From iam at lists.artsandmedia.net Wed Dec 6 13:35:25 2006 From: iam at lists.artsandmedia.net (iam@lists.artsandmedia.net) Date: Wed Dec 6 13:38:18 2006 Subject: Indy Arts needs your help now! Message-ID: --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- Independent Arts & Media 2006 Fund Drive Funds raised so far: $0 // Goal: $2,000 People on List: 941 // Weeks left: 3 Donate online: http://artsandmedia.net/contributions/ * Full details on making a tax-deductible donation are at the end of this email. * -- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- December 6, 2006 Dear Friends; Since 2000, Independent Arts & Media has strengthened public dialogue by increasing access to independent voices. This week, we'd like to let you know about two great, independent programs that Indy Arts is honored to support. See the end of this email for full details on these and other programs: -- Renowned film archivist Rick Prelinger comes to Shaping San Francisco's Fall Talks program TONIGHT. We are honored to be co-producers of the Talks series. -- Madhappys, San Francisco's original, free comix-art newspaper, just published its thirteenth issue. Madhappys is an independent project that is fiscally sponsored by Indy Arts. SUPPORTING INDEPENDENT CULTURE & COMMUNITY We founded Indy Arts because we were tired of waiting for large corporations to produce media and culture that's relevant to our lives ... because a steady diet of "infotainment" can't sustain the kind of civic dialogue and creative vitality that our democracy needs. If the mainstream isn't good enough, we'll do it ourselves! Powered by volunteers and lots of love, Indy Arts has staged dozens of free workshops and speaker events, produced the annual Expo for the Artist & Musician for seven years and counting, and has published more than 50 original articles on Newsdesk.org and 260 issues of the free weekly newsletter News You Might Have Missed. We've also provided support and sponsorship to 11 media, arts and dialogue projects, and this past fall debuted The Messenger, a free newspaper dedicated to independent culture and community. INDY ARTS NEEDS YOU! All this productivity, and our annual budget covers little more than rent and utilities. That's why your help is so important. Your donations of $25, $50, $100, $500 or more will keep Indy Arts alive -- and help us grow. Details on how to make a tax-deductible donation are at the end of this email -- or just click through to our secure online donor page: Indy Arts Donor Page http://artsandmedia.net/contributions/ Below, you'll also find a listing of December events by organizations Indy Arts sponsors or supports. Thanks so much for your support of independent culture and community! Sincerely, The Indy Arts Staff & Volunteers --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- Supporting Independent Culture & Community The following events are all staged by organizations that Indy Arts supports or sponsors. RICK PRELINGER @ SHAPING SAN FRANCISCO'S FALL TALKS -- Renowned film archivist Rick Prelinger comes to Shaping San Francisco's Fall Talks 2006 program TONIGHT. We are honored to be co-producers of the Talks series, in support of the hardworking folks at Shaping San Francisco. Wednesday, Dec. 6, 8:00 p.m., FREE. CounterPulse, 1310 Mission St. x 9th St. Full Fall Talks schedule: http://counterpulse.org/fall-winter-talks.shtml http://artsandmedia.net/cgi-bin/dc/iam/2006/fall-talks-2006 FREE COMIX FOR THE PEOPLE -- Madhappys, San Francisco's original, FREE comix-art newspaper, just celebrated its one-year anniversary, and has a new issue available around San Francisco. Madhappys is an independent project that is fiscally sponsored by Indy Arts. Learn more at http://www.madhappys.com/ CALL FOR ARTISTS & STUDIO SPACE AVAILABLE -- ArtSF, another Indy Arts sponsoree, has an artist studio for rent in the heart of the Mission District, and is currently seeking artists to contribute to its Dec. 17 exhibit. Studio: joemama@artsf.org Exhibit: artmagicsf@yahoo.com Web info: http://artsf.org/ PARTNER EVENT: GLOBAL YOUTH MEDIA & ARTS FEST -- World Savvy's Global Youth Media & Arts Festival addresses topics of "Immigration & Identity" this Friday at Zeum. The program is free/donation requested, and features the work of 300 youth from around the world. World Savvy is a veteran attendee of the Expo for the Artist & Musician. Friday, Dec. 8, 6-9p.m., Free/donation requested. Zeum, 221 4th St. x Howard Learn more at: http://www.worldsavvy.org/ --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- HERE'S HOW YOU CAN SUPPORT OUR WORK Independent Arts & Media 2006 Fund Drive Funds raised so far: $0 // Goal: $2,000 People on List: 1,695 // Weeks left: 3 Recommended donations: $25, $50, $100, $500 or more. Donate online: http://artsandmedia.net/contributions/ Snail Mail (checks only!): Independent Arts & Media PMB 821 * 601 Van Ness Ave., Ste. E * SF, CA 94102 * All donations are tax-deductible. * * Thank you for your generous support! * --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://gdc.groupd.com/pipermail/iam/attachments/20061206/5f0563dc/attachment.html From iam at lists.artsandmedia.net Thu Dec 14 14:03:26 2006 From: iam at lists.artsandmedia.net (iam@lists.artsandmedia.net) Date: Thu Dec 14 14:05:32 2006 Subject: [Indy Arts] MySpace and the Future of Democracy Message-ID: --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- Independent Arts & Media 2006 Fund Drive Funds raised so far: $250 // Goal: $2,000 People on list: 942 // Weeks left: 2 Donate online: http://artsandmedia.net/contributions/ * Full details on making a tax-deductible donation are at the end of this email. * -- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- December 14, 2006 Dear Friends; Thanks to the folks who've donated to Indy Arts so far! We've raised $250, and urgently need your support to meet our year-end funding goal. This week: Do 100 million MySpace accounts add up to democracy renewed? Remember that Rupert Murdoch didn't purchase MySpace because it's a beacon of online self-expression. As noted in Wired magazine ("His Space," July 2006), he bought it because MySpace is an enormous database of customers with whom to develop intricate one-to-one marketing relationships: "The most immediate [challenge] is to avoid doing anything that might interfere with the runaway growth that has already made MySpace the biggest aggregation of people on the Web. But that's just step one. Step two is to turn MySpace's teeming masses into a wholly new kind of media entity, an advertising, marketing, and distribution vehicle that gives News Corp. a hand on the steering wheel of popular culture worldwide." THE NEW MASS MEDIA Luckily for Murdoch, much of the marketing technology he needs is already built into the MySpace platform, as the company was founded by pioneers of the spam, adware, spyware and mass-email industry (see below for details). In this "wholly new kind of media entity," the Internet's cornucopia of ideas, information and art becomes an immersive series of massively personalized consumer experiences. Murdoch has seen this future, and it's brilliant. It's hundreds of millions of online users, tracked and analyzed on a daily basis. It's narrowcast and demographically targeted with unprecedented accuracy. Like Pavlov, it rewards certain consumer behaviors, and devalues others. And commerce ain't the half of it. What if the masters of this new mass medium have a political agenda as well? SUPPORT INDEPENDENT CULTURE & COMMUNITY Fortunately, this is a future we can opt out of. Independent culture and community is alive and well in the United States and around the world. We at Indy Arts are dedicated to supporting D.I.Y. cultural entrepreneurs and civic-minded, "open source" media and dialogue. We contribute to the new public-media sector that is emerging on the Internet -- and we take our work offline, into the real world, with programs such as the Expo for the Artist & Musician, fiscal sponsorship, dozens of free workshops and dialogue events, and non-virtual print and radio media. Your tax-deductible donations of $25, $50, $100, $500 or more will keep these vital services alive -- and help Indy Arts grow: Indy Arts Donor Page http://artsandmedia.net/contributions/ Snail Mail (checks only!): Independent Arts & Media PMB 821 * 601 Van Ness Ave., Ste. E * SF, CA 94102 Thanks so much for your support of independent culture and community! Sincerely, The Indy Arts Staff & Volunteers --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- THE MYSPACE FUTURE? -- Software in your MySpace homepage will harvest your online behavior patterns to send you personalized feeds of news, media and entertainment. Paradoxically, audience diversity fuels niche marketing. Knowledge of news, issues and arts outside of one's own special interests declines. -- Other media corporations join forces with News Corp. to "incentivize" purchases of, for example, pop music. Fans will be rewarded with store credits or free concert tickets for posting positive reviews to their blog of a band on an affiliated partner label. Bands on unaffiliated or independent labels somehow wind up at the bottom of the personalized MySpace feed, if at all. -- Political messaging becomes ever more subtle and pervasive in the "post-Fairness Doctrine" era. Media corporations with political agendas will be able to screen out or decrease the presence of competing political messages. REFERENCES -= "His Space" Wired, July 2006 http://tinyurl.com/me3ao A telling profile of Rupert Murdoch and his long-term plans for News Corporation and MySpace. -= "MySpace: The Business of Spam 2.0" Valleywag.com, Sept. 11, 2006 http://tinyurl.com/evj7g "Most users believe that MySpace started as some kind of fluke -- a happy accident that began in Anderson's bedroom or garage--and many still don't wonder, know, or care about the site's real business history and model. Heralded as a haven of DIY self-expression, MySpace was actually created by executives whose backgrounds are anchored in spam and mass marketing ... The real genius of MySpace lies in its re-imagining and repackaging of spam. While most Internet users expend time and energy attempting to keep it out, MySpace is spam that they actually invite in." -= "2006, Brought to You by You" New York Times, Sunday, Dec. 10, 2006 http://tinyurl.com/y2tyvo MySpace and YouTube are sold to Fox and Google, respectively, for more than $2 billion, and independent culture online is officially a force to be reckoned with. "User-generated content" disrupts the film and video industry's retail model -- and plays fast and loose with copyright -- but it also creates new ways to maximize profits: - SELF-EXPRESSION AS A MARKETING VEHICLE "A truly shrewd marketer might find [that] parodies, collages, remakes and mismakes are unvarnished market research: a way to see what people really think of their product. They're also advertising: a reminder of how enjoyable the official versions were." - NARROWCASTING "The multiplying choices promise ever more diversity, ever more possibility for innovation and unexpected delight. But they also point toward an increasingly atomized audience, a popular culture composed of a zillion nonintersecting mini-cults. So much available self-expression can only accelerate what narrowing radio and cable formats had already begun: the separation of culture into ever-smaller niches." --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- HERE'S HOW YOU CAN SUPPORT OUR WORK Independent Arts & Media 2006 Fund Drive Funds raised so far: $250 // Goal: $2,000 People on List: 922 // Weeks left: 2 Recommended donations: $25, $50, $100, $500 or more. Donate online: http://artsandmedia.net/contributions/ Snail Mail (checks only!): Independent Arts & Media PMB 821 * 601 Van Ness Ave., Ste. E * SF, CA 94102 * All donations are tax-deductible. * * Thank you for your generous support! * --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://gdc.groupd.com/pipermail/iam/attachments/20061214/5362670f/attachment-0001.html From iam at lists.artsandmedia.net Thu Dec 21 11:11:40 2006 From: iam at lists.artsandmedia.net (iam@lists.artsandmedia.net) Date: Thu Dec 21 11:15:20 2006 Subject: Indy Arts: Coming up in 2007 Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://gdc.groupd.com/pipermail/iam/attachments/20061221/92c179c5/attachment.html From iam at lists.artsandmedia.net Fri Dec 29 13:27:49 2006 From: iam at lists.artsandmedia.net (iam@lists.artsandmedia.net) Date: Fri Dec 29 13:30:15 2006 Subject: Indy Arts: Last-minute challenge grant Message-ID: Dear friends; We've been offered an eleventh-hour fundraising opportunity, and are sending out this final 2006 update to let you know. Your support this year has been inspiring. Thank you for helping create a new kind of public resource for commercial-free media, arts, culture and dialogue. MATCHING GRANT A group of anonymous donors have upped the ante by promising to match all contributions between now and 11:59 p.m. on December 31, up to $2,000 total. That means your donations will be automatically doubled up until the New Year's Eve countdown, and will help us close a major 2007 budget gap. (Note that sending a check saves us an online processing fee.) Expo Secure Online Donor Page http://artsandmedia.net/contributions/ Snail Mail (checks only, payable to Independent Arts & Media) PMB 821 * 601 Van Ness Ave., Ste. E * SF, CA 94102 Indy Arts strengthens civic dialogue by increasing access to independent voices. Thanks again for your support, and best wishes for the new year and beyond! Sincerely, The Indy Arts board, staff and volunteers http://artsandmedia.net/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://gdc.groupd.com/pipermail/iam/attachments/20061229/1b906e42/attachment.html