BigShinyThing

Activists haven’t been shy in exploiting digital and social media: witness the successes of IndyMedia’s user-generated street news, and the burgeoning peer-to-peer video distribution community around Miro (formerly the Democracy Player). The message is clear: don’t just have a voice on the street — create content and share it for global benefit. And this message isn’t just for the hardcore: what else is Al Gore’s current.tv, if not a centre-left, normalising riff on Miro’s theme?

Politically aware citizens, armed with video cameras, open source video editing software and BitTorrenting skills, are accessing difficult places and telling important stories, independent of mainstream media agendas. But how to get that activist content out in front of a broader, less engaged audience?

Say hello to InfoGraffiti (positioning: Tell the World What They Need to Know). Coming on like current.tv after a week at the Anarchist Bookshop, InfoGraffiti aims to take activist media to the people, urban guerrilla stylee. The short version of their manifesto reads as follows:

• InfoGraffiti is a new information distribution service intending on eventually rivaling the mainstream press; we need your help.
• We want to distribute internet documentaries and information via a CD format that will play on good DVD players or PC’s.
• Access to a printing press and the large costs involved is what has stopped forward thinking progressive messages from getting out before.
• Social network and Social news site users are forward thinkers (in general) and most of them have CD burners.
• Between us then we have the biggest printing press the world has ever seen and InfoGraffiti wants to organise it.
• You download our ISO torrent (ISO=CD Image, Torrent=FAST method of download) burn it to CD, label it with a logo and then distribute it around our wonderful cities.
• The CD contains all the best documenataries, virals, and information from the web, chosen by InfoGraffiti users. It works on DVD players and PC’s.
• Place it on park benches, in lifts, in coffee shops, on bus seats and in libraries for our wonderful fellow citizens to discover.

We think they might be a bit optimistic with their planned weekly release schedule, but wish them luck. Now is probably a good time for InfoGraffiti’s distribution model: urban punters have been softened up by countless lame ‘experiential marketing’ campaigns on the streets, flogging cable TV and shampoo — when they pick up those CDs they’re going to expect trailers for Shrek IV, not Noam Chomsky’s media critique. Hopefully they’ll keep watching.

Here’s the official release:

100proof announce the release of Issue 3 of their urban culture PDF 100proofTRUTH.

The only publication that gives real props to those it’s due to, still repping all that’s good in the world with 145 pages of visual diversity;

Eclectic interviews, street art, graphics, and photography with a truly global urban youth perspective (uh, no not “urban youth” like pictures of 50 Cent posing with a cognac in Vibe magazine).
— Fallon NYC on 100proofTRUTH.

Featured Photographers are: Witold Krassowksi, Kent Baker, The Face Hunter, Faith 47, Paul Hartnett, Darrell Berry… <blush>

100proofTRUTH Issue 3 is all about the power of the photograph, with a few other talents thrown in for good measure, (like Sfaustina from San Francisco, Sun7 from Paris, Karan Rashad from Iran, Dzyla and Fani1 from Australia, and Laser 3.14 from Amsterdam.)

With big thanks to King Adz.

Featuring 120 pages of the freshest urban talent from: Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, i-jusi, Sputn*kk, A1one Writer from Iran, Helen Lyon, mattblack, ASK! ELLiS, Szutka Fabryka, Blend, Paul Hartnett and shit-loads more… plus a FREE DVD offer featuring all video content from Issues 1 & 2 plus exclusive episode of the legendary ‘100proofMIXTAPE’…

What more could you want? With thanks to King Adz.

The picture shows New York spray can memorial by Antonio ‘Chico’ Garcia, located on Bruckner Boulevard, off Brook Avenue, Mott Haven, Bronx. This was Chico’s first memorial portrait, for a high school friend called Ed. Ed was shot down in a hail of bullets in a drive by shooting near this empty lot. The Lower East Side mural has since been defaced by rival dealers.

This is just one of 100 plus such murals documented by Martha Cooper and Joseph Sciorra in their recent book, R.I.P.: New York Spraycan Memorials. The murals memorialise all manner of death in the mean streets of New York: drugs, shooting, wars, asthma deaths, traffic accidents and AIDS.

In the introduction, Sciorra writes:

The memorial wall transforms personal grief into shared public sentiment by serving as a vehicle for community affiliation and potential empowerment. Covering the expenses for materials and the artist’s labor is often a collective endeavor, with neighborhood residents making contributions in memory of one of their own. The murals create new public spaces for community ceremony. Life is celebrated at the walls with parties marking anniversaries and birthdays. These centers of congregation become rallying points of candlelight processions and demonstrations held by community people who march through the streets in opposition to violence, drugs or police brutality.

These neighborhood billboards are used to elicit critical examination of the root causes and solutions to the daily onslaught against inner-city youth. The Crown Heights Youth Collective in Brooklyn sponsors memorials in an aggressive campaign to cultivate alternatives to violence among the neighborhood’s Caribbean and African American kids.

The images in this book represent only a fraction of those we documented; they are a small part of the two thousand plus killing that occur each year in the city. Turn the page and witness a generation of sons and daughters — now gone.