We’re putting together a team of passionate, committed, creative individuals. In the not-so-distant future, we plan to include an artist and technology exhibition space, live music, DJ’s and more. Here are the chief roles we’re looking to fill:
• Web-design and development
• PR and advertising
• Interactive wizards
• Musicians
• DJ’s
• Performers of all stripes
• Able bodies (to volunteer at events)
***Unfortunately, none of these positions are paid at the moment, but with your help that might change soon. In the meantime, we’re just looking to create a vital community, drawing people together based on enlightened ideals.
Remember, even the smallest level of commitment is greatly appreciated.
If you’re interested in being part of our team or have more questions, email David Friedlander at dfriedlander@lucidnyc.com or call 917 710 8388.
LUCID is Hiring***
Website MODS
If you’re visiting right now, thank you, but obviously something ain’t right. Come back tomorrow when Lucid get’s its head out of its ass and makes some much needed website mods. Thanks.
Director’s Manifesto (First Draft)
I was not a popular kid. There were several factors that conspired to ensure my unpopularity:
1. First, I moved around a lot. While far from being an orphan, my home life wasn’t particularly stable and hence I never spent long enough to mesh with a particular peer group.
2. I had curiosities—intellectual, artistic, etc.—bred at home (the product of hyper-intelligent, albeit questionably stable parents (at the time…they’re very cool now)), but these same curiosities were stifled and squashed at school and by my schoolmates (or at least it felt that way); being curious and different seemed anathema to most of them.
3. Third, the intangibles: call it karma, fate, whatever. I just seemed to be born to be maladaptive. Girls and boys alike—far from disliking me—were indifferent to me. They didn’t feel strong enough to include me nor to actively cast me from their circles.
Read the rest of this entry »
Lucid Makes NEWYork 100
So the good folks over at All Day Buffet determined that Lucid was worthy of their NEWYork100. I thought it was like a NYC based Fortune 500 for people and ideas that don’t make money. But I was wrong. Here’s what they say about the list:
NEWYork100 highlights 100 of the most innovative, rule- breaking, model-changing ideas to come out of the Big Apple. Call it social innovation, intelligent capitalism, idealistic enterprise: We’re curating and highlighting the most creative, resourceful, and innovative people, companies and movements in New York. All rebuilding the city better and brighter and recreating the way we understand the world. These 100 are just the beginning. After all, it is a big apple, so get ready to get full on good.
Thanks guys for the props.
Details for July 16th Event
Wait no more: details are set. I’ve been doing a lot of copy writing lately, so I’m going to embed some videos to demonstrate what an awesome line-up we have. Their official bios and pics are on the presenter bio page. I’ll try to make something more expansive in terms of details in the coming days.
Here are our presenters:
Daniel Pinchbeck, author of bestselling book “2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl”, will explain how a new consciousness can emerge out of the collapse of the self-evidently pathological economic and social systems of the status quo (see some of his writing at Reality Sandwich, a blog he helped co-found). Check out this trailer for his forthcoming movie on the same topic.
[vimeo 3254225]
Dickson Despommier, Columbia Professor and founder of Vertical Farms, will presenting his vision of how to address growing urban populations with the need for feeding those populations in a sustainable manner. Check out Dickson on the Colbert Report.
[vodpod id=Groupvideo.2912251&w=425&h=350&fv=videoId%3D173624]
And last but not least, Amanda Parkes of MIT’s Tangible Media Group, talking about non-anthropomorphized motion in robotics in the context of product design. In other words, she’ll be explaining how robotic motion will be as elemental in future products as their color and form.
The event will be held at SALT Art Space at 1160 Broaday (SE corner of 27th), doors open at 6:45 or so, presenter begin at 8:00 (please arrive before 8 to be seated and so forth). $10 bucks at the door. What else? Wine and tap water served. Light snacks. BYO’s welcome. See you there.
LUCID Event July 16 (16 July if you're from Europe)
Click here for more info on Daniel Pinchbeck.
Lastly, here’s some non-sequitur entertainment courtesy of David Bowie. Read my note while listening to the song (assiduously ignoring the lame montage)…it’s trippy.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBwy5y_tdQk]
Lucid March Presenter Mitchell Joachim on Colbert Report
This is March presenter Mitch Joachim on Colbert report (if the subject wasn’t clear enough).
[vodpod id=Groupvideo.2759217&w=425&h=350&fv=autoPlay%3Dfalse]
more about “Mitchell Joachim | May 7th | ColbertN…“, posted with vodpod
Community, Commerce and Credibility
Let me tell you a story about a new friend and his quest to create an enlightened community….
My friend, like me, was inspired by a conference that we’ll call FRED. Like me, he thought FRED was amazing: a clearinghouse of innovation and enlightened ideals, free from the constrictions of zealotry and intra-disciplinary myopia. He was so inspired that he started a FRED Meet-Up group. He wanted to help form a community built around the intellectual and philanthropic topics promulgated by the FRED presenters.
One day, FRED’s organization contacted my friend. FRED said my friend couldn’t use their logo without express permission, even if, as was the case here, it was used to directly promote the FRED conference. My friend had to dissolve the FRED Meet-Up.
FRED later came back with a compromise we’ll call FREDy. FREDy is an arm of the FRED conference, but it would be purely for enthusiasts. Under the conditions of FREDy licensing, one can build FRED-style events, but they are not FRED events officially or legally. It’s a win-win for FRED: if the events are successful and high quality, they add luster to the FRED brand; if they are unsuccessful and poor quality, FRED can distance themselves from any ill repute. Lastly, though a FREDy conference takes considerable time and effort, FREDy hosts are strictly forbidden from making money off the events.
My friend now has no community and a bad aftertaste from FRED’s branding policing.
The Friendly Fascism of Definition
[A little housecleaning: Sorry I’ve been away so long. There will an event in May. I’ll keep y’all posted. Lucid NYC is not dead, just disorganized.]
I recently heard one of the most horrifying sounds of my life: Neil Young’s power ballad about an electric car called “Fuel Line.” Young sings, “Her engine’s running and the fuel is clean/She only uses it ’cause she’s a machine/She don’t use much though, just to get around.” Cowgirl in the Sand, it is not.
To be fair, Young’s song should be given context. The album—which I’ve only read about thankfully—is imbued with a heavy dose of self-mockery. At the same time, it seems emblematic of an artlessness that often characterizes crusaders of sustainability. Everything is emblazoned with the words “green”, “eco” and “sustainability” because we have reduced our lives and their impact on the world to numerical values—creating a company or project that isn’t explicit in its intent is a waste of carbon. Everything we do must be done deliberately, carefully, artlessly.
Yesterday, I listened to an interview with the author Andre Codrescu, who was pushing his book “The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin play chess.” Codrescu used a supposed chess game between Tristan Tzara and Lenin (the respective fathers of Dadaism and Soviet Communism) as a challenge between ideology and art; between that which is easily defined and that which resists definition.
Codrescu then went on to say how we must view this current era—the “post-human era,” an era defined by our ever-increasing dependency on technology—through a Dadaist lens. How we must resist the definitions imposed upon by an easy-to-define movement like the “information age.” For when we become defined, we become systematized—inserted in and consumed by an ideology. I witnessed this at a technology conference I attended last week: a largely sexless, artless carnival of technological zealotry.
Advocates of sustainability are not much different from the post-human technologists. Both are searching for “solutions” and “applications” to solve “problems”: How do we solve the problem of better connectivity, of reduced carbon consumption? It’s all very mathematical, clinical and systematic. When you artificially superimpose this mathematical mentality upon art, you create monstrosities like Young’s “Fuel Line.”
But do we need more systems? Might we, as past Lucid presenter and friend Filip Noterdaeme suggests, need more “mischief”? Less order, more humanity?
I know we can’t play dumb to the woes of the world. I know what we’re up against, and I believe these things must be addressed efficiently and directly. I just don’t think it should come at the expense of our humanity. We are so busy creating new systems. There is little time to be artful with our lives whilst improving, maintaining and refining these systems.
Moreover, the systems—in a quantitative sense—require more energy, greater carbon footprints. We build gadgets and webpages and biodegradable pantyhose and it’s great, but it usually means more factories, bigger servers, more shit into the universe. On the other hand, our humanity, the artfulness by which we live, the conversations we develop, the passions we share—they are carbon neutral or often regenerative, and cost-free. To trade in the commodity of conversation (the only art form I can lay claim to) was why I created Lucid NYC.
If history is any predictor of the future, there is heartening evidence of art’s victory. Codrescu contends that the fall of the Soviet Union signified humanity’s resistance to being subsumed by systems. Hopefully, out of our current orgy of crises, where people are flailing to solve myriad problems with myriad systems, a newfound sense of humanity and artfulness will emerge, where we are not consumed with solutions because we begin to question the nature and existence of the problems.
Brooklyn, Lucid and Subversion
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dib2-HBsF08]
A few weeks ago I rewatched Network, a perpetually-timely film that centers around an inveterate newscaster named Howard Beale, who looses his shit when told he’s being taken off the air. He launches into an on-air oratory that details how Americans have come to be defined by their desperate, numb, automotonic lives; their only comfort coming from the narcosis of TV fantasy. His rant culminates in the catchphrase, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”
Last night, I had three gentlemen, while not mad in the Bealean sense of the word, who are committed to not taking it anymore:
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Mitch Joachim, who’s posing essential questions and solutions about how to reimagine the urban planning/architectural shit-storm we’re living in today; a storm that is directly and profoundly contributing to the continued slaughter of our environment.
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Filip Noterdaeme, who’s Homeless Museum of Art begs (forgive the pun) museum powers-that-be–and those of us complicit to those powers–to question how their motivation to expand the edifice of the museum obfuscates the museum’s mission and alienates the artist and museum-goer alike. Through producing HOMU, Noterdaeme both serves as an important countervailing voice to the corporatization of the arts, while being a generator of vital artistic expression in and of itself.
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Finally, Jeremy Kirk, who calls us to question our complicity with Empire–with the forces that kill, destroy and subjugate. Last night, he asked us to look at the lens through which we see the world–how our privilege as Americans (and most of us are privileged regardless of whether we are American born), is often directly proportionate to others’ suffering. He challenged us to begin divesting ourselves of our privilege (and don’t worry, you can start small), confident that the liberation from no longer being complicit with violence toward others is greater than the sundry and temporary liberations that privilege affords.