Tuesday, 9/30: RAPID RESPONSE: PUBLIC SPACE

157 people were arrested at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, followed by 818 more arrests during the Republican National Convention in the Twin Cities, including members of the mainstream and independent press and peaceful demonstrators. I-Witness Video, a New York-based collective that harnesses video to protect civil liberties and the right to use public space, surveyed police activity at both conventions. Eileen Clancy of I-Witness Video discussed their early-September house arrest in St. Paul and the gunpoint entry of police forces into their home. Later, I-Witness's offices were raided under false accusation that the group was holding hostages inside. This footage and more from outside of the convention walls was screened at Studio-X, to question how extraordinary policing alters public space as an arena for the exchange of ideas, and in so doing, affects the political process.

Tuesday, 10/14, 6:30 pm: INSIDE THE PAVILION

A survey of videos from the U.S. Pavilion at the 2008 Venice Biennale, including the work of Rebar, Center for Urban Pedagogy, Studio 804, International Center for Urban Ecology and more. Followed by a conversation with "Into the Open: Positioning Practice" curators Aaron Levy and Andrew Sturm, and filmmaker Laura Hanna.

Aaron Levy is Executive Director and a Senior Curator at Slought Foundation
Andrew Sturm is the Director of Architecture for the PARC Foundation
Laura Hanna is co-founder of Hidden Driver Pictures

Sponsored by Wine Cellar Sorbet

Thursday, 10/16, 7:00 pm: Live from Palestine: Raja Shehadeh

Shortly before his appearance at Studio-X, lawyer, writer and avid walker Raja Shehadeh will walk through the hills of the West Bank: rugged slopes that surround his home in Ramallah and constitute the subject of his book Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape. Shehadeh will film his walk in entirety. Then, on October 16th, the footage will be screened at Studio-X while he narrates the experience (via Skype) live from Palestine-so that we too may traverse this beautiful and charged landscape.

READING GROUP: Flying Close to the Sun

"On the morning of March 6, 1970, in the subbasement of 18 West 11th Street in Greenwich Village, a piece of ordinary water pipe, filled with dynamite, nails, and an electric blasting cap, ignited by mistake..."

As a college student in the 1960s, Cathy Wilkerson became involved with the civil rights movement, Students for a Democratic Society, and the Weathermen: a "fighting, anti-imperialist youth movement." Having survived the explosion of a New York City townhouse where she and four other Weathermen were building bombs, she moved underground. For the past twenty years, Wilkerson has worked as a mathematics educator in New York City schools.

This election season, Studio-X will host a month-long reading and discussion group of Cathy Wilkerson's memoir Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman. Three sessions will be devoted to exploring Wilkerson's work, which, according to the New York Times, "unsparingly maps the idealism, fanaticism, moral absolutism and personal passions that carried her to the townhouse [explosion]." In the fourth and final session, Cathy Wilkerson will join us at Studio-X.

Monday, 10/20
Monday, 10/27
Monday, 11/3
Monday, 11/10

10/28/2008 RAPID RESPONSE: COLLAPSE!

Collapse! explores the spatial consequences of the "new" economy--the panic of 2008 as well as the last two decades, and the last two years--at a variety of scales: the NYSE trading room to Manhattan, the city to the suburbs, the United States to the world. Network Architecture Lab Director Kazys Varnelis will lead a discussion with Daniel Beunza, Assistant Professor, Management Division, Columbia Business School and Micah Fink, Emmy Award-nominated documentary filmmaker. We will be airing a segment of a film by Fink originally produced for a PBS New York Voices special on the mortgage crisis.

Collapse! is produced in collaboration with the Network Architecture Lab.

Refreshments provided by Barefoot Wines

RSVP: gdb2106@columbia.edu
Free and open to the public

Tuesday, 11/18, 7:00 pm: re:construction

What do buildings sound like? What is the residue of a building? Multimedia artist Daniel Perlin questions work and construction as auditory processes in this layered performance piece-using screws, glue, nails, sawhorses, an audio cassette and a laptop to simultaneously build a small physical structure and a large orchestral work.

Tuesday, 11/25, 6:30 pm: RAPID RESPONSE: I NEED MY SPACE

Visual and performance artist KAREN FINLEY will lead this group meeting, featuring invited and volunteer testimonials sharing our emotional responses to the election and the various needs for space--physical, social, cultural and psychological--that it exposed. How do our national political relationships inform or dialogue with the workplace, family, community and friends? How do the race, gender, class and identity issues raised in the campaign continue to be discussed? Finley will also address the transformation of the memory of Chicago's Grant Park (and the 1968 Democratic Convention) from a site of pain and loss into one of celebration and unity on November 4th, as well as legacies of Vietnam War protests and the Civil Rights Movement embodied in that space.

Audience participation in the meeting is encouraged. I NEED MY SPACE will last approximately one hour, with the hope of providing a therapeutic and supportive group environment for those needing space in their own lives.

Refreshments provided by Barefoot Wines

Tuesday, 12/2, 6:30 pm: SOVIET CONTAMINATION

Celebrate the five-year anniversary of Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation History, Theory, and Criticism with a special event on the preservation of Soviet modernist buildings, and experimental techniques currently being used by Russia to preserve its Soviet heritage. Studio-X is pleased to welcome an esteemed roundtable to discuss the future and past of preservation within the Soviet context, featuring:

Barry Bergdoll, MoMA and Columbia
Jean-Louis Cohen, NYU
Yevgeniy Fiks, Artist
Vitaly Komar, Artist
Annette Michelson, NYU and Co-Founder of October
Jorge Otero-Pailos, Columbia and Editor of Future Anterior

Sponsored by BROOKLYN BREWERY and IZZE SPARKLING JUICE

Reception to follow

RSVP: gdb2106@columbia.edu
Free and open to the public

Thursday, 12/4: Night Haunts

The famed London night: "There was a time, well over a century ago now, when it was considered one the finest Victorian inventions." Gas lighting opened up the night--rendering the darkness visible, and introducing new spaces of lawlessness and depravity. But have CCTV cameras and British Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) neutralized the night? Writer SUKHDEV SANDHU and composer ANDREW INGKAVET present a visual and sonic journey through an unfamiliar nocturnal London, encountering urban fox hunters, exorcists, cleaning crews, mini-cab drivers, sleep technicians and the Nuns of Tyburn, as they pray for the souls of Londoners.

SANDHU is a professor of English Literature at New York University, Chief Film Critic of the "Daily Telegraph," and author of "London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City." INGKAVET is a composer, filmmaker and designer. He began scoring films while working in Hong Kong as one of MTV-Asia's first VJs.

RSVP: gdb2106@columbia.edu
Free and open to the public

Tuesday, 1/8, 6:30 pm: A Few Zines: Dispatches from the Edge of Architectural Production

In the 1990s, zines such as Lackluster, Infiltration, loud paper, Dodge City Journal and Monorail subverted traditional trade and academic architecture magazine trends by crossing the built environment with art, music, politics and pop culture--and by deliberately retaining and cultivating an underground presence. Much has been made of that decade’s zine phenomenon--inspiring academic studies, international conferences and DIY workshops--yet little attention has been paid to architecture zine culture specifically, or its resonance within architectural publishing today.

"A Few Zines: Dispatches from the Edge of Architectural Production does both." Rather than attempting to present an exhaustive retrospective of architecture zine culture, it highlights complete runs of several noted zines that began in the nineties. The exhibition also features contemporary publications that continue to draw inspiration from the self-publishing tradition, such as Pin-Up, Sumoscraper, and Thumb.

To launch this exhibit, curator Mimi Zeiger has published a new issue of loud paper and organized a party and panel discussion, including:

Luke Bulman, Thumb
Felix Burrichter, Pin-Up
Stephen Duncombe, NYU professor and author of Dream and Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture
Mark Shepard, Situated Technologies
Mimi Zeiger, loud paper

Moderated by Kazys Varnelis, AUDC

RSVP: gdb2106@columbia.edu
Free and open to the public

Sponsored by Alessi, Bulldog Gin and IZZE Sparkling Juice

This exhibition will run from January 8-February 28, 2009