PUBLIC transport users are literally being thrown off their seats in bus shelters as part of a bizarre protest against the Brisbane City Council’s apparent response to homelessness.

An “unofficial” public artwork in William St, the city, features a bench that tilts forward when used – tipping people off.

A spokesman for the artists’ group, who wanted to remain anonymous, said the so-called “bitter bench” was installed without council permission on the site of a recently removed bus shelter popular among Brisbane’s homeless.

“We installed the artwork to draw attention to a side of the city being airbrushed away in the interests of commercial priorities,” the spokesman said.

“It seems the more business-friendly Brisbane becomes, the more the city’s most vulnerable are targeted for harassment and contempt.”

Joe Hurley, of the West End Community Centre, said most of the seats in bus shelters had been removed in the past few years, at the request of local businesses.

“It has the effect of moving on homeless people to spaces that are much less public and much less visible,” Mr Hurley said.

“It also impacts seniors, who get quite perturbed that the bus seats are missing.”

A spokesman for Lord Mayor Graham Quirk denied the council made a decision to deliberately remove seats from shelters.

But Cr Helen Abrahams said a stocktake of public seats around West End found eight of 15 seats installed by the Soorley administration had been pulled out.

A subversive spotlight
by Karen Michelmore
abc.net.au
3 February, 2012

Sacred cows make the best hamburgers, says the activist who defaced an Australian icon.

It’s been eight years since David Burgess scaled up to the top of Sydney’s gleaming white Opera House and lashed it with bright red paint.

It took three coats before the act was complete. NO WAR screamed the sign.

The highly-visible protest against the looming Iraq war split the Australian community between those who were shocked at the wonton vandalism of the national icon, and those who applauded the message.

Ultimately, it landed Mr Burgess and his activist peer Will Saunders in jail for nine months’ weekend detention for malicious damage.

“I won’t say there were days I didn’t wake up feeling utterly miserable, but you couldn’t really regret what we’d done,” Burgess says.

“A lot of people said it gave them a little bit of happiness or hope on what was otherwise a very awful day.

“I think if we’d had the idea and then not gone through with it we would have wondered or thought we should have done that.

“A punishment is meant to make you think about what you did and they certainly succeeded in doing that, but I don’t regret it.”

The protest was an act of “culture-jamming”, a strategy that political psychologist Emma Thomas says often polarises communities.

Culture jamming is the subject of a controversial new exhibition to be unveiled at the Museum of Sydney next week (February 11).

“The more sensational something is, the more it is potentially polarising so it’s got this double-edged sword element to it,” says Dr Thomas, of Murdoch University.

“On one hand you do gain media attention for your cause…but on the downside it does also polarise public attention.

“It can certainly turn a lot of people against you.

“If people don’t agree with your means then they will often not identify with your cause as well.”

Dr Thomas says culture jamming is a form of social protest, often employed by smaller groups to effect social change, to raise awareness and influence the public and political process.

“If you are trying to create a baseline awareness of an issue you really need to do something a lot more dramatic and that is where culture jamming and other …more radical strategies really come in,” she says.

The Museum of Sydney exhibition features the work of award-winning photojournalist Dean Sewell who followed a small group of Sydney-based culture jammers known as The Lonely Station for four years.

The handful of activists were responsible for up to two dozen culture jamming events across the city, between 2003 and 2007 including unfurling a banner on the maiden journey of a tourist ship from Sydney to Tasmania which said “Woodchipping – the Spirit of Tasmania”.

Museum of Sydney Curator Inara Walden says some people consider culture jamming to be illegal graffiti, while others believe it is a legitimate form of social commentary.

“I think that one of the things that we believe at the Museum of Sydney is that museums can be safe places for difficult subjects to be discussed,” Ms Walden says.

“I think that something like culture jamming, while it might be controversial and some people might see it as illegal activity, or something that is wrong, there will always be other people who will say well what culture jammers do is in fact legitimate political comment.

“It’s a comment on corporate behaviour and often bad corporate behaviour.”
The first culture jamming in Australia happened long before The Lonely Station, and even Mr Burgess’ infamous protest on top of the Opera House.

Ms Walden says the BUGAUP – pronounced bugger-up – was a group of protestors who scrawled anti-tobacco messages on billboards across Australia during the 1970s and 1980s.

Peter Vogel, now 57, was in his early 20s when he took part in the Billboard Utilising Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions (BUGAUP) campaign.

The movement “refaced” tobacco, alcohol and other billboards deemed harmful to health, adjusting messages like Sterling cigarettes’ “what a Sterling idea”, to “what a stinking idea”, or changing “Marlboro” to “Macho”.

“It was a group of activists who in the 70s were particularly incensed about cigarettes,” Mr Vogel says.

“We decided that we would use the billboards against themselves by turning them into humorous messages that would draw attention to what they were really saying.

“I was driving along and I saw a billboard that someone already had refaced and it just completely captured my imagination and I thought, ‘this is a fantastic way to use the medium against itself and I just immediately took to it like a duck to water.”

The billboard offensive raised public awareness about the extent of tobacco advertising at the time, and gradually led to tighter restrictions placed on cigarette advertising, Mr Vogel says.

Mr Vogel says it was a different environment in Australia back then, well before September 11, when people were more laid back and access to buildings was easier.

“It was a protest that people supported because it was light-hearted and entertaining and people just had to agree with our message more than the advertiser’s message,” he says.

“It was generally not as high risk as it is today.”
Opera House protestor Dave Burgess says safety was paramount during their 2003 act.

“There would be only one thing more embarrassing than being prosecuted for it, (that) would be not even making it in the first place and being injured at the bottom and showing a complete foolhardiness and incompetence,” he says.

“Once we got up…I think we did three paint jobs, sort of rough, neat and very neat, and once I think the second coat of paint was going on and I realised the message had got up there, we were feeling quite emotional I suppose.

“It was deathly quiet up there, the roar of the city was well away and it was exceedingly peaceful on one of those beautiful Sydney days.

“Strangely enough when the police rescue squad got to us we talked about how nice it was up there, and all took a moment to look around before we came down.”

He says even years later, people remain divided.

“Some people utterly supported it while others would argue that the ABC shouldn’t even be giving me the time of day,” he says.

“The first thing I’d say is that it was cleaned up. The second thing I would say is that sacred cows make the best hamburgers.

“We wanted that message to be seen overseas and for people to know that …70 odd per cent of Australians were polling against the war in Iraq.

“A friend of mine who’d been in Iraq at the time, she’d been in a cafe and the television came on with the image on it and she said the whole place cheered.
“And that essentially is exactly what I wanted to achieve out of defacing an Australian icon.”

by freddiew: Just some cool dudes making sweet vids with rad FX!

via: GeeksAreSexy.net

The World’s Weirdest Restaurants
by Justine Sterling
Food & Wine
January 28, 2012

A380 In-Flight Kitchen; Taipei, Taiwan

This Taipei spot replicates the in-flight experience with an interior designed to look like an airplane cabin with servers dressed like flight attendants who wheel around food and beverage carts.

Fortezza Medicea Restaurant; Volterra, Italy

In Italy, one of the toughest restaurants to get into is this oddly situated one, set inside a prison and staffed almost entirely by inmates (don’t worry, the cutlery is plastic). One reason for the waits of up to two months is that it’s hugely popular; the other is that every diner needs to be screened by Rome’s Ministry of Justice.

Modern Toilet; Taipei, Taiwan

The original toilet-themed restaurant in Taipei has been so wildly successful that a dozen branches have opened across Taiwan. At all of them, diners are seated on standard-sized toilets and eat out of miniature ones. Drinks, though, are served in tiny urinals.

Clinic; Singapore

At this Singaporean hospital-themed restaurant and club, the rooms are pill-shaped, and the seating is on golden wheelchairs and metal hospital beds that have been converted into banquettes.

To see more, visit Slate.com

Joseph Maturo Jr. In Serious Damage Control Mode Following Jest Gone Awry

EAST HAVEN, Conn. (CBSNewYork/AP) — The office of East Haven’s mayor was blasted with prank phone calls and a delivery of hundreds of tacos Thursday after his now-famous quip that he would address accusations of anti-Latino bias by eating tacos, a remark that left emotions raw in the town’s large Hispanic community.

Mayor Joseph Maturo Jr. has apologized several times but resisted calls for his resignation over remarks he made to a television reporter following Tuesday’s arrests of four town police officers, men described by one FBI official as “bullies with badges.”

Maturo held regular meetings Thursday as Connecticut’s Latino and Puerto Rican Affairs Commission called on him to resign.

“The Latino community is upset and deeply wounded in what should have been a day of redemption for them,” the commission’s acting executive director, Werner Oyandel, said in a written statement, calling the comment “unprofessional and given in poor taste.”

Watch Maturo’s ‘Taco’ interview below (YouTube)

An immigration rights group, Reform Immigration for America, delivered 400 tacos to his Town Hall office in protest, though Maturo had left shortly beforehand for a meeting. A soup kitchen picked up the tacos, but one was left symbolically for the mayor.

The group had asked the public to text TACO to 69866 all this week and said they would send an actual taco for every text they received.

In a statement released by his office, Maturo said the abundance of tacos highlights the need for healing in the town.

“The events of the past few days have focused our Town, and my administration, on the need to deal sensitively and compassionately with the challenges currently facing our Town,” he said.

His office fielded a steady flow of calls, some with prank comments about tacos and others from supporters who want him to stay in his job.

Maturo has been mayor off and on since 1997 in this predominantly white, blue-collar town on the shore of Long Island Sound where Latino residents comprise about 10 percent of its population of 29,000. East Haven has been under federal scrutiny since the U.S. Justice Department launched a civil rights probe in 2009 that found discrimination and biased policing against Latinos.

A federal indictment accuses the four police officers of assaulting people while they were handcuffed, unlawfully searching Latino businesses, and harassing and intimidating people, including advocates, witnesses and other officers who tried to investigate or report misconduct or abuse.

The taco flap came after a reporter asked Maturo on Tuesday, “What are you doing for the Latino community today?”

Maturo’s response: “I might have tacos when I go home; I’m not quite sure yet.”

Maturo, who is of Italian heritage, then said he might have spaghetti or any other kind of ethnic food, growing increasingly angry as he told Diaz to “go for it, take your best shot” to make the “taco” comment seem to imply something he did not intend.

He has called himself a “jerk” for the comment, which he called an off-the-cuff quip made at the end of a long, stressful day of interviews.

The video of Maturo’s comments has spread across the Internet on social networks and media websites. It led Connecticut’s largest paper, The Hartford Courant, to call for his resignation in an editorial that declared: “The Mayor is an Idiot.” A Facebook page demanding Maturo’s resignation had more than 750 supporters Thursday afternoon.

The town’s Democratic Party is demanding the resignation of Maturo, a Republican, and he has fielded criticism from state and local officials including Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, who said on a conference call Thursday from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that Maturo’s remarks were “pretty bone-headed.”

Many residents were still angry Thursday in East Haven, where 38-year-old Jose Tapia, a cook originally from Ecuador, joked, “We’ve got tacos!” as he left a bakery with a bag of bread.

“I took it as a joke, but deep inside, it’s the true version of racist, that comment,” he said.

Pedro Gutierrez, the owner of the Guti’z Bakery, said the comment showed the mayor is out of touch because many Latinos in East Haven are from Ecuador, where tacos are not a part of cuisine, as they are in Mexico. But he said it also shows disrespect for all Hispanics.

“He clearly thinks of us as a third-class people,” he said.

Others were more forgiving, saying they viewed the comment as a misstep, but not something that should end Maturo’s political career.

Others in East Haven said people are being too sensitive.

Paul Esposito, 70, a lifelong resident, made a special trip Thursday to East Haven Town Hall to express his support, telling Maturo’s receptionists, “I don’t want him to resign. People make mistakes all the time.”

Those who know Maturo say that he’s not an idiot or a bigot, but that if the taco comment was meant to be a joke, it was clearly a misstep they think he genuinely regrets.

“It’s baloney. They’re making a mountain out of a molehill,” said Michael Liso, 65, who said he worked as a firefighter with Maturo and has known him for 40 years. “That’s why you put erasers on pencils. — It’s over and done with. Now let’s move forward.”

Maturo, 60, asked East Haven residents in a written apology Wednesday to “have faith in me” and the town. Whether he can make peace soon with Latino residents upset by his taco comment remains to be seen.

Marcia Chacon, a native of Ecuador and co-owner of My Country Store, said the one remark by Maturo destroyed some of the goodwill he had earned in the community by hosting a recent open house with the police department.

“We realized that he is a racist person,” she said. “We realized it is worse than we thought.”

Maturo has said he will no longer publicly discuss the quip. Messages left for several of his political allies at the state and local levels were not immediately returned Wednesday and Thursday.

Thousands of cars flying white ribbons and white balloons have circled central Moscow in a protest against Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
The cars jammed the inner lanes all along the 10-mile Garden Ring, which has as many as 16 lanes of traffic at its widest points.

More protesters stood along the side of the road waving white ribbons and flags as the cars passed, their horns blaring.

White ribbons became an opposition symbol during demonstrations to protest against alleged fraud in a December 4 parliamentary election said to have boosted the results for Mr Putin’s party.

Tens of thousands turned out for two mass protests last month to demand free and fair elections, and protest organisers are now preparing for a third big demonstration.

Mr Putin is running in a March 4 presidential election to reclaim the post he held from 2000 to 2008. He is expected to win, but is under pressure to show he can win fairly.

images: en.rian.ru, i.telegraph.co.uk

From the conference website:

“There is no truth existing which I fear or would wish unknown to the whole world.” – Thomas Jefferson

Transparency needs your brain. Whistleblowers need your protection. Fresh Juice Party, Courage to Resist and Bradley Manning Support Network invite you to bring your ideas.

Please join journalists, former military personnel, academics, activists, policy makers, media experts, filmmakers and whistleblowers for an open discussion designed to encourage unexpected interdisciplinary alliances and action.

This will be a unique participant driven environment where we will co-create the agenda for the day. [It] will be a first of its kind activist/expert un-conference mix so expect to be surprised. Sharing, networking and creating new alliances will be central to providing strategies and support for whistleblowers.

Come and enjoy the freedom of discussion and mobility of an unconference where serious discussion interplays with an open space atmosphere of creativity and play.

Check the conference site for more information. Register at Event Brite & Check for updates on Facebook and Twitter @OccupyTruthCon #TruthCon

From the CreativeActivism.com website:

Welcome to the Creative Activism Open Class – Now in Session

This class, presented by the Coventry University Department of Media and Communication, is exploring the potentials of creative media activism through encouraging ‘live’ creative interventions and participation in cultural, political and social debates.

Throughout the 10 week class we will be exploring how media activists and campaigners have used their media knowledge, connections and skills to ask difficult questions, provoke debate and raise awareness of important issues and problems in their local, national and international communities. We will be putting up a number of lectures, tasks, podcasts and other resources online to help you.

It is an activity-led class where participants will be choosing an issue that is important to them and working on a series of real and situated tasks that will aim to provide them with a number of and skills and abilities.

By being run as an open community it will enable participants to constructively critique, learn from, build on and collaborate with each other to produce a body of work that will, hopefully, make a practical and positive impact on the issue the students are addressing.

If you are interested in getting involved, or just want to stay up to date with the work of this class, please join us here or post comments using the #creativact hashtag. We look forward to hearing from you.

Doll ‘protesters’ present small problem for Russian police
by Miriam Elder
Guardian.co.uk
26 January 2012

Police in Siberian city ask prosecutors to investigate legality of protest involving display of toy figures holding miniature placards

Russian police don’t take kindly to opposition protesters – even if they’re 5cm high and made of plastic.

Police in the Siberian city of Barnaul have asked prosecutors to investigate the legality of a recent protest that saw dozens of small dolls – teddy bears, Lego men, South Park figurines – arranged to mimic a protest, complete with signs reading: “I’m for clean elections” and “A thief should sit in jail, not in the Kremlin”.

“Political opposition forces are using new technologies to carry out public events – using toys with placards at mini-protests,” Andrei Mulintsev, the city’s deputy police chief, said at a press conference this week, according to local media. “In our opinion, this is still an unsanctioned public event.”

Activists set up the display after authorities repeatedly rejected their request to hold a sanctioned demonstration of the kind held in Moscow to protest disputed parliamentary elections results and Vladimir Putin’s expected return to the presidency in a March vote.

Passersby admired the display with giggles, but police took it more seriously, examining its details and writing down each placard.

“The authorities’ attempt to limit citizens’ rights to express their position has become absurd,” said Lyudmila Alexandrova, a 26-year-old graduate student and protest organiser. “We wanted to hyperbolise this attempt and show the absurdity and farce of officials’ struggle with their own people.”

They are not the first. Russia’s Blue Buckets group, formed to protest officials’ wanton flouting of traffic rules, have run across government cars while wearing buckets on their heads, drawing the state’s ire.

Voina, the rebellious art collective, won worldwide fame after painting a 65-metre-long phallus on a drawbridge in St Petersburg that, when erected, faced the city’s Federal Security Service (FSB) headquarters. Its members have been repeatedly detained.

The activists in Barnaul say they have no choice but to adopt creative measures. Local authorities have refused to issue approval for opposition protests since 10 December, the first nationwide day of protest in Russia. Around 2,000 people turned out in Barnaul that day, an unprecedented number for the small city.

Police have tried to pressure them into shutting down the doll protests, organisers said. “They tried to tell us our event was illegal – they even said that to put toys in the snow, we had to rent it from the city authorities,” Alexandrova said.

All authorities appear to be on high alert, as Russia prepares for its next day of protest on 4 February, one month before a presidential vote that Putin hopes will sweep him back into the Kremlin. On Thursday, the Moscow mayor’s office approved the opposition’s request to gather up to 50,000 people for a march through part of the city centre.

The jumpiest police were found this week in Kaliningrad, Russia’s Baltic exclave. As two dozen nationalist youth took to the streets for a jog designed to promote a healthy lifestyle, carrying their traditional black, yellow and white flag, police descended upon the rally, having confused it for a gay pride parade. Gay rights remain largely unrecognised in Russia, and gay rights rallies are regularly banned. Police questioned the activists before releasing them, local media reported.

College students caused a Burns Night stir after putting a 5ft model haggis on a train.

The madcap students put the papier mache haggis on the 2pm Kirkcaldy to Inverness service yesterday, hoping an amused passenger might collect it at the other end for a Burns Night supper.

Sure enough, the haggis – complete with a pink kilt – was rescued by a businessman in the Highlands capital and whisked away to a celebration of the Scottish Bard’s life.

The haggis, made by students at Adam Smith college, Kirkcaldy, Fife, even sported a Paddington Bear-style tag with contact information for the college, in case he got lost.

The 5ft model was placed in the luggage department in the last compartment of the busy train.

A businessman, named by local press as Kit Fraser, collected the haggis from the station to be his guest of honour at a Burns Night supper for an accountancy firm.

Mr Fraser, owner of The Joy of Taste restaurant in Inverness said : “I liberated the haggis. He was in search of a party and we had a Burns Night supper going on in the restaurant so I took him.

“He even pulled two hot blondes. He was there all night and he had a great time. We’ve still got him and we might keep him for next year too.
“I was told this haggis was in seach of a party so I wanted to show him a good time.”

The model was made as part of an annual community art project.

Hazel Terry, curriculum head for creative arts at Adam Smith college, was in charge of the haggis trip.

She said: “The idea for the Haggis came about as we wanted to mark Burns Night and have some fun.

She added: “The haggis boarded the 2 pm train toInvernessand enjoyed a seat with a window view which brought many a smile to the travellers on the station platform and the train.

Fun

“We pinned a note on him asking travellers to take their photo with him and share through email and social networking sites their images and thoughts.”
Though the stunt caused much amusement for passengers on board, one local newspaper reported that the haggis almost caused a security alert within Inverness station.

It was claimed that railway staff were concerned by the unaccompanied haggis and that it was met off the train by officers from British Transport Police.
ScotRail today insisted they were well aware of the haggis and why it was on board.

A spokesman said: “It arrived safely and on time in Inverness and was kept at the station until reclaimed.”

A spokesman for British Transport Police said no incident was reported.
A spokeswoman for the college said that if any concern had been caused it was not intended.

She said: “We didn’t mean to cause any harm, it was just a bit of fun for Burns Night.

“Our haggis was clearly labelled and had our contact details on it if anything went wrong. We wanted to cause a bit of a conversation point, and we are delighted it caused some amusement for passengers.

“We just sent it out as a piece of public art for a bit of a laugh and a talking point. The students are delighted that someone picked it up and brought it to his restaurant. We’re glad that someone found it amusing,” she added.

Adam Smith students have played similar pranks in the past, leaving characters from The Magic Roundabout on various roundabouts around Fife.

Austin (January 24, 2012) The grassroots organization Patriots for Self-Deportation, formed last year in response to legislative inaction on the issue of birthright citizenship for children of illegal immigrants (also known as the “anchor baby” problem), announced today the launch of their website, SelfDeport.org. The group describes SelfDeport.org as a resource for patriotic Americans who wish to set an example of responsible citizenship by proving their own rights to remain in this great nation.

The group hopes the website and issue benefits from Republican candidate Mitt Romney’s endorsement of self-deportation as a solution to the problem of illegal immigration, according to spokesman Stephen Winters.

“A surprising number of authentic patriots have found in their own genealogical searches that one or more of their ancestors came here or stayed here illegally, and yet continued to make a living in this country and have children who in turn became instant citizens,” said Winters. “Some patriots, faced with this moral dilemma, have decided to set an example for others. Knowing that their own presence in this country is not on moral solid ground, they have decided to demonstrate the highest level of civic dedication and sacrifice, and engage in self-deportation.”

For example, Alex is self deporting to Poland

In order to address the surprisingly large number of such cases, Patriots for Self-Deportation launched SelfDeport.org to support, inform, and assist those undertaking or considering a similar move. At SelfDeport.org, patriots can answer for themselves the following questions:

1. How can I know if ancestors of mine came here legally?
2. If I suspect that an ancestor should never have received citizenship, am I morally obliged to do something about it?
3. What support is available if I decide to self-deport?
4. If several of my ancestors came over illegally, how do I decide which country of origin to return to?
5. How do I go about self-deportation?

Patriots for Self-Deportation urges all patriotic Americans to visit SelfDeport.org for answers to these questions and more, and for testimonials by patriots who have chosen to live in accordance with their values. “We hope that this resource will help guide other patriots in carrying out this difficult but essential duty,” said Winters.

Contact:
E-mail: Stephen Winters, SelfDeport@gmail.com
Phone: (717) 585-0628
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/SelfDeport

EIDIA House
14 Dunham Place, Basement Left
Williamsburg Brooklyn, NY
646-945-3830
http://www.eidia.com/

Now an international figure with a huge following, Private First Class Bradley Manning has been ‘detained’ in solitary confinement since May 2010 for allegedly passing classified video and documents to WikiLeaks, blowing the whistle on war crimes in Iraq. During his imprisonment at Quantico Marine Base in Virginia, Manning was subjected to psychological torture. He was placed on a Prevention of Injury assignment, which meant that he had to sleep in only his boxer shorts, with no blankets or pillow, and was woken up every 5 minutes by guards. His treatment has been described as “ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid” by State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley, who resigned shortly after making those comments. He stood by his opinion stating “exercise of power in today’s challenging times and relentless media environment must be prudent and consistent with our laws and values.” That same week Clark Stoeckley emblazoned a former U-Haul truck with signage that read “Release Bradley Manning”, “WikiLeaks Top Secret Mobile Information Collection Unit” along with the WikiLeaks hourglass logo. He then drove it around the White House, and was quickly arrested and interrogated by Secret Service without ever being charged with a crime. His WikiLeaks Truck has been a staple of Occupy Wall Street since day one, delivering food and supplies to the revolution in New York, D.C., Boston, Philadelphia, Newark and Bradley Manning’s trial at Fort Meade in Maryland. Using multiple personas and costumes Clark Stoeckley mixes humor and political activism into a conceptual ‘stew’ that tackles head on, distorted and dishonest news headlines, to provoke action, comic relief and debate.

For PLATO’S CAVE, EIDIA House founders Paul Lamarre and Melissa P. Wolf curate invited fellow artists who create installations along with accompanying editions for the underground space; PLATO’S CAVE. EIDIA House Studio boldly states that it does not function as an art gallery, but collaborates with the artist to create provocation in art forms, keeping within an ongoing discipline of aesthetic research.

Clark Stoeckley is a New York City based artist, activist, and performer working in wide variety of media and under several monikers. Stoeckley is a recent graduate from Brooklyn College’s Performance and Interactive Media Arts program and now teaches painting, drawing, and digital art at Bloomfield College in New Jersey. Though widely covered by the news, the WikiLeaks truck and Stoeckley’s work is rarely noticed by art writers. However, the artist was featured in the December 2011 ARTnews in an article titled “The Joke’s on Us”, describing a hoax lecture about New York City pranksters that Stoeckley presented, dressed in NYPD Vandal Squad Task Force police garb. His art has shown in the Pratt Manhattan Gallery, Emily Harvey Foundation Gallery, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, and the Detroit Institute of Art. Stoeckley maintains that the works he is most proud of are those visibly engaged in everyday life—experienced on our streets.

STEP 1: Secretly shave off your two year long hair.
STEP 2: Glue it into a wig.
STEP 3: pull it off to freak your friends. 40 of them.

I had been growing my hair for a couple of years, and wanted to go back to a shaved head, but I wanted to make it a surprise to my brother that i was suddenly shaving my head. I have NO IDEA where the idea came to me from, but i wondered if I would be able to cut off my long hair, keep it, then hot glue it into a wig. I would then wear that wig of my own hair (yes this is slightly serial killerish i know!) and while hanging with my brother, suddenly pull off my ‘hair’ and be shaved headed in a split second.

I told him I was filming a video project, that way I could film his reaction. And man it went down a treat! I then realised I could wear my wig to every visit with friends and family over the coming 2 months, I eventually pranked over 40 of my close friends and family. I’m editing it into a long version for Youtube in the next couple of weeks, but for now I hope you enjoy this 30 second clip.

I’ve entered it into an Australian prank competition (which is why it is constricted to 30 seconds only, argh!).

Competition link for voting: http://www.messinwithmates.com/entry-selection.html?video_id=494

From Ars Technica
January 18, 2012

Today is SOPA Resistance Day at Ars. Sites across the ‘Net, from reddit to the Internet Archive, from Wikipedia to Google, are protesting the excesses of the Stop Online Piracy Act. SOPA remains a flawed bill that treats piracy as an existential threat to the US economy and to a sacred class of rightsholders—and in doing so loses all perspective on appropriate remedies. The discussion is absolutely unbalanced.

Many sites have chosen to go dark (i.e., offline) today, a stance we respect—but it’s not the right path for us. Ars Technica has, for 14 years, tried to be an information resource, and the most appropriate response from Ars is to provide even more information on the legislation, how you can fight it, and what’s really at stake.

Our normal publishing schedule has been frozen in carbonite. For a limited time, we’re turning our attention to SOPA and its Senate cousin, the PROTECT IP Act. What remains in each bill after the managers’ amendments and the removal of DNS blocking? What would we like to see in a vastly improved SOPA 2.0? Is there a way forward?

Most importantly, what can you do to make your voice heard? Writing a boring note to your Senator won’t get the job done. So we’re going to show you our tips on really ruffling feathers en masse. Some people are already celebrating the death of SOPA, but we all know this is far, far from over.

We’ll be covering all these stories and more throughout the day, and we’ll be documenting the protests and the responses to them. Come back in the morning for the first installment of our Fighting Back Guide.

A few words of sanity

Piracy is an emotional issue, but it’s important to note what it is not: a war between the “creators” and the “technologists.” Ars Technica lives or dies by our content and its copyright. So does publisher Tim O’Reilly. So does musician Peter Gabriel. Yet all of us oppose SOPA. It’s time for supporters of SOPA and SOPA-like legislation to drop the conveniently facile caricatures they have of their opponents. Millions of us believe in intellectual property as a fair concept that can have an important place in our society. And for a subset of us, it’s our intellectual property that’s at risk anyway.

There’s room to build a reasonable consensus for dealing with the “worst of the worst” online. But that means going back to the drawing board and bringing the tech community and Internet users to the table before legislation is drafted. Creating a sudden “emergency” around the issue and using only the perspective of the biggest rightsholders as a starting point is no way to legislate on key Internet issues—and band-aid patches to such a flawed approach aren’t going to fix that.

SOPA needs to be stopped—and then we can start the hyperbole-free conversation that the content industries and the White House both say they want.

We challenge the White House, the Congress, and all supporters of SOPA: engage with us and with the Internet community on assessing the real threat of piracy and the appropriate response to it. This isn’t a PR stunt. Ars Technica has the longest track record online of taking these matters seriously and listening to both sides. We can save you a lot of time by pointing out the areas in which your failure is all but assured—and point the way forward on areas where we can find common ground. We’ll have more later today on ways to move forward with a strategy that isn’t dead before you think of it. Meanwhile, the smartest, most tech savvy people on the Internet will be here, waiting for your next move.