Monthly Archives: July 2017

Art, Chelsea Manning

Come to the Opening Reception for “A Becoming Resemblance” – August 2, 6-8pm – Fridman Gallery, NYC

Opening Reception – August 2, 2017 – 6-8pm

Fridman Gallery – 287 Spring Street, New York

Fridman Gallery is pleased to present A Becoming Resemblance, an exhibition by Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Chelsea E. Manning, investigating emerging technologies of genomic identity construction and our societal moment.

In 2015, Heather began to produce 3D printed portraits derived from the DNA extracted from cheek swabs and hair clippings Chelsea mailed out of prison. Incarcerated since her gender transition and subject to a strict policy on visitation, Chelsea’s image was suppressed from 2013 until her release from prison in May this year. The artistic collaboration with Heather gave Chelsea back a form of visibility, a human face she had been denied.

As Chelsea described the collaboration: “Prisons try very hard to make us inhuman and unreal by denying our image, and thus our existence, to the rest of the world. Imagery has become a kind of proof of existence. The use of DNA in art provides a cutting edge and a very post-modern—almost ‘post-post-modern’—analysis of thought, identity, and expression. It combines chemistry, biology, information, and our ideas of beauty and identity.”

More about A Becoming Resemblance In the Press:

Save Net Neutrality

Today We Fight to Protect Free Speech On The Internet

I know it sounds ridiculous to imagine, but without Net Neutrality, the cable companies have the power to slow down traffic that doesn’t pay extra fees for the privilege of not being interfered with.

It’s really about FREE SPEECH people. If we lose Net Neutrality, it means people with more money will be able to silence online voices those that don’t.

1000s of participants, including Netflix, Twitter, Amazon, GoDaddy, Google, Snapchat, and Facebook!

From this post about the campaign:

Sites and apps participating include:  Automattic (WordPress), Amazon, Mozilla, Netflix, Etsy, Kickstarter, Soundcloud, Dropbox, Spotify, Facebook, Google, Snapchat, Medium, Y Combinator, GitHub, Pantheon, Opera, Bittorrent Inc., Shapeways, Nextdoor, Stack Overflow, Funny Or Die, Dreamhost, and CREDO Mobile, Goldenfrog, Fark, Chess.com, Namecheap, DuckDuckGo, Checkout.com, Sonic, Ting, ProtonMail, O’Reilly Media, SlashDot, Dribble, Dischord, SourceForge, and Union Square Ventures.

Organizations participating include Fight for the Future, Free Press Action Fund, Demand Progress, Center for Media Justice, EFF, Internet Association, Internet Archive, World Wide Web Foundation, Creative Commons, National Hispanic Media Coalition, Greenpeace, Common Cause, ACLU, Rock the Vote, American Library Association, Daily Kos, OpenMedia, The Nation, PCCC, MoveOn, OFA, Public Knowledge, OTI, Color of Change, MoveOn, Free Software Foundation, Internet Creators Guild, the Women’s March, and many others.

It’s REALLY nice to see Netflix on board, as they would not be the successful company today, without Net Neutrality.

What does that mean? It means that they weren’t charged extra based on the nature of their usage. It means that all traffic on the internet is given the same priority. So the internet will allow your pages to load as fast as anyone else’s page.

So please write to the FCC today – and let’s keep the pressure on, every day, until the FCC stops with its current mission of internet destruction.

From the Battle for the Net page:

Cable companies are famous for high prices and poor service. Several rank as the most hated companies in America. Now, they’re lobbying the FCC and Congress to end net neutrality. Why? It’s simple: if they win the power to slow sites down, they can bully any site into paying millions to escape the “slow lane.” This would amount to a tax on every sector of the American economy. Every site would cost more, since they’d all have to pay big cable. Worse, it would extinguish the startups and independent voices who can’t afford to pay. If we lose net neutrality, the Internet will never be the same.