As a part of our Prison Series, we are thrilled to invite Bay Area artist, writer, experimental geographer Trevor Paglen.

"Listening to Pelican Bay" is an experimental lecture documenting a series of unauthorized incursions into California's carceral landscape. Using conventions from film, music, lecture, and performance art, "Listening to Pelican Bay" creates a multi-sensory montage which seeks to both ask and answer some of the following questions: What are the origins of super-max incarceration and what are its effects?; Why is the Security Housing Unit at Pelican Bay State Prison so quiet?; How does Pelican Bay function within larger topographies of incarceration and domination?; What are some strategies that cultural producers might use in order to gain access to illegal places?

Trevor Paglen is an artist, writer, and experimental geographer currently working out of the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. His work encodes and decodes physical and cultural landscapes in ways that challenge the assumptions, proscriptions, and prohibitions built into human environments. Borrowing heavily from the physical and human sciences, Paglen uses a broad range of contemporary media to develop projects for cultural institutions, activist organizations, and urban landscapes.

www.paglen.com

It has been almost exactly one year since we invited Avi Mograbi to screen and discuss his works. A war with Iraq and "roadmap" to peace? later, it seems the questions related to plans, strategies, tactics, responsibilities remain in the fore not just politically or ethically, but within the cultural field.

As an artist based in Israel, Avi Mograbi has never steered clear of the ?vulgar politics? of the everyday. But within his work, he is able to bring the banal and the complex conditions of the everyday into a liminal space, a cinematic space, sometimes mixing the gritty ?real? with the humorous ?fiction? in order to do so. And by creating this space, questions related to strategies, responsibilities, the absurd demands of the banal, the politics of the everyday are brought together and given the time to interrogate one another.

We hope you will be able to join us for what should be an interesting screening and discussion.

On hand will be Drazen Pantic, a long time advocate of independent media, he has been and continues to be involved in a variety of initiatives working to expose/utilize the potential of emerging technologies.

In addition to getting his input on the recent events, we will work from a series of materials ranging from screening a powerpoint presentation by Laurence Lessig to a recent article by Jamie King (which has been posted on our website).

With the this week's vote by the FCC on Media Ownership, and with an eye to the upcoming showdown on June 19th in Congress over this week's decisions, we wanted to invite people for an infomal discussion about some of the recent developments in media convergence and media ownership.