Audio Interference

In the past few weeks, regular listeners to the podcast have heard an episode on community internet, and another celebrating libraries. This week, we’ll combine the best of both worlds.

Today, we'll chat with Alison Macrina, Founder and Executive Director of the Library Freedom Project, an organization that’s making an impact in local communities, helping reduce the harm that people face online from hackers, law enforcement and major corporations. We’ll learn of the organization's showdown with the Department of Homeland Security and hear of its efforts to scale up to a library near you.

To learn more about Library Freedom Project and Library Freedom Institute, visit www.libraryfreedom.org.

Music in this episode (“Dusting,” “Stilt,” “Borough” & “Hickory Interlude”) by Blue Dot Sessions - www.sessions.blue

Produced by Interference Archive.

In today’s episode, we’ll learn about community networks around the world, including NYC Mesh, FunkFeuer, and Rhizomatica. Community Networks offer local communities the opportunity to own and control their communication infrastructure.

To learn more about NYC Mesh visit www.nycmesh.net.

To learn more about Rhizomatica, including projects outside of Oaxaca, Mexico, visit www.rhizomatica.org.

To learn more about FunkFeuer, visit www.funkfeuer.at.

Thanks to Jonathan Dahan, Myf Ma, Aaron Kaplan, and Peter Bloom for speaking with us for this episode.

Music: Onward & Upward by junior85.

Produced by Interference Archive.

We’re back to continue our series on radical, community libraries! In this episode, we chat with Ola Ronke Akinmowo of the Free Black Women’s Library, Dev Aujla of Sorted Library, and Jen Hoyer and Daniel Pecoraro from our own Interference Archive library.

To learn more about the Free Black Women’s Library, stay up to date about future pop ups, and find out where to donate books, visit her site, follow the library on social media @thefreeblackwomenslibrary, and consider supporting the project via Patreon.

Here’s a short list of reading recommendations from Ola Ronke: Audre Lorde, Gloria Naylor, Buchi Emecheta, Pat Parker, June Jordan, Nnedi Okorafor, especially Who Fears Death, Octavia Butler, especially Parable of the Sower, Zora Neale Hurston, especially Dust Tracks on the Road, This Thing Around My Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Sula by Toni Morrison, Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi, Things We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons, All About Love by bell hooks, Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires, I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem by Maryse Condé, The Girl Who Smiled Beads by Clementine Wamariya, Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward, Eloquent Rage by Brittney Cooper.

To learn more about the Sorted Library, including the date of their next open house, you can follow them on Instagram @SortedLibrary or visit them at sortedlibrary.com.

To learn more about the Interference Archive library, visit our website, or visit us in person. The archive (and library) is open to the public Thursdays-Sundays.

A huge thank you to Ola Ronke Akinmowo, Dev Aujla, Jen Hoyer, and Daniel Pecoraro for talking with us and the important and exciting work you do!

Music: “Good Times” and “Laid Back Fuzz” Podington Bear

Produced by Interference Archive.

This episode features an interview with artist and collector Alison Alder, recorded last summer when Alison visited New York. Alison Alder is a visual artist whose work blurs the line between studio, community and social/political art practice. Her formative years as an artist were spent working in the screen-printing workshops of Megalo (Canberra) and Redback Graphix (Wollongong/Sydney) where she was co-director from 1985–1993. The next major period of her art practice was spent working within Indigenous organisations in the Northern Territory, primarily for Julalikari Council in Tennant Creek. Alder received an International Year of Tolerance Fellowship from the Australia Council in recognition of her work toward social justice and equity through art practice. Alder is currently Head of the Printmedia and Drawing Workshop at the Australian National University School of Art.

Alison is also the organizer of Interference Archive's current exhibition, Hi-Viz: Australian Political Posters 1979-2019. Hi-Viz, an exhibition of screen-printed posters that provide a visual commentary of politics and life in Australia over the last four decades, is on display through April 14.

Here's an image of the Redback Graphix poster Alison refers to:

https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/85.1983/

Music: "Amends" by Mere Women.

Produced by Interference Archive.

The Professional Staff Congress, the union of the faculty and staff at the City University of New York, is currently bargaining a contract which includes a flagship demand of seven thousand dollars per course for adjunct faculty — which would finally earn many adjuncts a living wage and push forward a national conversation about funding for public education.

Various adjunct organizers are trying to push the union towards a strike in order to win the demand, but they have faced resistance from union leadership, as striking is illegal for public sector workers in New York State and comes with tremendous risks. Organizers in favor of a strike have united under a campaign they have called, "7K or Strike!" In this episode, we hear from various union members about how they believe they will win this demand. To learn more about the 7K demand itself and the daily reality for adjuncts at CUNY, you can listen to episode 51, titled: "Adjunctification at CUNY".

Music:

La Fatigue et l'Insupportable Bonheur du Prochain by Bernard Grancher

New York Town by Woody Guthrie

Produced by the Interference Archive

This episode of Audio Interference features highlights from an event at the archive with Keith Brooks and Phil Brown, in which they shared their experiences in the critical psychology movement that was a part of the revolutionary environment at Alternate U. Phil and Keith helped set up the organization Psychologists for a Democratic Society (an offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society), which published a newspaper under the same name.

Radical psychology and the politics of mental illness were an important part of social movements in the 1970s and 1980s, and central issues in free education experiments, including Alternate U. In 1970, Keith Brooks ran a course called Towards a Radical Psychology, centered around psychology in the context of the global liberation struggle and the questions of “what is its role and whose side is it on?” Phil Brown ran a course called Demystification of Contemporary Psychology, challenging what he called the “Myth of Mental Illness.”

Music: "The Birds & The Bees" by The 2 Bears.

Produced by Interference Archive.

In this episode of Audio Interference, you'll hear a recording of an event held at the archive in October of 2018. The event was called “Politics of Sound: Listening to the Archive,” and it was a discussion about the various ways archiving sound can be a political act, including how sound archives can support organizing work, and how sound collections can contribute to the creation of historical memory, broadening the range of stories that are part of our collective history.

Speakers included Natiba Guy-Clement, Special Collections Manager at the Brooklyn Public Library, home of the Civil Rights in Brooklyn Oral History Collection; Daniel Horowitz, oral historian and poet, currently working on a historical memory project based in Bay St Louis, Mississippi; Samara Smith, Associate Professor at SUNY, who documented the sounds of Occupy Wall Street; and Mario Alvarez, one of the creators of Columbia Life Histories, a series of oral history interviews with graduate students at Columbia University.

For more information, visit:

https://borrow.bklynlibrary.org/r1s/iii/encore/?lang=eng (search "civil rights in Brooklyn")

http://brooklynink.org/2011/12/26/39230-the-anarchivists-who-owns-the-occupy-wall-street-narrative/

https://columbialifehistories.com/

Music: "Telling Me Yes" by Ryan Anderson.

Produced by Interference Archive.

“Our lending policy is: as many books as you want, for as long as you want. We want people to take the time to live with the books as long as they need to, to figure out how they fit into the larger picture of how they live.” -- Dawn Finley, FLOW

In this episode, we ask the questions: What does it mean to be a radical, community library? What are the goals, responsibilities, and impacts of such an organization? We do so through conversations with Laura Moulton of Streetbooks, Melissa Marturano of Books Through Bars, Dawn Finley of FLOW, and Julia of the ABC No Rio Zine Library.

To learn more about Streetbooks visit their website at—http://streetbooks.org/

and read this NYT article about them: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/10/us/homeless-outreach-in-volumes-books-by-bike-for-outside-people-in-oregon.html

To learn more about Books through Bars visit their website at—https://booksthroughbarsnyc.org/

Read an interview with founder vikki law—http://artfcity.com/2012/09/05/the-abc-no-rio-interviews-vikki-law/ and this NYT article: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/12/opinion/books-prison-packages-new-york.html

To stay up to date about what’s going on in Pennsylvania Prisons see the links below:

—https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/incarcerated-pennsylvanians-now-have-to-pay-150-to-read-we-should-all-be-outraged/2018/10/11/51f548b8-cbd9-11e8-a85c-0bbe30c19e8f_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.49acb26c7a96

—https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/08/29/pennsylvania-prisons-are-locked-down-after-unknown-substances-leave-hospitalized/?utm_term=.ffa16cd982d

—http://www2.philly.com/philly/news/pennsylvania-prison-department-corrections-john-wetzel-security-plan-books-through-bars-k2-20181019.html?fbclid=IwAR1mWpHFFCjSgWWiE0AXCKUUfGW6DQBoxmhyKHgcbfMc2KNCgtZdLbU8auA

For those interested in what FLOW is up to: http://feministlibraryonwheels.com/ and https://lithub.com/the-feminist-library-on-wheels-a-roaming-tool-for-social-justice/.

ABC No Rio Zine Library Contact Information: http://www.abcnorio.org/pcgi-bin/suite/calendar/calendar.cgi?request=detail&website=default&event_id=12029

A huge Thank You to Laura Moulton, Melissa Marturano, Dawn Finley, and Julia for engaging us in conversation and for the important work you do! Stay tuned for Radical Access, Part II.

Music: “Bronco Romp,” by Waylon Thornton; “Feel Good (Instrumental),” by Broke For Free; “Luminous,” by Broke For Free; “Live on BSR,” by Juan Wauters.

Produced by Interference Archive.

“I think we were interested in finding a true story. We were interested in telling the truth, not to make a propaganda film and not to make a film that would make people feel heroic. We wanted to make a film that was both sympathetic to the project and its goals and purposes, and at the same time was realistic about the world that it was operating in.”

- Robert Machover

In this episode we speak with Norman Fruchter and Robert Machover about their collaboration as filmmakers and instructors at the Free University of New York (FUNY), a 1960s experiment in radical education. Fruchter presented a course called ‘Film Form: Propaganda into Art’, and Machover offered a workshop with the aim of producing a film collectively under the title ‘Filmmaking’. This led to creation of the film Dog Burning at Noon, a short clip of which plays during the episode. This episode also includes a discussion of and short clip from Machover and Fruchter’s 1966 film Troublemakers, which chronicled a group of young activists who worked with a predominately black community in their struggle against poverty and low quality housing in Newark.

A huge thank you to Jakob Jakobsen, who moderated the discussion and organized the event as part of Interference Archive’s current exhibition Free Education! Rooted in an examination of the history of the Free University of New York, the exhibition aims to generate conversation within our community–across generations and socio-economic realities –about what it looks like to reimagine possibilities for education. The exhibition is currently running at Interference Archive through January 27, 2019. Thanks also to Norman Fruchter and Robert Machover.

Music: "Hello Vietnam," by Johnny Wright.

Produced by Interference Archive.

“I remember walking home from that huge protest and feeling this sense of huge hope in the air...And it was just really exciting and it felt like things actually could change.” --Becca Shaw Glazer

In this episode, we speak with activists who participated in protests against the World Trade Organization in the 1990s and 2000s. The 1999 Seattle protest against the WTO is often seen as the beginning of a worldwide anti-globalization movement and the Indymedia movement. About 40,000 people took to the streets to express their dissent, and protestors successfully blocked delegates from entering the convention center, delaying the meeting. The protests became known as “The Battle of Seattle” because of the police violence that ensued in response. We focus on the protests that took place in Seattle, and then share an interview with someone who participated in WTO protests in Cancun, one of the protests that took place globally as a result.

A huge thank you to our interviewees for speaking with us for this episode: Becca Shaw Glaser, Danielle Chynoweth, Mark Enslin, and Celeste. Many of these people were involved in founding the Independent Media Center in Urbana, IL and the radio station WRFU, and became connected to Interference Archive when they began airing episodes of this podcast.

Archival materials used in this episode include:

Democracy Now, 12.2.1999 Broadcast, Drum Circle from WTO Protest in Seattle and interviews with activists

Democracy Now, 12.3.1999 Broadcast, Activists chanting and interviews with activists

Democracy Now, 12.6.1999 Broadcast, WTO Talks Collapse

Courtesy of Celeste, who was working with pirate radio and independent media at the time, we have been able to include recordings of the 2003 WTO protest in Cancun, including an interview with the Beehive Collective and with Celeste herself. You can also listen to these recordings at Interference Archive.

To learn more about the Battle of Seattle, and international WTO protests:

60 Minute reporting of Seattle protests: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4i_4xEBCdys

Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/event/Seattle-WTO-protests-of-1999

“Curfew in effect as Seattle struggles to control WTO protests,” http://www.cnn.com/US/9911/30/wto.04/

“State of Emergency in Seattle,” https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/dec/01/wto

“Seattle WTO Uprising Still a Force in World Events, 15 Years Later,” http://berkeleyjournal.org/2014/12/seattle-wto-uprising-still-a-force-in-world-events-15-years-later/

“WTO Meeting and Protests in Seattle (1999),” http://www.historylink.org/File/9183 & http://www.historylink.org/File/9213

“20 Years of the WTO: A Story of Poverty and Protest,” https://www.telesurenglish.net//english/analysis/20-Years-of-the-WTO-A-Story-of-Poverty-and-Protest-20150415-0017.html

You can also visit the archive for print materials related to these protests.

To learn more about Lee Kyung Hae and his leadership among the activist and farming communities:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/sep/16/northkorea.wto

https://viacampesina.org/en/take-agriculture-out-of-the-wto-farmer-lee-kyung-hae-reproducing-his-letter-from-2003/

https://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/16/world/farming-is-korean-s-life-and-he-ends-it-in-despair.html

Produced by Interference Archive.