February 12 2010

Cineworks is excited to support Safe Assembly 2010, in collaboration with VIVO Media Arts.

Since 1973, VIVO Media Arts Centre (aka Video In, aka Satellite Video Exchange) has facilitated an archive of dissent. Providing a space for dialogue and community building is the core of our ambition. In order to preserve our history as a place for artists to engage in a culture of critical action, VIVO has chosen not to participate in the 2010 Cultural Olympiad. We intend to use the clarity of our position outside of this spectacle to operate as a hub for analysis, skill sharing, production, and collaboration. We want to create a space for artists to consider their own production in relation to the events and systems around them. The forms this questioning will take are speculative. For some this will involve bearing witness with camera or microphone, for others it will be a period of digestion, a time to observe, create questions, and build an understanding. We look forward to asking how might we act politically? Given the polemical nature of this time, how do we move beyond didacticism, to produce new thought and action? For others who have always taken the open, subtlety of art for granted, we look to precedents, to those who have not shied from the term political artist. We can use this moment to examine the tropes of the past, and produce a solidarity that branches into personal practice or opens to produce new forms of collaboration.

While the Olympics clothe aggressive urban restructuring with a party, privileging an atmosphere of celebration over adverse political-economic effects upon local communities, we want to engage the cultural logic that justifies its continued development despite grave social costs. The power of artistic discourse to intervene in this process—registering dissent, producing new forms of protest, and amplifying its meaning—is its use value. Art opens thought, complicates the official story, and articulates a lineage of solidarity — it functions as both a force of heterogeneity and lasting register of political impressions. Long after the event is over, cultural expressions continue to emerge, as markers of the time, and reflections of individual and collective experience. We might challenge the old antagonisms and use the energy of this moment to facilitate a new start, simultaneously building a community to produce this shift.

AFTERNOON SCHOOL consists of both planned and spontaneous seminars, with examples of skill sharing, media activism, screenings from the Video Out archive with its rich history of protest in Vancouver, and discussions using critical theory and contemporary art to produce a counter-public. Click here for more information.

The EVENING NEWS is a series of discussions and presentations that will include a forum for participants and audience members to show highlights and ephemera from what they have gathered throughout the day. These presentations will contribute to a larger conversation and archive around the cultural meaning and social impact of the Olympics. Click here for more information.

We will be operating a RADIO transmitter during the last two weeks of February. Our signal will also be streaming online. Our range will be humble, and thus situated.

The SOCIAL PROPAGANDA MIXING MACHINE is an open call for participants to create sound or image propaganda. Click here for more information.

COVERING UP will be a street action photo/video-documentation project.

We also invite people to collaborate with our performance troupe, THE WHITE PILLOWS, to create responses to the day-to-day tensions of the event and site-specific performances that deal with public presence.

SAFE ASSEMBLY 2010 intends to facilitate cultural expressions that arise from the community in a lineage of solidarity. If you are interested in participating please come visit us this month.

SAFE ASSEMBLY
12-28 February 2010
VIVO Media Arts Centre [1965 Main Street]
Free