POWER UP 2021: Healing & Transformation Through Technology
August 30th - September 3rd, 12:00 - 3:30 PM*
POWRPLNT: 562 Evergreen Ave, Bushwick, Brooklyn, NY
Pioneer Works: 159 Pioneer St, Red Hook, Brooklyn, NY
POWER UP is an opportunity for teens to explore what it means to hone community, creativity, and literacy in a world increasingly digital.
Addressed to 16-25-year-olds interested in investigating how we start to hack our everyday tools to build new worlds, make art, become critical thinkers, and collaborate with peers.
The goal is that participants leave the program with exposure to art, music & technology spaces across the city and join a community of young creatives who want to use technology, music, and art to build a better world.
What kind of rituals mediated by technology can we use for collective healing? In a time of intense transformation, what intentions can we set for the future? By working alongside artist-educators, this program will teach participants that technology, from software to music equipment, has the power to create art, community, and metamorphosis.
Mission-aligned organizations from across the city will commit to preparing workshops based on the themes of autonomy, power, & literacy based on the critical belief that understanding technology equals the power to determine our future.
We will build a FREE five days program, for teens of 16-25 years based in New York, to interact in the worlds of activism, design, music production, new media, art, and technology.
How will classes be conducted?
Classes will be conducted at POWRPLNT and Pioneer Works from 12:00 - 3:30, August 30th- September 3rd. Students who attend the entire program will receive a $50 stipend for completing the program.
Eligible students must:
• Be between the ages of 16 and 25
• Demonstrate an interest in art, technology, and culture
REGISTER TODAY!
For questions, please contact digital@powrplnt.org
Program Details Below
More program information will be announced soon!
Evolution of & Intro to DJing
HD
Take a journey through the history of DJing and learn the basics hands on. DJ HD leads a brief lesson on the history of DJing with a specific focus on the CDJ technology. Most of this course is hands-on – learn the basics of a CDJ and how to prepare music for a set on a USB with the chance to try out different historical models of equipment. Bring questions about the craft or the industry, we will discuss.
HD is a force breathing life into New York City’s underground queer nightlife ecology since 2012. After years of throwing parties and DJ’ing for (who are now) pop icons like Princess Nokia, Lafawndah, Kelela, and Mykki Blanco, she has since brought her ear-to-the-ground DJ sets around the world. She has recently DJ’d for or alongside Rico Nasty, Junglepussy, and D Double E. Melding hip-hop, R&B, club, and reggaetón into a distinctly danceable flavor, HD holds monthly residencies for NTS and The Lot Radio.
Nightlife as a form of radical self expression
DisCakes
Opening hour dj lesson on CDJS or XDJS:
DJ Ant Puke will teach an hour DJing lesson to students, so they can be equipped with knowledge on mixing, curating playlists and have the skills and knowledge to dj. Potentially we can get a sponsorship from Pirate Studios so students can get discounted studio time in their dj recording rooms.
Workshop and Presentation On the intersections of queerness and raving:
Open panel on the intersections of queerness and raving. Inviting DJs and organizers from the community to present on their personal history with queerness and raving, the impact that nightlife has socially and personally on self expression and gender expansiveness. These presentations will be filmed and streamed on the DisCakes website.
DisCakes is a multi-faceted music, rave, and mutual aid platform. DisCakes is launching DisCakes Radio through POWRPLNT as a weekly radio and live-streamed video show amplifying radical self-expression within underground music scenes in NYC’s QTPOC community.
Dear young artists who wants to make queer diaspora work… this is our love letter
Taehee Whang (Hyperlink Press)
In this workshop, students will create and design a love letter to a distant past or future to their community/individual inspired by the history of queer online community.
Using InDesign, students will learn about how to compose a page layout that incorporates text & image that weave their own digital community archive.
Inspired by South Korean Cyber Lesbian Utopia in the 2000s, HYPERLINK PRESS is an online publication and curatorial collective to create intersectional platforms to showcase work by artists navigating the in-between spaces. Hyperlink Press’ mission is to empower the underrepresented history, experience, and identity in the tech field, and art gallery system.
Founded by Taehee Whang, Jeong Yoon Lee, and Minsoo Thigpen in 2018, Hyperlink Press would like to share the time of utopic excitement, that we felt back in our shared childhood of 2000’s, for a just world, breaking free from the traditional forms of community building.
Engaging with Digital Spirits
CY X
In part lecture + part practicum + part coven, we will come together with our machines and begin to understand how we can engage in magical practice through building intentional relationships between us, machines, and digital spirits.
We will begin by understanding the history of cyber witchcraft before exploring three digital magical tools for creating our own spells and magical tools.
Cy X is a black queer non-binary storyteller and cyber witch merging sound, video art, installation, and performance. Their practice is grounded in the art of synthesis: truth generation and sound generation which is used to create portals that may aid us in exploring black queer futures and abolitionist possibilities. Fusing art and technology with the practice of witchcraft, they are inspired to use spells, rituals, and alchemic practices to fundamentally alter the world around us. Cy earned a BA in Film and Media Studies from Colorado College and is a MPS Candidate at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program.
Monument Media
Pioneer workS
Umber Majeed
Public Monuments are products of collective imagination- to honor a person, a group of people, or a historical event. Whether it is the Statue of Liberty or the Sphinx, monuments were erected with specific intentions and designed to convey a clear message to all who see them. What happens when we design these moments in history for concerns we have in the present? Are monuments really fixed in Time?
During the Workshop provided, the class will be exploring the work of artist, Umber Majeed. She will share the effects of monuments from history placed in unusual contexts as a morphing of time-scapes from her artistic research in Pakistan. Before visiting, ask students to reflect on the importance of context in meaning-making for monuments.
Umber Majeed is a multidisciplinary visual artist. She received her MFA from Parsons the New School for Design in 2016 and graduated from Beaconhouse National University in Lahore, Pakistan in 2013. Her writing, performance, and animation work engage with familial archives to explore Pakistani state, urban, and digital infrastructure through a feminist lens.
SUPPORT
POWER UP is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council. Also is possible with the generous support from individuals and organizations such as Eyebeam, the Joseph Robert Foundation, and the collaboration of Pioneer Works.
