has been down, primarily due to the impacts of Superstorm Sandy on our crew. When we've been posting, it's either been to the Occupational Art School tumblr or the OwA Facebook page. While posting to the websites hasn't been so much a priority over the past few few weeks - for some of us who've been without power, it wasn't even a possibility - we have focused our energies mainly on pre-visualization practice and organizational development. This hasn't been easy often, due to interruptions in our communication services. That said, we have several exciting new projects, events and alliances launching later this month that we'll be announcing in the next few days.
occupational art school in updates Sunday, October 21, 2012 at 02:27PM 
IS OCCUPY ART?, Paul McLean, art and occupy in artist talk Sunday, October 21, 2012 at 02:23PM 
2012 Arts of Protest Series Presents:
Public/Poets and Protest/Space: A Discussion with Four Occupy Poets,
Tuesday, October 23, Machmer E-23, 6:00pm.
Travis Holloway is a Goldwater Fellow in Poetry at NYU and a Ph.D. Candidate in Philosophy at SUNY-Stony Brook. He was a Fulbright Scholar to Germany in 2010-11 for a dissertation entitled “How to Perform a Democracy” and, upon his return to the United States, organizer of the first “Poetry Assembly” at Occupy Wall Street. His primary interests include democracy, poetics, and the relationship between public art and social media. His recent work has appeared in The Nation, Guernica, and Symposium, on C-SPAN, and in the co=authored book, Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America (OR Books, 2011).
Paul McLean is an artist accomplished in new media and traditional fine art, a pioneer in dimensional production and integrated exhibit practice. He has exhibited in one-man and collective shows extensively since 1986, and is currently represented by SLAG Contemporary Gallery in Bushwick (Brooklyn, NYC). His research interests include media philosophy, specifically pertaining to time and systems; individual and collective expression; and the convergence of 4D methodologies among military, political, business and social sectors. McLean holds a B.A. in English with a Fine Art concentration from the University of Notre Dame (South Bend, IN), two Masters degrees from Claremont Graduate University (MFA in Digital Media, Masters of Arts & Cultural Management) and is currently a doctoral candidate at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. He is a contributing writer for the Brooklyn Rail and other publications and has been blogging since 1999. McLean has been a co-organizer of Occupy with Art since September 2011, and is a founding member of the Occupational Art School Node #1 in Bushwick. He creates moving images for projection, art environments and the web; net.art, web and print graphics; paintings and drawings; poems, commentary fiction and non-fiction. McLean lives and works in Bushwick.
Letta Neely is a Black dyke artist, feminist, and mother. She is originally from Indianapolis, IN where she survived the busing experiments of the 80’s. In the mid 90’s, she lived in New York City where she was a member of the Black Star Express Collective and taught poetry to youth in the five boroughs. She currently resides in Boston with her wife, niece, and daughter. Letta explores the various textures, technologies and intersections of race, sex, sexuality, class, gender, economics and liberation in her daily living. Hence, her work focuses most intently on the connections and intersections of queerness, blackness, and awareness.
Letta is also teacher, poet, playwright and freelance writer whose books Juba and Here were finalists for the Lambda Literary Awards. In addition, Here was a Triangle Award finalist. She has been New York Fellowship for the Arts recipient (1995), a finalist for both the Massachusetts Cultural Council Poetry Fellowship (2002) and the Astraea Lesbian Writer’s Award (1999). Ms. Neely is a two time winner of the OutWrite National Poetry Slam (1996, 1998) and in 2001 she was named the Best Local Author by Boston Phoenix readers. Her work has been included in various anthologies, literary journals and magazines such as: Through the Cracks; Sinister Wisdom; Common Lives, Lesbian Lives; Rag Shock; African Voices, Rap Pages, Catch the Fire ,Does Your Mama Know, The World in Us, Best Lesbian Erotica 1999, and, Roll Call—a Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature & Art. Her play Hamartia Blues which was produced by the Theatre Offensive in 2002 has been nominated for two IRNE awards. A second play, Last Rites, received a staged reading with the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, CA and a world premiere production with The Theater Offensive at the Boston Center for the Arts. In 2011, Neely was awarded a fall residency with the Garderev Center and was a finalist for the Brother Thomas Fellowship. Currently, she is a recipient of the 2012 Winter Creation Fund Award from the National Performance Network and along with The Theater Offensive, a grant recipient from NEFA’s Expeditions program.
April Penn is a Boston-area poet who frequents the Cantab Poetry Lounge and has been involved in Occupy Boston protests. She is a member of the Boston Feminists for Liberation and considers herself a poetry blogging fiend with plans to write 365 poems a year for the rest of her life. She originally hails from Hammond, Louisiana and Baltimore, Maryland but loves Boston best of all! She has been published in Amethyst Arsenic, Snake Oil Cure, and Spoonful.
Paul McLean, occupy with art in panel, poetry, presentation Wednesday, October 10, 2012 at 12:31PM 
admin
Tuesday, October 2, 2012 at 01:35PM 
Occupational Art School Node 1 @Bat Haus is pleased to host an evening of conversation with New Media phenom Amelia Winger-Bearskin on Wednesday, October 3 from 7-9PM. She will performing in the OASN1@BH event STARR STREET SLAM. For our Wednesday night discussion with Amelia, we hope to discuss Open Source Performance Art, time-based media, and Winger-Bearskin's continent-hopping artist practice.
"Flowers," performed in Manila City, Philippines [2010]
[ABOUT AMELIA WINGER-BEARSKIN]:
"Crying on Cue;" for the Performance Art Network PAN ASIA Performance Art Festival in Seoul, Korea [2009]
[ABOUT AMELIA'S UPCOMING PERFORMANCE AT STARR STREET SLAM]:
Vocal Performance Amelia Winger-Bearskin was classically trained at the Eastman Conservatory of Music in Vocal Performance, she has worked in theatre and opera both as a performer and a composer since 1997. Her pieces are a fusion between punk, electro, opera and dark wave, with a heavy dose of performance art and interactivity as well. This work, Vocal Performance, requires only two things, an audience and darkness (or the absence of any artificial light). 
