Mat Callahan's The Trouble with Music (2005) explores the crisis facing music. The signs are everywhere, from the saturation of public space by tuneful trivia to the digital downloading controversy. Quantity has replaced quality. The number of units sold is now the criteria by which music is judged and high-gloss, mass-produced, low-content music is everywhere. […]
Quantum leap, a physics term deriving from the mid 1900s indicating significant and swift advances (originally via a sudden shift in energy within an atom), became the title of an early 1990s American television series featuring a time traveling, body-swapping, do-gooder scientist. In 2006 this inspirational screening of new video follows suit, cataloguing heroes, compressing […]
The creation of the Low Power FM radio service stands as one of the greatest successes in recent efforts for grassroots media reform. As a result, hundreds of new low power community stations are broadcasting that otherwise would not be—operated by civil rights groups, schools, farmworker organizations, environmentalists, cultural organizations, and others. Low power radio […]
How to Turn Distress into Success: A Parable of War and its Making is a funny, poignant, radical, occasionally violent response to the 9/11 attacks, filtered through the coolest puppets you'll ever see. It's a layered event; a commentary on a puppet administration, put on by puppet masters who, more than just about anyone, know […]
Author and filmmaker Heather Rogers will screen her documentary on the political history of rubbish in the United States, "Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage" and talk about her new book of the same name. Every day a phantasmagoric rush of spent, used and broken riches flows through our homes, offices, and cars. The […]
Lee Hirsch's 2002 film Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony documents South African musicians, playwrights, poets and activists as they recall the struggle against apartheid from the 1940s to the 1990s that stripped black citizens of South Africa of basic human rights, and the important role that music played in that struggle. The documentary uses a mixture of interviews, musical performances […]
Galen Joseph-Hunter and Tom Roe will discuss the field of "Transmission Arts," and free103point9. Free103point9 has an array of goals toward which it is perpetually working, each ultimately focused on expanding the scope of radio's possibilities and advancing the genre of Transmission Arts. The nonprofit organization's online radio transmissions introduce audiences to aggressive and challenging […]
Barbara Ettinger's 2006 documentary Two Square Miles tracks the conflicts in the small town of Hudson, New York as a proposed multinational coal-fired cement plant threatens to reshape the community. With its thriving main street, diverse population, and healthy rate of revitalization, Hudson, New York could be seen as a model of small-town America. But underneath […]
In Chris Bedford's and Shelley Morhaim's The Next Industrial Revolution (2001), architect Bill McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart bring together ecology and human design. While some environmental observers predict doomsday scenarios in which a rapidly increasing human population is forced to compete for ever scarcer natural resources, Bill McDonough sees a more exciting and hopeful […]
While the international community passively looked on, the democratically elected president of the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere was violently deposed twice. Aristide: and the Endless Revolution (2005) investigates the events in Haiti that led to the second brutal deposition of Jean Bertrand Aristide. The archival footage and interviews soon make it clear that the United […]
Art blends with politics as experimental music pioneer Pauline Oliveros and media artist Surajit Sarkar join creative forces at The Sanctuary For Independent Media! Even as internet use has grown exponentially, the hierarchy of metaphors that describe it has remained constant: The internet is most of all a mail pigeon, then a library, then an […]
The conscious hip hop group Broadcast Live brings music to The Sanctuary.
Join the Beehive Collective for a high-energy picture-lecture. According to the The Beehive Collective: Dismantling Monoculture is an anthology of three educational, visual narratives that illuminate the connections between colonization, militarization, and industrial development in the Americas. To create the graphics, the Beehive interviewed hundreds of community members about the effects of globalization on their […]
In director Imanga Ivunga's Dôlè (Dollar) (2000), the action takes place in Libreville, the capital city of Gabon, where four street kids scrape a living as a gang. Mougler, the unwilling hero of this story, finds his life hard to bear, between an ailing mother and an absent, alcoholic father. Yet, the four friends continue […]
Roots reggae from Jamaica, by the masters.
The Golden Ball (Le ballon d’or) directed by Cheik Doukouré, Guinea/France, 1992, 90 minutes. Cheik Doukouré’s second feature celebrates the powerful dream of becoming an African soccer star, a dream that is pursued by kids in innumerable small villages who play in the dust with bare feet and footballs made of rags. A thoroughly engaging […]
A concert with Pauline Oliveros (electronics), David Dove (trombone), Chris Cogburn (percussion), with the Children of the Ark Community Charter School (percussion). Students from the Ark Community Charter School in Troy are performing an improvised composition with a combination of xylophones, drums and percussion as a result of their workshop with Dove and Cogburn.
Based on a novel by Ousmane Sembene, Niiwam (Clarence Thomas Delgando, Senegal, 1991, 80 min) recounts the travails of a young couple’s attempt to save the life of their infant son, who is gravely ill. Unable to find a cure in their village, Thierno and his wife take him to a city hospital, only to […]
Michael Hurley is an American folk singer-songwriter who was essential to the Greenwich Village folk music scene of the 1960s and 1970s. In addition to playing a wide variety of instruments, Hurley is also a cartoonist and a painter. Hurley's music has been described as "outsider folk". Tara Jane O'Neil is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, audio engineer and visual artist. She creates melodic and […]
Malentendu Colonial (The Colonial Misunderstanding) directed by Jean-Marie Teno, Cameroon, 2004, 78 minutes. The Colonial Misunderstanding is a bold exploration of Germany’s “African past”—specifically, its attempts to colonize parts of Africa through religion and trade. Jean-Marie Teno looks at the role that missionaries played in laying the groundwork for colonialism in countries like Togo, Cameroon, […]
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