SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2007
Mobile Aesthetics & Social Movements: Thinkspace
2:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. Polycentric Session, UC-Berkeley, Townsend
Center for the Humanities
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The number one cause of death in the low-income
neighborhoods of Oakland, CA is not gang violence or drug overdoses
– it's heart disease. Diabetes and cancer also run rampant in
these poor communities. Welcome to the food desert, where supermarkets
and fresh produce don't exist. Most residents buy their food at the
ubiquitous corner liquor store, where processed foods are abundant.
The relationship between the ecology of control, and the control of
ecology, is rendered starkly by the extremity of this social landscape,
just as that relationship is obscured completely by the images with
which West Oakland is represented – or in favor of which it is
ignored – by industrial media.
Altering the long-term trajectory of this system
will require strategic interventions into the patterns of flow of biological
resources, images, information, and cascades of control and accountability.
The Liberation Ecology Project proposes succinct, provocative, "content-free"
design criteria (meaning that the criteria are portable to design in
any domain, any project). We'll introduce and contextualize these criteria,
and use them to structure our discussion of actual and imagined media-tactical
responses to the West Oakland food desert.