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;performing; visuals with Lance Blisters tonight
Posted on April 14th, 2007 by dan.
Categories: politics, connections, performing, nyc, war, music, live visuals.
I forgot to mention that I’m doing visuals with Lance Blisters tonight at the after-party for the 1st annual Anarchist Book Fair. 
LANCE BLISTERS: LIVE Jungle, Breakcore, Punk, and Noise performed with MIDI Guitar and Microphone, using custom software to create cutup political anthems. LIVE synchronized visual transcriptions of the songs’ subjects. LANCE BLISTERS was initiated in 2003 to SMASH THE STATE with a show which will ROCK YOUR FACE OFF! LANCE BLISTERS is a live multimedia band currently comprising Lance Blisters (music) and Ilan Katin (visuals), with special guest visual performer Dan Winckler for this show.
This Saturday, 14 April 07, LANCE BLISTERS will perform at the Anarchist Bookfair Afterparty with bands VIC THRILL and SATURN MISSILE, MOURNING GLORIES, ZEMI 17, and DJ’s CX KIDTRONIK, PETER GUNN, SHAKEY, AMOK, EMMIT BROWN, JASON BK playing a mixed bag of breaks, hip hop, d and b, techno, rare grooves, dubstep, breakcore, and…
Expect LANCE to play at 10:30pm
9pm-4am, Saturday, 14 Apr 2007
The Creek in The Cave, 10-93 Jackson Ave. (Long Island City, QueenS)
7 to Vernon/Jackson -or- G to 21 St/Van Alst.
$3-6 w/ ID
Google subway map from onnyturf.com
No Water
Posted on August 10th, 2006 by dan.
Categories: politics, nyc, war, america, history.
“Terrorists can be defeated simply by not becoming terrorized — that is, anything that enhances fear effectively gives in to them.”*
This moment in history will be remembered as a high-water mark of fear and hysteria, a time when small groups of men successfully bred fear around the world, a fear which politicians encouraged and manipulated to secure their control over government. Today I called my Congressman and Senators’ offices to ask them to speak out against this “no liquids” policy on airplanes and the manipulation of this foiled act of terrorism by the party in power to make people more fearful, and thus, more easy to control. The response by our government to acts of terrorism is turning our country into a fearful, reactionary monster. I hope you’ll call or write your representatives, too.
http://house.gov
http://senate.gov
* From “A False Sense of Insecurity?” (alternate link), an essay by John Mueller from the Cato Institute’s Regulation magazine.
thesis tidbit
Posted on August 9th, 2006 by dan.
Categories: politics, secondlife, nyc, education, structures, Grad school, philosophy.
As I said earlier today, I’m writing, writing, writing my thesis paper stuff, which, thank god, is not as painful as my writing process used to be just a few months back. It’s an engaging challenge putting my motivations for Kids Connect as clearly as possible…without using bullet points. 
Here’s one of my objectives, which will form the template/questionnaire for the thesis paper itself. Your feedback would be much appreciated. Here are some guiding words on clarity if you need them. If you prefer, add your thoughts on my page on the ZoomLab wiki.
Objective [1]: teach read/write media literacy and cultivate a critical stance to mass media
Why: One of the primary goals of Kids Connect (KC) is read/write media literacy. What does this mean? To be literate is to be able to read and write. A full understanding of media (new, mass and otherwise) necessitates practical know-how of audio and video recording/editing, creation and synthesis. [Quote Mark Twain about reading the river]. In order to be critical of media, you must be able to distance yourself from it. A practical understanding of the craft of media creation and manipulation cultivates that distance. Moreover, a one-sided conversation is a lecture. Few young people are learning how to master the written word, to produce a compelling argument in nouns and verbs. It is vital that young people learn to write media, to raise their voices over and around the constant shouting match and join the discussion.
How: In the first two weeks of workshops, students learn to shoot video with cameras of various quality, record audio with a variety of microphones, go on sound walks and video walks (experiential exercises in listening and seeing), composition and framing, editing and compression. Each technology is approached through exercises with storytelling, improvisational and/or experiential frames. For example, convey a given emotion through a sequence of still images. In the subsequent weeks, these skills are built upon in exercises exploring expression of identity, neighborhood and community experience. Example: take photos, audio and video of your home in your neighborhood, edit together a gestalt, share it through Second Life. Furthermore, we introduce our students to the world of live visual performance. They learn the techniques of live visuals and VJ-ing: how to mix and synthesize live, streaming, and pre-recorded media, how to express emotion and narative through abstracted light and sound, and to do this collaboratively over networks. They’ve [Some have] already given up on the written word [for formal purposes, e.g., an argument –thank you, Anton]: we teach them the new multimedia communication skills they passionately desire.
Evaluation: How can you tell if someone has developed read/write media literacy? By seeing what they’ve expressed through various media. At the end of the workshops, we will have a large collection of work by our students to examine, as well as many hours of teaching experience to consider. We’ll sift this for patterns and I will write it up in my thesis paper.
Let it be known
Posted on May 4th, 2006 by dan.
Categories: nyc, performing, politics, education, programming, live visuals, theater, art, Grad school.
My allergies started two nights ago. The allergen index is high and the predominant pollens are oak, birch and maple. I always forget this stuff so for future reference and so on and so forth. That is all.
In other news, I’m performing a work in progress at Share this Sunday. Writing the Max patches for it has been quite satisfying. The big challenge is writing the video step sequencer*. I’m finding the logical stuff just as fun as the video manipulation.
We’re hosting DrupalCamp at Poly this weekend. Anton and I are hosting/representing IDMI, but I’ll probably be spending a lot of time hiding and working on my patches. :-/
And furthermore, there’s great stuff going on at Issue Project Room this Friday but I can’t go. Perhaps you can go. Think about it.
* Mom and Dad, this means something that plays through a bunch of videos in sequence automatically. It’s trickier than it sounds, especially if you want it to be dynamic, e.g., play them in random order or with crossfades.
Schule der zeit
Posted on April 26th, 2006 by dan.
Categories: politics, film, education, theater, Grad school, philosophy.
Sorry for the silence here — I’m spectacularly busy, as you might have guessed. I’ll try to post a few times a week: it’ll be brief, messy and the mundane will creep in but hey, doesn’t that describe everything? As I said 10 hours ago, my new thesis is Kids Connect, which brings together a lot of my interests: improv theatre, networked performance and collaboration, Second Life performance, teaching and has the added benefit of institutional support so more of the being-the-producer work is taken care of and I can devote myself to artistic direction and teaching. In other news, the semester is drawing rapidly to a close and I have a paper for Law, a presentation and a project for Media History, a project for Max/MSP/Jitter as well. Exciting stuff. I’m reading Deep Time of the Media by Siegfried Zielinski, key ideas of which can be found in this brief Rhizome interview — and I’m presenting on it and Spectres of the Spectrum (a messy, funny film collage — see this review) on Friday. Key thought from Deep Time for you before I get back to it: the present concentration of power is in control of time, not space. E.g., TV, pace Tivo. (Man, I hope someone gets that besides me.)
Hard facts on Guantanamo Bay detainees
Posted on March 25th, 2006 by dan.
Categories: politics, war, iraq, america.
From the report on Guantanamo detainees by professors and students at Seton Hall University Law School, constructed from declassified government information (and nothing else):
> Only 5% of the [Guantanamo] detainees were captured by United States forces. 86% of the detainees were arrested by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and turned over to United States custody.
> This 86% of the detainees captured by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance were handed over to the United States at a time in which the United States offered large bounties for capture of suspected enemies.
Call your Senators and Congressmen to ask them what they’re doing to stop torture and mistreatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere. It makes a difference.
More on the report:
>The media and public fascination with who is detained at Guantanamo and why has been fueled in large measure by the refusal of the Government, on the grounds of national security, to provide much information about the individuals and the charges against them. The information available to date has been anecdotal and erratic, drawn largely from interviews with the few detainees who have been released or from statements or court filings by their attorneys in the pending habeas corpus proceedings that the Government has not declared ?¢‚Ǩ?°?É‚Äû?ɬ?classified.?¢‚Ǩ?°?É‚Äû?ɬ?
>This Report is the first effort to provide a more detailed picture of who the Guantanamo detainees are, how they ended up there, and the purported bases for their enemy combatant designation. The data in this Report is based entirely upon the United States Government?¢‚Ǩ?°?É‚Äû?ɬ¥s own documents. This Report provides a window into the Government?¢‚Ǩ?°?É‚Äû?ɬ¥s success detaining only those that the President has called ?¢‚Ǩ?°?É‚Äû?ɬ?the worst of the worst.?¢‚Ǩ?°?É‚Äû?ɬ?
They have a new report that just came out Monday. I heard about it on C-SPAN today when the authors of the report, who are counsel for two detainees, spoke at George Washington University along with former detainees in England who spoke about the beatings, solitary confinement, and other mistreatment they received.