The In(ter)ventions Festival

Mission
The In(ter)ventions Festival provides a forum for new modalities of personal and public interaction within consumer spaces. The Festival wants to bring together a general public being called upon to re-examine their relationship to personal and group resource use, with inventors and in(ter)ventionists who are building new technological and cultural means to do so. Public site specific installations, walks, workshops, and panel discussions will promote conscious-consumerism through direct and indirect action.

About the Festival
The In(ter)ventions Festival is the first festival dedicated exclusively to questioning consumerism through in(ter)ventions. It is a multi-day experience of public site specific in(ter)ventions, walks, workshops, and panel discussions. The festival will feature a variety of projects in public locations around New York City, from small group curated walks to public installations and do-it-yourself workshops. Participants and artists will have the chance to interact and jointly conceive of the future roles of individuals and society in relation to consumerism.

The festival will feature roughly twenty (20) different in(ter)ventions for three (3) days during the Fall of 2007. Most events will take place outside of the festival headquarters but will be tracked with live video feeds so that participants can join in-progress walks and in(ter)ventions, in hopes of capturing the gallery going crowd as well as local residents. This is meant to encourage participation that transforms urban public spaces in meaningful ways. In(ter)ventions invite spectators and participants to recontextualize places and transactions in unconventional ways.

The In(ter)ventions Festival is premised on the observation that inventions create interventions. The influence of invention is often a driving force behind change: often a will to change exists long before the wide adoption of the ability to manifest change appears in popular culture. Within the contemporary cultural context of global warming, natural resource competition, and heightened interdependencies ranging from economics to religion to culture, many activists have turned to building change from the ground up at the same time as large international bodies are searching for the means to do the same. From the success behind Make Magazine, Home Depot, World Changing, and the recent partnership between the National Resources Defense Council and utility giant TXU, people are beginning to embed small changes into their everyday lives not just in terms of using new technologies, but also re-purposing old ones in radical ways. The In(ter)ventions Festival will nurture and capitalize on a growing interest in and awareness of conscious consumer options and reconfigurations for everyday life.

Advances in communication technologies, manufacturing and outsourcing practices, and restructuring of global markets have all led to a world more highly interdependent than ever before. Knowledge of the impact of human activities upon our larger ecosystem increasingly crosses national, international and political boundaries. In such a world of increasing interconnection and interdependence, I am interested in exploring the impact small individual choices and actions have on the greater world. Daily decisions that we constantly make expend, support, re-purpose or transmute various resources and energy. I am interested in what precipitates transactions and to understand how mundane choices affect the chains of events preceeding and subsequent to individual action.

Initially, I intended to create an engaging system that captializes on the everyday interactions that we repeat over and over; as this seems a ripe opportunity for casual, complex and meaningful points engagement.

I have been interested in creating large scale real world events that engage and offer participants the opportunity to question and inquire together. To this end, I’ve curated and produced educational conferences, programs and public events on the environment and the arts for cultural institutions such as the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies and Wave Hill. The aim of these experiences was to engage the public in critical dialogues through active real world participation—whether that be in the form of conferences, participatory dance, audio-experiments, storytelling festivals, literary series, art events or bird walks, to name a few. At ITP, my work has expanded this approach to include designing real world games, networked objects and experiences; often connecting topics and groups of people in seemingly counter-intuitive ways. I believe that distributed or peripheral play that is embedded in everyday interactions has the potential to add an aspect of engagement to experiences that are otherwise taken for granted. I am interested in capitalizing on the ability that playful engagement has to connect an individual to examine their subset of actions upon a larger collective set of actions.

From this point I decided to curate and produce a festival of interventions that would speak to conscious consumerism. In today’s economic and cultural climate as the quote says:

‘We must shop to survive.’
-Michele Micheletti, Political Virtue and Shopping: individuals, consumerism and collective action. Pg. 74

The act of consuming whether in the retail environment or through the myriad of other consumption channels: energy use, media, real estate, sonic, visual, social, etc; creates and reproduces the world in which we live. This is a broad and exciting space through which to explore individual and social agency in everyday life; one which many activists, artists and technologists are already exploring. Turning to building change from the ground up, people are beginning to embed small changes into their everyday lives not just in terms of using new technologies, but also re-purposing old ones in radical ways. The In(ter)ventions Festival is a platform to nurture and capitalize on this growing interest in and awareness of conscious consumer options and reconfigurations for everyday life.

Audience Development

The festival intends to reach the mass consumer vectors, this being consumers as they are generally understood as shoppers; as well as speaking to invested communities in conscious consumerism.

By applying guerilla marketing tactics, we will go after a broader, more general public. Current targets include: inserts in free consumer flyers at chain stores, placing ads on Craig’s List, and using Google Adwords. Placing inserts into free flyers at chain stores nearby to festival headquarters, like Home Depot, Western Beef, and Gristedes will pose the opportunity to catch potential festival-goers off-guard by an unexpected designed festival advertisement that speaks to relevant concerns. For Google Adwords, we will buy keyword ads for the festival, such as “shopping nyc.” When a user types those keywords into Google or if the phrase appears on a page, the festival ad will appear. If clicked, the festival pays what we have bid, for example: $.10 per click thru. We can limit the amount we spend per day by setting up limits for example, when ten people click through and go to the festival site, no more ads will be shown that day.

In order to reach out to younger audiences, we will contact school groups and after school programs working with teenagers. If partnered with Eyebeam we might tap into their established programs such as, After School Atelier, Girls Eye View, and Digital Day Camp.

We will alert like-minded individuals of the coming festival by targeting the media that already serves the community of individuals invested in sustainable consumerism, as well as academic and non-profit institutions.

PR & Marketing
Branding context was an important but difficult part of designing the festival. The problem of differentiating an informed vs an uninformed audience brings up the age old issues of top down or bottom up strategies for change.

The festival will develop an audience through press and blog coverage, outreach to relevant academic and school groups, and through an integrated email list (including participating artist’s lists) that receives limited festival updates. We are hoping to partner with the already established ‘Swap-o-rama-rama’ organization for an event during the same weekend, we will also include email outreach to this large community.

The festival will promote itself through established connections in the blogosphere, and through the PR Coordinator’s concentrated efforts sending relevant press releases to the appropriate institutions, organizations, schools, community groups and media outlets. The festival will be promoted at ITP’s Spring Show through a presentation and festival mailing list sign-up.