Ruderal Ecologies: Grounds for Change
2018-04-13 00:00 - 2018-04-15 23:59 (America/New_York) | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
CHECK OUT video documentation of RUDERAL ECOLOGIES!

This event was free and open to the public, with donations encouraged to build the NATURE Lab Environmental Education Center.

This symposium marks the last weekend for our NATURE Lab crowdfunding campaign: help us build a center for community science, bioart and environmental justice, right here on our block in North Troy! The Sanctuary needs your support! Register and donate to find out more about how you can help us make this citizen science center a reality.Ruderal Ecologies is a weekend-long symposium to commence Earth Week. Art, urban ecology, and social justice activities focus on living in urban environments shaped by stress. “Ruderal ecologies” are formed by hardy and adaptive organisms and grassroots activist communities that grow out of the ruins of urban wastelands.Hosted by The Sanctuary for Independent Media’s NATURE Lab, the symposium involves thinkers and activists from ecology, public health, urban planning, environmental science, environmental justice, permaculture, the arts, and science and technology studies. Together participants look for growth and resilience in polluted but biodiverse environments, asking:

How can we identify underserved marginalized communities to build engaged, diverse networks, on grounds considered “wastelands”?

What forms of life flourish amid the ruins of ruderal ecologies?

What happens when we include “nonhuman” forms of life–including plants and animals–in our thinking about human flourishing?

For more information on our diverse set of Symposium presenters:

Schedule Overview:

Friday, April 13 – Day 1

7pm Opening Keynote: Decolonizing the Anthropocene | Heather Davis

Davis, drawing on work with co-author Zoe Todd, brings radical feminist and indigenous perspectives to the geological term, the Anthropocene, tracing colonialist origins and contemporary geographies.

8pm Jayohcee| Hip Hop Performance by a First Nations Mohawk Warrior from the Akwesasne Mohawk Reserve | Jayohcee

8:30pm Art Auction | NATURE Lab Environmental Education Center Crowdfunding Campaign

Dance with Plants Party | LRT/Location Responsive Theme!Ruderal and domesticated plants generate electronic music via bio-feedback sensors mixed to the beats and loops of electronic musician LRT. Join our NATURE Lab Environmental Education Center celebration, featuring an Art Auction with works exhibited in the Sanctuary’s Underground Gallery over the past decade. Hit the floor and dance with the plants, in a bio-art party with LRT/Location Responsive Theme!

Saturday, April 14 – Day 2

9:30-10:00am Coffee / Welcome

10:00-11:15am Morning Panel: Plants, People, Health, Risk | Mae-ling Lokko, David Seiter, Gail Wittwer-Laird & Xiaobo Xue

Diverse networks interconnect as professionals from architecture and public health sectors discuss the implications that modern landscape designs have on wildlife and the future of the human species.

11:30am-1:00pm Workshops:

Appropriate Remediation: Ecoremediation vs. Toxisphere | Scott KelloggEcoremediation is a framework for looking at environmental contamination through a complex, whole systems lens, combining an environmental justice analysis of the “toxisphere” with simple and affordable bioremediation techniques. In this hands-on workshop, we will build familiarity with our ecoremediation allies: microbes, fungi, plants, insects, and worms.

Art in the Anthropocene:Radical Care Practices | Andrea Haenggi, Ellie Irons, Catherine GrauAgents of the Environmental Performance Agency lead a gleaning workshop on the streets around the urban environmental campus, considering the informal public waste stream as offering, resource, and burden.

1:00-2:00pm Lunch

2:00-3:30pm Workshops:

Appropriate Remediation:Watershed, Sewershed, Seedshed | Julia Cavicchi, Anne Pfeifenberger, Olivia GoldenIn this multidisciplinary workshop, we will consider the aquatic ecologies of post-industrial Troy from multiple perspectives, including watershed-scale interconnectivities, troubled sewer infrastructure inheritances, and possibilities for mitigation and adaptation. The workshop will conclude with a collaborative mapping project to invite reflections on the many unseen river crossings we make every day.

Art in the Anthropocene:Plant Sensibilities: Tools for Many Kinds of Selves | Lucia Monge

In this workshop we will explore relationships to plants through the use of (speculative/prosthetic/por qué no/what if) tools to observe the thinking and action that emerge from attention to other ways of being.

3:30-5:00pm Afternoon Panel: Soil, Remediation, Regulation, Design | Moderated by Angelyn Chandler, featuring Tatiana Choulika, Kaja Kühl, Leila Nadir & Seeta Sistla

5:00-5:15pm Break

5:15-6:15pm Closing Keynote: Grounding Environmental Justice in the Capital Region | Aaron Mair

April 15, Sunday – Day 3

11:00am-2:00pm Bio-mapping Brunch: Ruderal Resource Mapping | Azuré Keahi & Oliver Kellhammer

A potluck brunch is followed by a bio-mapping workshop in which we walk our North Troy neighborhood to observe and note our ever changing biodiverse urban ecologies. Using a combination of bio-blitzing and community cartography, participants will explore assigned areas to map and highlight post-industrial resources to inspire grassroots, environmental stewardship.

Sponsors: Ruderal Ecologies is hosted by folks from NATURE LAB; Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Vasudha Living and Learning Community and the Vollmer Fries Fund; the Department of Science and Technology Studies and the Thomas Phelan Endowed Chair in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences; the Department of the Arts; Skidmore College; and RADIX Ecological Center.

For information, please contact:Kathy High, email: high@rpi.edu and phone: 518-209-6209Ellie Irons, email: ellieirons@gmail.com and phone: 909-702-1584Branda Miller, email: miller@mediasanctuary.org and phone: 518-229-0441

People’s Health Sanctuary presents: End-of-Life in the Age of Covid
2020-12-04 18:30 - 20:00 | https://www.mediasanctuary.org/event/peoples-health-sanctuary-presents-end-of-life-in-the-age-of-covid/
In the midst of unprecedented personal, national and global oppression, suffering and death, how do we process loss to maintain hopeful connections? End-of-Life in the Age of Covid features conversations about our experiences of death, end of life care, and the creation of social and spiritual community during the pandemic. How do we honor the memory and voices of the dying? How can our grief inform and inspire us to create a new world that is inclusive, and responsive to the needs of marginalized populations most hard hit by Covid?

Join us for an initial conversation to process our personal and collective grief and loss.

Moderator: Corinne Carey

Panelists:

Marne Lucas, artist and end of life doulaUrban Grief

BIOS

Corinne Carey is a political & public affairs strategist taking on bold public health initiatives backed by sound evidence & human rights. Carey is the campaign director of Compassion & Choices New York. Compassion & Choices improves care, expands options and empowers everyone to chart their end-of-life journey.

Compassion & Choices’ award-winning video features the groundbreaking filmmaker Hammer urging New York lawmakers to pass the Medical Aid in Dying Act. “My cancer is incurable … I will reach a very debilitated state,” she says in the video, in which she notes that she suffered through more than 100 chemo treatments for ovarian cancer over 12 years before entering hospice in late 2018. “I would so much like to be able to manage my own death by choosing the time and the person I’d like to have with me so that I can die in comfort and with compassion and not in pain and morphine-drugged.” Hammer died on March 16, 2019, at age 79 in her Manhattan home without access to this gently dying option. In February, Oscars in Memoriam honored her for her legacy as an experimental filmmaker. Watch the entire award-winning video of Barbara Hammer urging New York lawmakers to pass the Medical Aid in Dying Act.

Corinne Carey is a radio producer with Hudson Mohawk Magazine on WOOC 105.3 FM.

Marne LucasMarne is an artist and end of life doula. As a multidisciplinary artist her work investigates social justice related projects such as Bardo ∞ Project, an ongoing exploration of creativity as a form of spiritual end of life care, and video installations using infrared imaging technology to reference surveillance culture and the fragility of human existence. She is in-training at Parker Jewish Institute to be an INELDA certified end-of-life doula, and currently serves as a client board member at URAM, a Harlem United health agency.

Urban Grief

Lisa Good, MSW, is founding the director of Urban Grief, a trauma-informed community-based organization that educates on the effects of violence and supports those affected through outreach and victim advocacy. She is the former director of SNUG (formerly known as Cure Violence) and has over 25 years of human service experience. She is an experienced speaker and trainer, facilitating trauma-informed workshops such as Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), and community events, and faith-based workshops aimed at creating healing spaces and empowering community members through information about trauma, grief, and resilience.

http://lisawgood.com/

Urban Grief is trauma informed and healing centered 501(c)(3) community-based organization. Urban Grief responds to the traumatic impact of community violence, death and loss through community education, crisis response, victim advocacy and grief support. Urban Grief provides relevant and relatable information about trauma, grief, self-care, resiliency, and victim services. UG acknowledges the prevalence of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), along with chronic exposure to traumatic events, and strives to avoid further re-traumatization.

End-of-Life in the Age of COVID organizing team

Dr. Xavier Coughlin, Kathy High, Corinne Carey, Nancy Weber, Branda Miller

MORE ABOUT THE PEOPLE’S HEALTH SANCTUARY

The People’s Health Sanctuary‘s goal is to establish a central space to share health skills, provide basic integrative care and explore ways to build networks of community health. We are celebrating a year of organizing around this project, initiated under the organizing name Health Autonomy Clinic and after listening sessions with our surrounding community, re-named People’s Health Sanctuary. Our goal is to embrace models of open sharing of health knowledge, and empower all of the growing collective of community members to seek their independent health goals, as opposed to the traditional, hierarchical top-down approach of clinical medical practice. Though caring for our elders, our children, or cooking soul-nourishing food for family or friends may not be deemed ‘real’ healthcare, they know that in fact, it’s what holds us together and keeps us sane. Our growing network sharing skills to build a space where creative, joyful health is possible and accessible.

In this current crisis, we are more than even committed to the potential that People’s Health Sanctuary can offer. Everyone it seems is struggling to keep up with the flood of information about the current crisis, the ways those in power are forcing us back to a “normal,” the over-reliance of the economy as a marker of anything lending towards health. And then we have the horrific news from Georgia and Minneapolis, the killings of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd, a stark reminder of the crisis behind the crisis. COVID has only exacerbated the social oppression and disparities that mark the “normal” so many of the elites want to return to.

Chris Hedges: "American Sadism"
2021-06-27 19:00 - 20:30 | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
Chris Hedges returns to the Sanctuary for a virtual talk about the times in which we live.

Sadism now defines nearly every cultural, social and political experience in the United States. It is expressed in the greed of an oligarchic elite that has seen its wealth increase during the pandemic by $1.1 trillion while the country has suffered the sharpest rise in its poverty rate in more than 50 years. It is expressed in extra-judicial killings by police in cities such as Minneapolis. It is expressed in our complicity in Israel’s wholesale killing of unarmed Palestinians, the humanitarian crisis engendered by the war in Yemen and our reigns of terror in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. It is expressed in the torture in our prisons and black sites. It is expressed in the separation of children from their undocumented parents, where they are held as if they were dogs in a kennel.

The historian Johan Huizinga, writing about the twilight of the middle ages, argued that as things fall apart sadism is embraced as a way to cope with the hostility of an indifferent universe. No longer bound to a common purpose, a ruptured society retreats into the cult of the self. It celebrates, as do corporations on Wall Street or mass culture through reality television shows, the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and the incapacity for remorse or guilt. Get what you can, as fast as you can, before someone else gets it. This is the state of nature, the “war of all against all,” Thomas Hobbes saw as the consequence of social collapse, a world in which life becomes “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” And this sadism, as Friedrich Nietzsche understood, fuels a perverted, sadistic pleasure.

Check out Chris Hedges’ “The Politics of Cultural Despair,” recorded on October 18, 2020 at The Sanctuary for Independent Media!

Tony Cokes in Conversation
2021-10-29 15:00 - 17:00 | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
Please join us for an online presentation with American artist Tony Cokes.

Through a rigorous analysis of images and language, Tony Cokes dissects the often-obscured power dynamics at work in the cultural and political representation of histories of Blackness, class, and the war on terror.

This event is a collaboration between EMPAC and the iEAR Presents series with support from RPI’s ARTS department and School of Humanities, Arts and Social Science, and from the New York State Council for the Arts/ NYSCA, with The Sanctuary for Independent Media as Community Co-sponsor.

The talk will be followed by a Q&A with the artist.

Hear the Hudson Mohawk Magazine interview with Tony Cokes

MediaSanctuary · Tony Cokes Contradicts Cultural Associations with Sound

Tony Cokes’ distinctive artworks and installations center on videos that foreground textual statements, often overlaid onto colorful monochromatic backgrounds with pop, punk, and electronic music soundtracks. Quoting language from across the political spectrum—from philosophical statements to news, art criticism, advertising, and song lyrics—Cokes mixes linguistic, visual, and sonic oppositions in a pared back approach that refuses the easy desire for a spectacular image. Shot through with wry humor and the aesthetics and upbeat music of popular culture, the videos project unstable meanings that deconstruct how we receive and read images.

Tony Cokes makes video, installation, print, sound, and other works that reframe appropriated texts to reflect upon capitalism, subjectivity, knowledge, and pleasure. Cokes deploys sound as a crucial, intertextual element, complicating minimal visuals. He has shown works internationally at venues including Tate Modern, and CCA Goldsmiths, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, and Whitney Museum, New York; ZKM, Karlsruhe; REDCAT, and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona; Schinkel Pavillion, Berlin; ICA, Philadelphia; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; MMK Frankfurt; and La Cinémathèque Française. Cokes has screened works in festivals including the Berlin Biennale X; RuhrTriennale 2019, Essen; Rotterdam International Film Festival; Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid; and the Oberhausen Short Film Festival. He is a Professor in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, Providence,RI. His work is represented by Greene Naftali, New York, Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles, and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.

Funding has been provided by the Electronic Film and Media area of the New York Council on the Arts.

EMPAC

https://empac.rpi.edu/

"Not Going Quietly" w/ filmmaker Nicholas Bruckman and panel discussion
2021-11-12 19:00 - 22:00 | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
Join us for a virtual film screening of “Not Going Quietly” with filmmaker Nicholas Bruckman, followed by a panel discussion.

The event begins with a quick introduction by filmmaker Nicholas Bruckman, then we will screen Not Going Quietly. Following the film, a personal message by Ady Barkan and brief Q&A with Nicholas will lead into a discussion led by People’s Health Sanctuary moderators Aileen Javier and Corinne Carey with panelists: Tracey Corder, ACRE (Action Center on Race and the Economy); Ursula Rozum, Campaign for NY Health; Julia Solow, Hand in Hand (The Network of Domestic Employers); Scott Desnoyers, health care activist.

CLICK HERE FOR VIDEO DOCUMENTATION

On December 18, 2017, approximately 70 protesters against the GOP Tax Bill were arrested while staging a ‘die-in’ in the rotunda of the Rayburn House office building. One of the arrestees was health care activist Ady Barkan, who is living with ALS. Barkan said the GOP tax bill’s cuts to Medicaid will put his and 13 million other American’s life at risk. (Photo by Michael Nigro)

A rising star in progressive politics and a new father, 32-year-old Ady Barkan’s life is upended when he is diagnosed with ALS. But after a confrontation with powerful Senator Jeff Flake on an airplane goes viral, catapulting him to national fame, Ady and a motley crew of activists ignite a once-in-a-generation political movement called “Be a Hero.” Together, they barnstorm across the country and empower people to confront their elected officials with emotional, personal stories to demand healthcare justice, and Ady holds groundbreaking interviews with Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren. Through his journey, Ady discovers that collective action and speaking truth to power offers hope for his family and millions of others.

View Democracy Now! clip of “Not Going Quietly”: Paralyzed with ALS, Ady Barkan Continues Fighting for Medicare for All

This event is a collaboration between the iEAR Presents series with support from RPI’s ARTS department and School of Humanities, Arts and Social Science, and from the New York State Council for the Arts/ NYSCA, with The Sanctuary for Independent Media and People’s Health Sanctuary.

https://www.notgoingquietlyfilm.com

Nicholas Bruckman produced the feature film VALLEY OF SAINTS, which won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Independent Spirit award. The film was released on Netflix and was a New York Times Critics Pick.

He previously directed the feature documentary LA AMERICANA, which won the best documentary prize at the NY and LA Latino Film Festivals. The film broadcast worldwide on networks including PBS, National Geographic, and Al Jazeera.

Nicholas Bruckman is the director of NOT GOING QUIETLY, his latest film about 32-year-old Ady Barkan’s life.

Nicholas’ work has received support from foundations including the Fledgling Fund, Cinereach, NYSCA, NYFA, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He is the founder and CEO of People’s Television, a New York and D.C.-based branded & original content company.

PANEL

Tracey Corder, Campaign Director – Policing and Incarceration, ACRE (Action Center on Race and the Economy)

Tracey is a Deputy Campaign Director for ACRE ‘s Policing work. She comes to this work after serving as a social worker, electoral campaign organizer and political strategist.

Her most recent position as Director of Federal Action and Racial Justice at Center for Popular Democracy worked to advance direct action as a tactic to advocate for progressive legislation on housing, immigration, voting rights, climate and policing.

Tracey serves on the Advisory Board of Be A Hero, the Steering Committee of Black Womxn For and is a trainer for the Birddog Nation.

Ursula Rozum, Co-Director, Campaign for NY Health

Ursula Rozum, a Syracuse native, is an organizer building people power to win healthcare for all with Campaign for New York Health. In 2012, she was the Green party candidate for Congress. She likes bicycles and growing vegetables.Busy-bee organizer in Syracuse, NY.

The pandemic is exposing the weaknesses of the current healthcare system and why we must create a system that guarantees care for everybody. The New York Health Act (A5248a/S3577a) will provide comprehensive, universal health coverage — including long-term care — for every resident of New York.

Scott Desnoyer, healthcare activist

Scott Desnoyers says his son died because of $20 and Amy Sterling Casil was charged $50,000 after her baby died – they are among many Americans sharing their stories about the health system.

Daniel was 29 when he died. He killed himself after failing to get his medication refilled because he missed a $20 premium he was not aware of.

“I promised his siblings and him at the funeral in front of everyone that I was going to make our lawmakers look me in the eye and see the consequences of their decisions,” shares his father, Scott Desnoyers. a loving father who lost his son and became a Medicare-for-All activist.

Julia Solow, Lead NY Caring Majority Organizer at Hand-in-Hand: The Network of Domestic Employers

Julia’s passion for organizing comes from a long legacy of organizing in her family, personal experiences of struggle and amazing mentors along her journey. She first got involved in movement work when social work professors in college introduced her to immigrant rights leaders fighting for the DREAM Act in 2010. Since then, Julia has been organizing in solidarity with working class people of color-led movements and power organizations on efforts to address gentrification, living wages for farm workers and drivers licenses for undocumented immigrants in New York State, among others. Prior to her work at Hand-In-Hand, she has had the privilege of working at AFL-CIO National Headquarters in DC, Community Voices Heard in New York and as an Americorps VISTA in Cleveland, Ohio. Julia has a Masters in Social Work from CUNY Hunter College. She is bilingual in English and Spanish

Aileen Javier, co-moderator

Aileen Javier is a Community Health Worker/ Outreach Educator/Family Advocate. She is passionate about fomenting community health by supporting and empowering people to successfully navigate the local social and health care system. She worked as a Community Outreach / Family Advocate in Massachusetts. At the Sanctuary Aileen collaborates in the NATURE Lab’s newest initiative: Health Autonomy Clinic and she is working on radio production for WOOC 105.3 FM publishing pieces on local health resources. Aside from the radio production, she helps plan and organize events and distribute flyers, she is ready to help in any way that she can. In the near future she will do community outreach for the HAC.

She enjoys dancing, buying from local businesses and farms, meditation, yoga, hiking and living a healthy lifestyle. She loves talking and meeting new people. She is part of the People Power at the Sanctuary because she believes in the Sanctuary’s Mission “We use art and participatory action to promote social and environmental justice and freedom of creative expression.”

– From Aileen: The Sanctuary For Independent Media is My Tribe and my Second Family. I am honored to be part of such a Great Organization! I Love You Guys! See what Aileen has done with the Sanctuary

Corinne Carey, co-moderator

Corinne Carey is a political & public affairs strategist taking on bold public health initiatives backed by sound evidence & human rights. Carey is the campaign director of Compassion & Choices New York. Compassion & Choices improves care, expands options and empowers everyone to chart their end-of-life journey.

Compassion & Choices’ award-winning video features the groundbreaking filmmaker Hammer urging New York lawmakers to pass the Medical Aid in Dying Act. “My cancer is incurable … I will reach a very debilitated state,” she says in the video, in which she notes that she suffered through more than 100 chemo treatments for ovarian cancer over 12 years before entering hospice in late 2018. “I would so much like to be able to manage my own death by choosing the time and the person I’d like to have with me so that I can die in comfort and with compassion and not in pain and morphine-drugged.” Hammer died on March 16, 2019, at age 79 in her Manhattan home without access to this gently dying option. In February, Oscars in Memoriam honored her for her legacy as an experimental filmmaker. Watch the entire award-winning video of Barbara Hammer urging New York lawmakers to pass the Medical Aid in Dying Act.

Corinne Carey is a radio producer with Hudson Mohawk Magazine on WOOC 105.3 FM.

CO-SPONSORS

Be A Hero Fund

Be A Hero takes on the impossible fights. Big money. Special interests. Powerful politicians. We’ve taken them all on– and won.

The Be A Hero team is led by Ady and co-Executive Director Jamila Headley. Together with a group of committed organizers, Ady and Jamila are fighting for a more just health care system in the United States.

Four months after the birth of his son Carl, Ady Barkan was diagnosed with ALS. Confronting his own mortality, Ady decided to spend his remaining time fighting to transform America’s health care system so that it guarantees all of us the care and dignity we deserve and lifting up stories of incredible heroism in the face of injustice.

Jamila is an impact-focused leader and an accomplished advocate for healthcare, racial, and disability justice. She thrives at the intersections of strategy and implementation, building organizations and movements at the global and local levels, and caring for the individuals in them.

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the brokenness of our healthcare system, and the time is ripe for transformational change. But in order to win, we must build a powerful movement and we can’t do it without you. Join our fight today!

NY Health: Healthcare for Every New Yorker

The New York Health Act [A.6058/S.5474] will provide comprehensive health care for every New Yorker. You and your healthcare provider of choice will work to keep you healthy—New York Health pays the bill. You will never have to fear going without coverage again—especially in the middle of a deadly pandemic.

Over the last year, tens of thousands of New Yorkers died, lost income, fell behind on rent, and struggled to pay medical bills. Meanwhile, private health insurance corporations made record profits. The COVID-19 pandemic puts everyone at risk, but Black, brown, and low-income New Yorkers carry the greatest burden of exposure, with disproportionately more serving as essential workers and disproportionately fewer having access to healthcare.

We need a legislative agenda of compassionate care to heal from this pandemic. That’s why we partnered with allies in the housing justice and decarceration movements to release the Compassionate New York Agenda. This is a road map to saving lives and billions of dollars by providing guaranteed healthcare, stopping unjust evictions, and reducing the number of people behind bars and harmed by the criminal and immigration systems. We reject the austerity agenda, and call for a movement based on compassion and care to drive the legislative agenda in New York.

Join us in building the movement to win universal, guaranteed healthcare — and more. Check out ways to get involved in passing the New York Health Act!

Where Do Gardens Come From? And Where Do They Go?
2022-03-25 12:30 - 13:30 | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
Join us for the first of the virtual series, BioArt Talks @CBIS, presented in conjunction with RPI’s Center for Biotechnology, the ARTS department & the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, and the Sanctuary’s NATURE Lab initiative.

Orkan Telhan will present the outcomes of an ongoing research project that is centered on an investigation in Istanbul’s historical gardens and how they endure social, environmental, and political challenges over 1500 years. The talk will feature artworks and scientific research that intend to foreground the less-visible aspects of the gardens, discussing the roles gentrification, immigration, nationalism, and the climate crisis in shaping their meaning in the public imaginary.

Orkan Telhan investigates critical issues in cultural, environmental and social responsibility. Telhan is Associate Professor of Fine Arts – Emerging Design Practices at the University of Pennsylvania, Stuart Weitzman School of Design. He holds a PhD in Design and Computation from MIT’s Department of Architecture. He was part of the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Laboratory and a researcher at the MIT Design Laboratory. Telhan is a co-founder of Biorealize and the head of foundry engineering at Ecovative. Telhan’s individual and collaborative work has been exhibited internationally in venues including the Istanbul Biennial (2013), Istanbul Design Biennial (2012, 2016, 2021), Milano Design Week, London Design Week, Vienna Design Week, the Armory Show 2015 Special Projects, Ars Electronica (2007, 2017), ISEA, LABoral, Archilab, Matadero Madrid, Architectural Association, the Architectural League of New York, MIT Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Design Museum, London. www.orkantelhan.com/

See all BioArt Talks @CBIS here

BioArt Talks @CBIS are an online series of one hour lunchtime presentations given by internationally recognized bioartists. Bioartists work with biological materials, consider bioethics, and look at the materiality of biosystems and the technologies used in biotechnology and scientific research. These artists cover a broad range of fascinating topics including research into lost environmental microbial systems, cognitive states of mind and behavior, biomechanical prototyping of assisted device design, colony-building with non-humans, and queering hormone disruption. The BioArt Talks @CBIS artists include: Orkan Telhan, Heidi Boisvert, Aisen Caro Chacin, Anna Lindemann, and Mary Maggic.

Embodied Intelligence & the Future of the Performing Body
2022-04-01 12:30 - 13:30 | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
Join us for the second event in the virtual series BioArt Talks @CBIS, presented in conjunction with RPI’s Center for Biotechnology, the ARTS department & the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, and the Sanctuary for Independent Media’s NATURE Lab.

Dr. Heidi Boisvert will discuss current empirical research methods and insights emerging from the Limbic Lab, which employs biometrics, machine learning and predictive models to isolate effective narrative ingredients across various mediums of expression. Boisvert will share how this research informs the creation of bio-adaptive, networked dance and mixed reality theatre performances that interrogate how our bodies carry intergenerational trauma, are surveilled, controlled, and spun out of balance by our dependence upon technology and speculate on future bodies.

Heidi Boisvert, TED Resident. May 13, 2019. New York, NY. Photo: Ryan Lash / TED

Heidi Boisvert (PhD) is an interdisciplinary artist, experience designer, creative technologist, and academic researcher who interrogates the neurobiological and socio-cultural effects of media and technology. Simply put, she studies the role of the body, the senses, and emotion in human perception and social change. Boisvert is currently mapping the world’s first media genome, while taking great care with its far-reaching ethical implications. She founded futurePerfect lab, a creative agency and think-tank that works with social justice organizations to design playful emerging media campaigns to transform the

public imagination. She also co-founded XTH, a company creating novel modes of expression through biotechnology and the human body. Presently, she is working with David Byrne on Theater of the Mind, a new immersive theater piece. Boisvert is an Assistant Professor of AI & the Arts at the University of Florida. She is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Norman Lear Center, a research affiliate in the Open Documentary Lab at MIT and a member of NEW INC’s Creative Science track. www.heidiboisvert.com/

See all BioArt Talks @CBIS here

BioArt Talks @CBIS are an online series of one hour lunchtime presentations given by internationally recognized bioartists. Bioartists work with biological materials, consider bioethics, and look at the materiality of biosystems and the technologies used in biotechnology and scientific research. These artists cover a broad range of fascinating topics including research into lost environmental microbial systems, cognitive states of mind and behavior, biomechanical prototyping of assisted device design, colony-building with non-humans, and queering hormone disruption. The BioArt Talks @CBIS artists include: Orkan Telhan, Heidi Boisvert, Aisen Caro Chacin, Anna Lindemann, and Mary Maggic.

BioArt + Assistive Device Art: Transformation of Ability and Perception, the Plasticity of the Mind, and Human Expansion
2022-04-08 12:30 - 13:30 | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
Join us for this virtual session of the series BioArt Talks @CBIS, presented in conjunction with RPI’s Center for Biotechnology, the ARTS department & the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, and the Sanctuary’s NATURE Lab.

Glowing rabbits, ears on arms, female human sperm are artworks that apply scientific methods and technology to explore and sculpt living systems. BioArt and Assistive Device Art are contemporary art practices that incorporate biological sciences and assistive technology as a form of artistic inquiry into biosystems and the human condition. Seeing through your tongue, listening to music through your teeth, navigating space through sonic vision, are examples of interfaces that are functional and assistive, yet can serve as interactive portals to gain new cross-modal perceptual abilities. Bio-artworks aesthetically and conceptually apply materials and methods from bioengineering, health sciences, synthetic biology, and medicine, generating work that deals directly with these bio-fields’ socio-cultural implications. The convergence of expertise necessary to create these artworks is a platform to generate discussions and new directions for research between health practitioners, bioethicists, and artists to envision alternative biofutures that are humanistically, socially, and aesthetically conscious and concerned.

Dr. Aisen Caro Chacin is an artist and the medical prototyping lab lead at the University of Texas Medical Branch. She holds a BFA in sculpture and a minor in visual studies from the University of Houston (UH), where she is an Affiliate Faculty of New Media Arts. She has an MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons, The New School, NYC, where she was an Adjunct Professor of Physical and Creative Computing. She created a framework for assistive technology and Device Art while attaining her Ph.D. in Human Informatics at the University of Tsukuba, Japan. She is the Chair for LASER Houston, a series of art and science talks sponsored by Leonardo, IAST, and Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology, and she is also a Board Member of the Medicine and Media Arts Program at UCLA. Her work lies within the intersection of art, science, and technology, with a focus on new media art, human-computer integration, medical devices, sound art, and Assistive Device Art. She has presented and exhibited at Ars Electronica, Cite du Design, TEI, NIME, NYC Museum of Art and Design, The New York Hall of Science, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, World of Haptics, SXSW. www.aisencaro.com/

See all BioArt Talks @CBIS here

BioArt Talks @CBIS are an online series of one hour lunchtime presentations given by internationally recognized bioartists. Bioartists work with biological materials, consider bioethics, and look at the materiality of biosystems and the technologies used in biotechnology and scientific research. These artists cover a broad range of fascinating topics including research into lost environmental microbial systems, cognitive states of mind and behavior, biomechanical prototyping of assisted device design, colony-building with non-humans, and queering hormone disruption. The BioArt Talks @CBIS artists include: Orkan Telhan, Heidi Boisvert, Aisen Caro Chacin, Anna Lindemann, and Mary Maggic.

Evo Devo Art
2022-04-15 12:30 - 13:30 | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
Join us for this virtual session of the series BioArt Talks @CBIS, presented in conjunction with RPI’s Center for Biotechnology, the ARTS department & the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, and the Sanctuary’s NATURE Lab.

Anna Lindemann will present her work as an Evo Devo Artist. In her creative work, Anna combines animation, video, music, and performance to explore the emerging field of evolutionary developmental biology (Evo Devo). Her work seeks to uncover narratives within rigorous scientific research, to visualize biological processes in novel ways, to define new artistic creative processes modeled on biological processes, and to examine the human emotion and subjectivity behind scientific research. As part of her talk, Anna will highlight several Evo Devo Artworks including The Colony, an art-science performance about sisterhood and the evolution of social life in humans and ants.

Anna Lindemann calls herself an Evo Devo artist. Her work as an animator, composer, and performer explores the emerging field of evolutionary developmental biology (Evo Devo). Anna graduated magna cum laude with honors from Yale with a BS in Biology before receiving an MFA in Integrated Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Digital Media & Design department at the University of Connecticut where she has pioneered courses integrating art and science. Anna has presented her Evo Devo Art at such venues as the Imagine Science Film Festival, New York, NY; ISEA, Vancouver, Canada; KLI Institute for Theoretical Biology, Klosterneuburg, Austria; EvoMUSART, Parma, Italy; Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Troy, NY; SCINEMA International Film Festival, Australia; The State Darwin Museum, Moscow, Russia; The Franke Program in the Science and Humanities, Yale University; The ATLAS Center for Media, Art and Performance, University of Colorado Boulder; MATA Festival, New York, NY; Istanbul Fringe Festival; SEAMUS. She is the recipient of a Connecticut Artist Fellowship and her animation work includes commissions from the USS Constitution Museum and Boston Cyberarts. www.annalindemann.com

See all BioArt Talks @CBIS here

BioArt Talks @CBIS are an online series of one hour lunchtime presentations given by internationally recognized bioartists. Bioartists work with biological materials, consider bioethics, and look at the materiality of biosystems and the technologies used in biotechnology and scientific research. These artists cover a broad range of fascinating topics including research into lost environmental microbial systems, cognitive states of mind and behavior, biomechanical prototyping of assisted device design, colony-building with non-humans, and queering hormone disruption. The BioArt Talks @CBIS artists include: Orkan Telhan, Heidi Boisvert, Aisen Caro Chacin, Anna Lindemann, and Mary Maggic.

We're All Living in the Estroworld
2022-04-22 12:30 - 13:30 | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
Join us for this virtual session of the series BioArt Talks @CBIS, presented in conjunction with RPI’s Center for Biotechnology, the ARTS department & the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, and the Sanctuary’s NATURE Lab.

How do bodies queer at the molecular level? How is this queering inextricably tied to industrial capitalism? Combining body and gender politics and environmental toxicity, we begin to unpack the concept of “open source estrogen,” the underlying premise that hormonal molecules are ubiquitously all around us – available for us to hack, mutate, and become-with. Through this process of unboxing their molecular mystique, we see that even in our sublime sea of toxic molecules, it is still a sea of co-mattering. With our extractive tools we can see only the tiniest picture in the macro cosmos of space and time. But perhaps this is all we need to transmute the traumas of our old world into the new.

Mary Maggic (b. Los Angeles, ’91) is a nonbinary artist working at the intersection of hormones, body and gender politics, and ecological alienations. Maggic frequently uses “biohacking” as a xeno-feminist practice of care that potentially demystifies invisible lines of molecular biopower. Completing their Masters in the Design Fiction group at MIT Media Lab, they received the Prix Ars Electronica Honorary Mention in Hybrid Arts (2017) for the project “Open Source Estrogen” and a 10-month Fulbright research award in Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2019). Maggic is a current member of the global network Hackteria – Open Source Biological Art, the tactical theater collective Aliens in Green, the Asian feminist association Mai Ling Vienna, as well as a contributor to the radical syllabus project Pirate Care and to the online Cyberfeminism Index. maggic.ooo/

See all BioArt Talks @CBIS here

BioArt Talks @CBIS are an online series of one hour lunchtime presentations given by internationally recognized bioartists. Bioartists work with biological materials, consider bioethics, and look at the materiality of biosystems and the technologies used in biotechnology and scientific research. These artists cover a broad range of fascinating topics including research into lost environmental microbial systems, cognitive states of mind and behavior, biomechanical prototyping of assisted device design, colony-building with non-humans, and queering hormone disruption. The BioArt Talks @CBIS artists include: Orkan Telhan, Heidi Boisvert, Aisen Caro Chacin, Anna Lindemann, and Mary Maggic.

Be The Media! Hudson Mohawk Magazine Skillshare: Volunteer-Powered News, with Norman Stockwell
2022-06-27 20:00 - 20:30
Join the legendary independent journalist Norman Stockwell, who for 20 years was Operations Coordinator in Madison Wisconsin’s WORT-FM Community Radio during the glory years of one of the very best community radio stations ever! WORT is famous for having a very effective volunteer powered news department. Learn from Norman about how he and WORT successfully realized their independent journalism platform, and strategize how we can incorporate their successes into our volunteer-driven Hudson Mohawk Magazine.

Hudson Mohawk Magazine hosts monthly Be The Media! sessions on the last Monday of each month, where we invite seasoned community radio and radio activists to share their skills with HMM producers and the general public. Join us to learn about radio production, and how to have a voice to make a difference!

Email HMM@mediasanctuary.org for the zoom link

Norman Stockwell is publisher of The Progressive Magazine, a voice for peace and justice and the common good! Since 1909, The Progressive magazine has aimed to amplify voices of dissent and voices under-represented in the mainstream, with a goal of championing grassroots progressive politics.

Stockwell has spent the last 33 years at WORT Community Radio, a world-renowned listener-sponsored volunteer-driven station in Madison!

While at WORT he has covered national and international issues with radio reports, print articles and talk programs. For the past 21 years, Stockwell has served as Operations Coordinator at WORT. He also coordinated the Iraq Journal website in 2002-2003. In 2011, he regularly reported on protests in Madison for Iran’s PressTV and other outlets. His reports and interviews have appeared on Free Speech Radio News, DemocracyNow!, and AirAmerica, and in print in Z Magazine, the Capital Times, AlterNet, Toward Freedom, the Tico Times, the Feminist Connection, and elsewhere. Before that, he ran a folk music school, worked in a food cooperative, an IWW printshop, and as an archeologist, where he also marketed scientific publications and served as associate editor for a national magazine.

Norm Stockwell is co-editor of the book REBEL REPORTING: John Ross Speaks to Independent Journalists. Hamilton Books/Rowman-Littlefield. ISBN 978-0-7618-6660-2.

Before that, he ran a folk music school, worked in a food cooperative, an IWW printshop, and as an archeologist, where he also marketed scientific publications and served as associate editor for a national magazine.

Hudson Mohawk Magazine (HMM) is produced, engineered, and hosted by volunteers passionate about democracy and community journalism. There are many opportunities for anyone who wants to learn about broadcast journalism. Our virtual production meetings are on Monday nights at 7:07pm; contact us at HMM@mediasanctuary.org for information on how to attend!

Learn more about Hudson Mohawk Magazine!

BioArt Visionary @CBIS with Miriam Simun
2022-11-16 12:30 - 14:00 | online
“Corporeal Entanglements All The Way Down“

Join us for this virtual session of the series BioArt Visionary @CBIS, presented in conjunction with RPI’s Center for Biotechnology, the ARTS department & the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, and the Sanctuary’s NATURE Lab.

The BioArt Visionary @CBIS is sponsored by RPI’s Arts department, the iEAR Presents series, the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies (CBIS), the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, and the Sanctuary for Independent Media’s NATURE Lab initiative.

The iEAR Presents series has been generously supported by funds from the New York State Council on the Arts by approval of the New York State legislature and the Governor. We are grateful for this support!

If collision is understood as a form of disturbance (in the ecological sense), then in disturbance we find not only damage, but also the opportunity for renewal. As we collide in new and ancient ways, we discover, as the poet Fred Moten said, “a shared need to renew our habits of assembly.” I work with sensorial, corporeal experience e as sites of multi-species, multi-epistemological assembly. The corporeal is political, the political is corporeal. What happens when we treat bioart as performance art and performance art as bioart?

Miriam Simun works at the intersection of ecology, technology and the body, spanning multiple formats including video, performance, installation, writing, and communal sensorial experiences. Of chief concern is the collision of bodies (human and non) with rapidly evolving techno-ecosystems. If collision can be understood to be a form of disturbance (in the ecological sense), then in disturbance we move through damage to an opportunity for renewal. Simun’s centers the sensorial as imperative for this renewal.

Their work has been presented internationally, including Gropius Bau (Berlin), New Museum (New York), Himalayas Museum (Shanghai), The Contemporary (Baltimore) and the Bogota Museum of Modern Art (Bogota) and has been supported by Creative Capital and the Robert Rauschenberg, Joan Mitchell, and Onassis Foundations. More at linktr.ee/mseamoon

"American Caliph” Book Talk
2022-12-01 19:00 - 21:00 | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
with author Shahan Mufti

Join author Shahan Mufti for a behind-the-scenes look at American Caliph, his riveting true story of America’s first homegrown Muslim terror attack–the 1977 Hanafi siege of Washington, D.C.

Get a sneak-peek at the event with Steve Pierce’s interview of Shahan Mufti.

***In line with our commitment to equity, love and justice, we ask that you please keep your mask on at our indoor events.

One of Publishers Weekly’s “best nonfiction books” of 2022

Late in the morning of March 9, 1977, seven men stormed the Washington, D.C., headquarters of B’nai B’rith International, the largest and oldest Jewish service organization in America. The heavily armed attackers quickly took control of the building and held more than a hundred employees of the organization hostage inside. A little over an hour later, three more men entered the Islamic Center of Washington, the country’s largest and most important mosque, and took hostages there. Two others subsequently penetrated the District Building, a few hundred yards from the White House. When a firefight broke out, a reporter was killed, and Marion Barry, later to become mayor of Washington, D.C., was shot in the chest. The deadly standoff brought downtown Washington to a standstill.

The attackers belonged to the Hanafi Movement, an African American Muslim group based in D.C. Their leader was a former jazz drummer named Hamaas Abdul Khaalis, who had risen through the ranks of the Nation of Islam before feuding with the organization’s mercurial chief, Elijah Muhammad, and becoming a spiritual authority to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Like Malcolm X, Khaalis had become sharply critical of the Nation’s unorthodox style of Islam. And, like Malcolm X, he paid dearly for his outspokenness: In 1973, followers of the Nation murdered seven Hanafis at their headquarters, including several members of Khaalis’s family. When they took hostages in 1977, one of the Hanafis’ demands was for the murderers, along with Muhammad Ali and Elijah’s son, to be turned over to the group to face justice. They also demanded that the American premiere of Mohammad: Messenger of God—an epic about the life of the prophet Muhammad financed and supported by the Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi—be canceled and the film destroyed. The lives of 149 hostages hung in the balance, and the United States’ fledgling counterterrorism forces—as yet untested—would have to respond.

Shahan Mufti’s American Caliph gives a full account of the largest ever hostage taking on American soil and of the man who masterminded it. Informed by extensive archival research and access to hundreds of declassified FBI files, American Caliph is a riveting true-crime story that sheds new light on the disarray of the 1970s and its ongoing reverberations.

Read more about the book HERE.

Shahan Mufti is the chair of the Department of Journalism at the University of Richmond and a former daily news reporter for The Christian Science Monitor. He is the author of The Faithful Scribe: A Story of Islam, Pakistan, Family, and War, and his writing has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and The Nation, among other publications.

David Carpenter: "Science for the People"
2023-03-19 14:00 - 17:00 | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
Join us for a celebration of SUNY Albany Professor David Carpenter’s long career as an environmental advocate! We’ll be gathering with Dr. Carpenter along with some of his graduate students and colleagues, as well as representatives of some of the many grassroots organizations who have worked with David over his decades-long career. Dr. Carpenter will speak, along with former EPA Region 2 administrator Judith Enck and other local luminaries. We’ll hear an update on the ongoing legal case surrounding Monsanto’s pollution of the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation, and other local environmental struggles. But mostly we’re gathering to acknowledge a true hero of the environmental justice movement!

The celebration will close with a free community meal of soup and cake. This is a zero waste event–bring your own reusable plate, utensils, cup and napkin!

Co-sponsored by NATURE Lab, United University Professions- Albany Chapter, Beyond Plastics, Clean Air Coalition of Greater Ravena-Coeymans, Rensselaer Environmental Coalition, PAUSE, Green Education & Legal Fund, UNCAGED, Environmental Advocates NY, Riverkeeper, NYPIRG, Lights Out Norlite, Healthy Schools Network, Community Advocates for a Sustainable Environment, Stop NY Fracked Gas Pipeline, Zero Waste Capital District, Housatonic River Initiative, Inc, and Housatonic Environmental Action League, Inc.

Download the flyer here.

Masks are encouraged and will be available at this event. If you are feeling unwell or have any symptoms of illness please stay home and rest.

Judith Enck and Dr. David Carpenter at Dunn Landfill

David Carpenter is a public health physician whose current position is Director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the University at Albany, as well as Professor of Environmental Health Sciences within the School of Public Health at the University at Albany. After receiving his MD degree from Harvard Medical School he chose a career of research and public health. After research positions at the National Institute of Mental Health and the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute, he came to Albany in 1980 as the Director of the Wadsworth Center for Laboratories and Research of the New York State Department of Health, the third largest public health laboratory in the US after NIH and CDC. In an effort to build ties to an academic program, he initiated efforts to create a partnership between the New York State Department of Health and the University at Albany, resulting in the creation of the School of Public Health in 1985. He was then appointed as the founding Dean of the School of Public Health, a position he held until 1998 when he became the Director of the Institute of Health and the Environment. In 2011 the Institute for Health and the Environment was declared a Collaborating Centre of the World Health Organization in Environmental Health. While his early research was study of animal and cellular models of brain function, his more recent studies have focused on environmental causes of human disease. He has more than 485 peer-reviewed publications.

Photos from the event

By Robert Cooper

photograph by Caroline Tennant

Author Joshua Frank presents "Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America"
2023-03-25 19:00 - 21:00
Join us for an in-person book talk with Joshua Frank author of Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America. The 2022 book (Haymarket Books) examines the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State, which once was home to the United States’ largest plutonium production site.

“In the context of renewed support for atomic power as a means of combating climate change, Atomic Days provides a much-needed refutation of the myths of nuclear technology—from weapons to electricity—and shines a spotlight on the ravages of Hanford and its threat to communities, workers and the global environment.”

About the Book

The Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State is laced with 56 million gallons of radioactive waste. The threat of an explosive accident at Hanford is all too real—an event that could be more catastrophic than Chernobyl.

The EPA designated Hanford the most toxic place in America; it is also the most expensive environmental clean-up job the world has ever seen, with a $677 billion price tag that keeps growing. Huge underground tanks, well past their life expectancy and full of boiling radioactive gunk, are leaking, infecting groundwater supplies and threatening the Columbia River.

Whistleblowers, worried that the worst is ahead, are now speaking out, begging to be heard and hoping their pleas help bring attention to the dire situation at Hanford. Aside from a few feisty community groups and handful of Indigenous activists, there is very little public scrutiny of the clean-up process, which is managed by the Department of Energy and carried out by contractors with shoddy track records, like Bechtel. In the context of renewed support for atomic power as a means of combating climate change, Atomic Days provides a much-needed refutation of the myths of nuclear technology—from weapons to electricity—and shines a spotlight on the ravages of Hanford and its threat to communities, workers and the global environment.

Joshua Frank is an award-winning California-based journalist and co-editor of the political magazine CounterPunch. He is the editor and co-author of several books. Most recently, he is the author of the book Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America (Haymarket Books 2022).

"Rooted in Independent Media, Growing Toward a Just Future" with Amy Goodman
2023-04-22 19:00 - 21:30
Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! comes to the Sanctuary stage for the second night of our weekend celebration Rooted in Independent Media, Growing Toward a Just Future! Join us on Saturday, April 22, for a conversation about the role and future of independent media, followed by a conversation about stories over the past two decades building the Sanctuary’s campus with outgoing Executive Director Steve Pierce. They will be joined by Hudson Mohawk Magazine’s Willie Terry and moderator KP Holler, the Executive Director of Media Alliance.

Rooted in Independent Media, Growing Toward a Just Future! is a weekend celebrating the contributions of Steve Pierce to the Sanctuary’s legacy.

Co-sponsored by: Women Against War.

*Masking is mandatory for this event

“Rooted in Independent Media, Growing Toward a Just Future” Sanctuary Weekend Celebration!

Join us for a weekend celebrating this historic time at the Sanctuary, starting with a night of amazing music by Taína Asili and Eljuri and ending the following night with a presentation by Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman! During this weekend celebration, each evening will include refreshments and reflections from friends old and new about how the Sanctuary (and Steve) has made an impact on them!

It seems incredible but, thanks to Steve’s leadership, we owe just $25,000 left to pay off the complete mortgage for our entire Sanctuary campus! This includes four buildings — the Sanctuary with presentation venue, live production, radio and video studios; NATURE Lab with a level-1 Biology Laboratory and Peoples Health Sanctuary, the NATURE Lab Residency House, the Carriage House, plus Collard City Growers Gardens’ four lots and our outdoor community presentation space Freedom Square!

Your contribution, of any size, would greatly contribute to the impact of our organization by helping us move into the future with a new Executive Director with our goal of being fully debt free!

See all ticket options here.No one will be turned away for a lack of funds

Photos by Robert Cooper

Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on over 1,400 public television and radio stations worldwide.

The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard honored Goodman with the 2014 I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence Lifetime Achievement Award. She is also the first journalist to receive the Right Livelihood Award, widely known as the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’ for “developing an innovative model of truly independent grassroots political journalism that brings to millions of people the alternative voices that are often excluded by the mainstream media.” She is the first co-recipient of the Park Center for Independent Media’s Izzy Award, named for the great muckraking journalist I.F. Stone, and was later selected for induction into the Park Center’s I.F. Stone Hall of Fame. The Independent of London called Amy Goodman and Democracy Now! “an inspiration.”

Goodman has co-authored six New York Times bestsellers. Her latest, Democracy Now!: Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America, looks back over the past two decades of Democracy Now! and the powerful movements and charismatic leaders who are re-shaping our world. Before than, The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope, and Breaking the Sound Barrier, both written with Denis Moynihan, give voice to the many ordinary people standing up to corporate and government power. She co-authored her first three bestsellers with her brother, journalist David Goodman: Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times (2008), Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back (2006) and The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them (2004). She co-writes a weekly column with Denis Moynihan (also produced as an audio podcast) syndicated by King Features, for which she was recognized in 2007 with the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Reporting.

Goodman has received the Society for Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award for Excellence; American Women in Radio and Television Gracie Award; the Paley Center for Media’s She’s Made It Award; and the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship. Her reporting on East Timor and Nigeria has won numerous awards, including the George Polk Award, Robert F. Kennedy Prize for International Reporting, and the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award. Time Magazine named Democracy Now! its “Pick of the Podcasts,” along with NBC’s Meet the Press. PULSE named Goodman one of the 20 Top Global Media Figures of 2009.

She has also received awards from the Associated Press, United Press International, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and Project Censored. Goodman received the first ever Communication for Peace Award from the World Association for Christian Communication. She was also honored by the National Council of Teachers of English with the George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language.

Indigenous Lens on Media Making
2023-10-03 19:00 - 21:00 | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
Kahstoserakwathe Paulette Moore, co-owner of The Aunties Dandelion media organization, transformed her work in mainstream media to her present focus on revitalizing communities through stories of land, language, and relationships. Join us for a conversation where Moore explores how and why The Aunties Dandelion uses an Indigenous lens to create media.

This event is organized by Hudson Mohawk Magazine and is co-sponsored by the MDOCS Co-Creation Initiative, Skidmore College and is part of the Sanctuary Eco-Art Trail project, funded by a National Endowment for the Arts Our Town creative placemaking grant, connecting Indigenous legacy to an urban nature walk on 6th Avenue.

The Aunties Dandelion is a media arts organization and a transformative space informed by traditional Onkwehon:we (original peoples’) teachings. They are a collective of storytellers who are co-creating and revitalizing an expansive global community through stories of land, language and relationships.​ The Aunties Dandelion recently completed their 30th podcast episode and wrapped shooting on their short film VESS – about a Kanyenkehà:ka (Mohawk) philosopher and carpenter who is working through the loss of family as he builds a home for a young family returning to the Rez.

Kahstoserakwathe Paulette Moore (Kanyen’kehà:ka) is a long-time documentary and independent filmmaker, podcaster, and educator. Moore is a fluent Kanyen’kè:ha speaker (ACTFL intermediate/high), and an enrolled member of Six Nations of the Grand River territory. She spent two decades in Washington, DC as producer/director/writer with Discovery Channel, National Geographic, and others. Moore is a founding member/co-owner of The Aunties Dandelion.

MediaSanctuary · Indigenous Lens On Media Making

"Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation" Book Talk & Discussion
2023-10-14 19:00 - 21:00 | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
Join us for a conversation around the book Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation, edited by Lesly Deschler Canossi and Zoraida Lopez-Diago, the duo that makes up Women Picturing Revolution. They will present their book before a discussion with local photographer and doula Jayana LaFountaine and ending with a Q&A with the audience.

5:00pm-6:00pm: Join Jayana LaFountaine for a photography-based workshop around our identities and lineage in Who’s On Your Face?

6:00pm-7:00pm: Community Meal

7:00pm-9:00pm: A discussion around Black motherhood and representations of it in photography, centered around the book Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation

About the book:

Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation questions how the Black female body, specifically the Black maternal body, navigates interlocking structures that place a false narrative on her body and that of her maternal ancestors. Drawing on a wide range of scholarly inquiry and contemporary art, this book addresses these misconceptions and fills in the gaps that exist in the photographic representation of Black motherhood, mothering, and mutual care within Black communities.

The essays and interviews, paired with a curated selection of images, address the complicated relationship between Blackness and photography and in particular its gendered dimension, its relationship to health, sexuality, and digital culture – primarily in the context of racialized heteronormativity. This collection, then, challenges racist images and discourses, both historically and in its persistence in contemporary society, while reclaiming the innate brilliance of Black women through personal stories, history, political acts, connections to place, moments of pleasure, and communal celebration.

This visual exploration of Black motherhood through pictures made by Black woman–identifying photographers thus serves as a reflection of the past and a portal to the future and contributes to recent scholarship on the complexity of Black life and Black joy.

Photography, revolution, representation. Through leading seminars, curating panels, and consulting services, Women Picturing Revolution (WPR) co-creators Lesly Deschler Canossi and Zoraida Lopez-Diago are reclaiming and retelling history in a manner that is both radical and necessary. By highlighting the work of woman photographers who have documented conflicts, crises, and revolutions in private realms and public spaces, WPR sheds light on personal and political experiences that are often overlooked or underrepresented. From images made as a response to forced silence, oppression, and the inability to act, to well-known visual journalists documenting upheaval, Lesly and Zoraida, along with WPR participants, examine not only the photographs but also the conditions under which women make images.

Jayana LaFountaine is an Afro-Latina portrait photographer and birth Doula based in Troy, New York. Her work focuses on vulnerability and the preservation of legacy through photo documentation and birth work. As a former foster youth with an adverse childhood she understands the importance of creating strong familial connections through this work. She does this work with Black and Brown folks at the forefront. Photography is a means for her to heal while creating a better reality outside of abuse and trauma. Birth work is her birth right as she is a 4th generation birthworker.

EVENT PHOTOS:

FEMeeting Sister Labs: Artist Presentations
2024-04-05 19:00 - 21:30 | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
Join FEMeeting Sister Labs, a conference bringing together women in art, science and technology, for two days of speakers, workshops, and community activities. NATURE Lab hosts FEMeeting Sister Labs right here in North Central Troy, NY, welcoming local and international artists, scholars, students and community members. All are welcome for this exciting weekend of events!

Schedule:April 5, 7 pm – 9:30 pm: An Evening of Radical Women’s Voices in Art, Science and Technology

Suzanne Thorpe and Stephanie Rothenberg: Tending Ostreidae: Serenades for Settling celebrates the listening body of the heroic oyster. Whereas other marine animals use chemical exudates or patterns of light, oysters determine suitable settlement habitats through a distinction of sound signatures in underwater soundscapes. They are also sensitive to loud sounds at certain pitches, which potentially disturbs their reproductive process.

Cecilia Vilca: Exorcisms of the Territory. This Lecture-Exorcism, delivered by Cecilia Vilca, invokes texts that draw a conversation of times, and a history that heals itself.

Praba Pilar: Nixtamalízaté-té-té. Praba Pilar will share her convivial project Nixtamalízaté-té-té, which subverts emergent AI systems into fellow travelers, into beautiful pluriversal monsters.

Thorpe and Rothenberg: Tending Ostreidae

Praba Pilar

Cecilia Vilca

April 6, 9am – 2pm: Workshops

NATURE Lab Workshop: Community Science in N. Central Troy with Kathy High, Sarah Cadieux, Ellie Irons, Azuré Keahi, Abby Kinchy, A’Livija Mullins-Richard, and Emilly Obuya.

Sanctuary Eco-Art Trail, walk with Ellie Irons, Kathy High, Azuré Keahi, Branda Miller

L Lot Workshop: AilanthusXYucca, with Azuré Keahi and Ellie Irons

FEMeeting is driven by the desire to develop and promote a more direct collaboration between women working at the intersection art, science, and technology. The conference aims to disseminate projects being undertaken by women worldwide and, as a result, to contribute to the development of art-science research methodologies and to the growth of cooperation strategies that can increase knowledge sharing and bring communities closer.

More about the Presenters on April 5:

Cecilia Vilca Ocharan is a Peruvian transartist, feminist chola techno-witch, and language activist. She is a founding member of the creative and digital heritage division, MyAP Electron Microscopy Laboratory. From a decolonizing vision, she exercises her epistemological rebellion using technology as a tool and object of analysis. Her main goal and poetics are to encourage reflection through revelation. Her projects are born from her personal crusades, and therefore, they are micropolitical flesh. ISEA2020 Montreal and ISEA2023 Paris IPC Member. FEMeeting 2023 Taos and TTT2023 Malta Scientific & Artistic Committee member. Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts (CITAR) Reviewer. Eight Art Residency Programs: Mexico, Bolivia, USA, and Canada. She has exhibited her work, organized exhibitions, and given lectures in Peru, Mexico, Bolivia, Argentina, Spain, Cuba, Chile, Norway, Colombia, Brazil, South Africa, Australia, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Austria, and the USA. Born, lives and dreams in/from Lima, Peru, she has a M.A. Digital Arts, UPF, BCN, Spain.

Praba Pilar is a diasporic Colombian artist disrupting the overwhelmingly passive participation in the contemporary ‘cult of the techno-logic.’ Over the last two decades Pilar has presented cultural productions integrating performance art, live work, digital works, video, electronic installations, radio programming, street theatre, invisible theatre, websites and writing. These projects have traveled widely to museums, galleries, universities, performance festivals, conferences, public streets, political meetings, bookstores, bars, and radio airwaves around the world. Check out Praba Pilar’s website here.

Suzanne Thorpe is an interdisciplinary artist-scholar whose creative research intersects electronic music, feminist and ecological theory. She interweaves critical listening practices with acoustic ecology, improvisation and technology to craft immersive sound engagements and creative research sites that question circulations of power within human and nonhuman systems. As an electroacoustic flutist and sound artist she’s performed and exhibited internationally, has a large discography, with releases on Columbia Records, Beggars Banquet, Geffin, V2, and her research has been published in journals and edited volumes. Thorpe has been granted several residencies and awards for her artistry and research, such as the Frog Peak Collective Award for innovative research in technology, a Gold Record from the Recording Industry Association of Americas, as well as grants from the MAP Fund, NYSCA, New Music USA and Harvestworks Digital Media Foundation. Thorpe holds an MFA in Electronic Music & Media from Mills College, a Ph.D. in Integrative Studies from the University of California, San Diego, and is a certified Deep Listening Instructor, having studied in depth with pioneering composer and Deep Listening Founder Pauline Oliveros. Most recently she was a Mellon Fellow and member of the Society of Fellows at Columbia University, and is currently Assistant Professor of Sound Studies at Manhattan College. She also remains a co-founder and director of TECHNE, a nonprofit arts-education organization dedicated to dismantling social and cultural barriers in technical learning environments.

Stephanie Rothenberg’s interdisciplinary art draws from digital culture, science and economics to explore symbiotic relationships between human designed systems and biological ecosystems. Moving between real and virtual spaces, she engages a variety of media platforms that include interactive installation, drawing, sculpture, video and performance. She has exhibited internationally in venues and festivals including MassMOCA (US), Sundance Film Festival (US), House of Electronic Arts / HeK (CH), LABoral (ES), Transmediale (DE), and ZKM Center for Art & Media (DE). She has received awards from Harpo Foundation, NYSCA and Creative Capital among others and has participated in numerous residencies including Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace/LMCC and Eyebeam Art and Technology Center in NYC, Santa Fe Art Institute, and ZK/U in Berlin. Her work is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art and has been widely reviewed including Artforum, Artnet, The Brooklyn Rail and Hyperallergic. She is Professor in the Department of Art at University at Buffalo SUNY where she co-directs an interdisciplinary design studio collaborating with local social justice organizations.

More about FEMeeting and Sister Labs

Launched in 2017, the conference “FEMeeting: Women in Art, Science and Technology” was driven by the desire to develop and promote more direct collaboration between individuals who identify themselves as Women, independently of their sex. The idea behind FEMeeting was orchestrated by the Portuguese artist Marta de Menezes and scholar Dalila Honorato, after realizing that women in the field of Art and Science have an unquestionable presence worldwide.

In 2021, FEMeeting Sister Labs launched as an hybrid model of interaction between local and global, between digital and physical: where FEMeeting members address to the community of women in art, science and technology an invitation to their lab spaces.

Discover the lab spaces already presented by FEMeeting members through Sister Labs and learn more about the community of women in art, science and technology! Check out Sister Lab around the World!

We are particularly interested in hearing about the experiences of BIPOC, trans women, non-binary women, and gender queer women, and people living with disabilities.

This event is a collaboration between the iEAR Presents series with support from RPI’s ARTS department and School of Humanities, Arts and Social Science, and from the New York State Council for the Arts/ NYSCA, with The Sanctuary for Independent Media, and is a featured project of the NEA Our Town “Sanctuary Eco-Art Trail” creative placemaking grant.

"The Black Woods" Book Talk
2024-04-30 19:00 - 21:00 | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
Join author Amy Godine for a book talk on her most recent work, The Black Woods: Pursuing Racial Justice on the Adirondack Frontier. The presentation will be followed by an audience Q&A.

The Black Woods: Pursuing Racial Justice on the Adirondack Frontier (2023, Cornell University Press) chronicles the dramatic history of Black pioneers in New York’s northern wilderness. From the 1840s into the 1860s, they migrated to the Adirondacks to build farms and to vote. On their new land they could hope to meet the $250 property requirement New York imposed on Black prospective voters in 1821, and gain a cherished right of citizenship, the ballot.

In 1846 and ’47, three thousand Black New Yorkers were gifted with 120,000 acres of Adirondack land by Gerrit Smith, an upstate abolitionist and heir to an immense land fortune. Smith’s suffrage-minded plan was endorsed by Frederick Douglass and New York’s leading Black abolitionists. The antislavery reformer John Brown was such an advocate that in 1849 he moved his family to Timbuctoo, a new Black neighborhood in the woods.

Smith’s plan was prescient, anticipating Black suffrage reform, affirmative action, environmental distributive justice, and community-based racial equity more than a century before these were points of public policy. But when the response to Smith’s offer fell radically short of his high hopes, Smith’s zeal cooled. Timbuctoo, Freemen’s Home, Blacksville, and other Black enclaves were forgotten. Local and regional historians would marginalize the Black experience for 150 years. In The Black Woods, Godine retrieves the robust story of Black pioneers who carved from the wilderness a future for their families and their civic rights. With stirring stories from archival sources, Amy Godine returns these trailblazers and their descendants to their rightful place in the Adirondack narrative. This recovery is long overdue.

Who is Amy Godine?

Amy is a writer, curator, and lecturer with a longstanding interest in the social history of the Adirondack region. She has been writing articles and speaking about social trends, marginalized communities, and ethnic and Black neighborhoods in this high corner of New York since 1988. What do these pieces have in common beyond their focus on this region? One way or another, they aim to challenge or confound entrenched ideas about Adirondack exceptionalism, and reach for the guy lines that lash the region to the wider, fractious world beyond. Miners’ strikes, eastern European peddlers, Klan rallies, Spanish road workers, the pseudo-science of eugenics and its impact on the early conservation movement, suffrage activism, and Black pioneers – her’s is not the Adirondack Country dear to Park historians, nature writers or antiquarians. Amy goes for something else.
