Audio Interference

In the past few weeks, regular listeners to the podcast have heard an episode on community internet, and another celebrating libraries. This week, we’ll combine the best of both worlds. Today, we'll chat with Alison Macrina, Founder and Executive Director of the Library Freedom Project, an organization that’s making an impact in local communities, helping reduce the harm that people face online from hackers, law enforcement and major corporations. We’ll learn of the organization's showdown with the Department of Homeland Security and hear of its efforts to scale up to a library near you. To learn more about Library Freedom Project and Library Freedom Institute, visit www.libraryfreedom.org. Music in this episode (“Dusting,” “Stilt,” “Borough” & “Hickory Interlude”) by Blue Dot Sessions - www.sessions.blue Produced by Interference Archive.

In today’s episode, we’ll learn about community networks around the world, including NYC Mesh, FunkFeuer, and Rhizomatica. Community Networks offer local communities the opportunity to own and control their communication infrastructure. To learn more about NYC Mesh visit www.nycmesh.net. To learn more about Rhizomatica, including projects outside of Oaxaca, Mexico, visit www.rhizomatica.org. To learn more about FunkFeuer, visit www.funkfeuer.at. Thanks to Jonathan Dahan, Myf Ma, Aaron Kaplan, and Peter Bloom for speaking with us for this episode. Music: Onward & Upward by junior85. Produced by Interference Archive.

We’re back to continue our series on radical, community libraries! In this episode, we chat with Ola Ronke Akinmowo of the Free Black Women’s Library, Dev Aujla of Sorted Library, and Jen Hoyer and Daniel Pecoraro from our own Interference Archive library. To learn more about the Free Black Women’s Library, stay up to date about future pop ups, and find out where to donate books, visit her site, follow the library on social media @thefreeblackwomenslibrary, and consider supporting the project via Patreon. Here’s a short list of reading recommendations from Ola Ronke: Audre Lorde, Gloria Naylor, Buchi Emecheta, Pat Parker, June Jordan, Nnedi Okorafor, especially Who Fears Death, Octavia Butler, especially Parable of the Sower, Zora Neale Hurston, especially Dust Tracks on the Road, This Thing Around My Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Sula by Toni Morrison, Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi, Things We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons, All About Love by bell hooks, Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires,

This episode features an interview with artist and collector Alison Alder, recorded last summer when Alison visited New York. Alison Alder is a visual artist whose work blurs the line between studio, community and social/political art practice. Her formative years as an artist were spent working in the screen-printing workshops of Megalo (Canberra) and Redback Graphix (Wollongong/Sydney) where she was co-director from 1985–1993. The next major period of her art practice was spent working within Indigenous organisations in the Northern Territory, primarily for Julalikari Council in Tennant Creek. Alder received an International Year of Tolerance Fellowship from the Australia Council in recognition of her work toward social justice and equity through art practice. Alder is currently Head of the Printmedia and Drawing Workshop at the Australian National University School of Art. Alison is also the organizer of Interference Archive's current exhibition, Hi-Viz: Australian Political Posters 1979-2019. Hi-Viz, a

The Professional Staff Congress, the union of the faculty and staff at the City University of New York, is currently bargaining a contract which includes a flagship demand of seven thousand dollars per course for adjunct faculty — which would finally earn many adjuncts a living wage and push forward a national conversation about funding for public education. Various adjunct organizers are trying to push the union towards a strike in order to win the demand, but they have faced resistance from union leadership, as striking is illegal for public sector workers in New York State and comes with tremendous risks. Organizers in favor of a strike have united under a campaign they have called, "7K or Strike!" In this episode, we hear from various union members about how they believe they will win this demand. To learn more about the 7K demand itself and the daily reality for adjuncts at CUNY, you can listen to episode 51, titled: "Adjunctification at CUNY". Music: La Fatigue et l'Insupportable Bonheur du Prochain

This episode of Audio Interference features highlights from an event at the archive with Keith Brooks and Phil Brown, in which they shared their experiences in the critical psychology movement that was a part of the revolutionary environment at Alternate U. Phil and Keith helped set up the organization Psychologists for a Democratic Society (an offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society), which published a newspaper under the same name. Radical psychology and the politics of mental illness were an important part of social movements in the 1970s and 1980s, and central issues in free education experiments, including Alternate U. In 1970, Keith Brooks ran a course called Towards a Radical Psychology, centered around psychology in the context of the global liberation struggle and the questions of “what is its role and whose side is it on?” Phil Brown ran a course called Demystification of Contemporary Psychology, challenging what he called the “Myth of Mental Illness.” Music: "The Birds & The Bees" by The

In this episode of Audio Interference, you'll hear a recording of an event held at the archive in October of 2018. The event was called “Politics of Sound: Listening to the Archive,” and it was a discussion about the various ways archiving sound can be a political act, including how sound archives can support organizing work, and how sound collections can contribute to the creation of historical memory, broadening the range of stories that are part of our collective history. Speakers included Natiba Guy-Clement, Special Collections Manager at the Brooklyn Public Library, home of the Civil Rights in Brooklyn Oral History Collection; Daniel Horowitz, oral historian and poet, currently working on a historical memory project based in Bay St Louis, Mississippi; Samara Smith, Associate Professor at SUNY, who documented the sounds of Occupy Wall Street; and Mario Alvarez, one of the creators of Columbia Life Histories, a series of oral history interviews with graduate students at Columbia University. For more inf

“Our lending policy is: as many books as you want, for as long as you want. We want people to take the time to live with the books as long as they need to, to figure out how they fit into the larger picture of how they live.” -- Dawn Finley, FLOW In this episode, we ask the questions: What does it mean to be a radical, community library? What are the goals, responsibilities, and impacts of such an organization? We do so through conversations with Laura Moulton of Streetbooks, Melissa Marturano of Books Through Bars, Dawn Finley of FLOW, and Julia of the ABC No Rio Zine Library. To learn more about Streetbooks visit their website at—http://streetbooks.org/ and read this NYT article about them: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/10/us/homeless-outreach-in-volumes-books-by-bike-for-outside-people-in-oregon.html To learn more about Books through Bars visit their website at—https://booksthroughbarsnyc.org/ Read an interview with founder vikki law—http://artfcity.com/2012/09/05/the-abc-no-rio-interviews-vikki-la

“I think we were interested in finding a true story. We were interested in telling the truth, not to make a propaganda film and not to make a film that would make people feel heroic. We wanted to make a film that was both sympathetic to the project and its goals and purposes, and at the same time was realistic about the world that it was operating in.” - Robert Machover In this episode we speak with Norman Fruchter and Robert Machover about their collaboration as filmmakers and instructors at the Free University of New York (FUNY), a 1960s experiment in radical education. Fruchter presented a course called ‘Film Form: Propaganda into Art’, and Machover offered a workshop with the aim of producing a film collectively under the title ‘Filmmaking’. This led to creation of the film Dog Burning at Noon, a short clip of which plays during the episode. This episode also includes a discussion of and short clip from Machover and Fruchter’s 1966 film Troublemakers, which chronicled a group of young activists who work

“I remember walking home from that huge protest and feeling this sense of huge hope in the air...And it was just really exciting and it felt like things actually could change.” --Becca Shaw Glazer In this episode, we speak with activists who participated in protests against the World Trade Organization in the 1990s and 2000s. The 1999 Seattle protest against the WTO is often seen as the beginning of a worldwide anti-globalization movement and the Indymedia movement. About 40,000 people took to the streets to express their dissent, and protestors successfully blocked delegates from entering the convention center, delaying the meeting. The protests became known as “The Battle of Seattle” because of the police violence that ensued in response. We focus on the protests that took place in Seattle, and then share an interview with someone who participated in WTO protests in Cancun, one of the protests that took place globally as a result. A huge thank you to our interviewees for speaking with us for this epi

“We knew it was illegal, and we knew the FCC would probably come after us at some point, and they did.” This episode focuses on two New York pirate radio stations--Steal This Radio and WBAD--both of which were active in the 1990s. We interview Arrow Chrome, one of the founders of Steal This Radio, a pirate station that grew out of a Lower East Side community of squatters and activists. The episode also includes some audio from an event at Interference Archive featuring David Goren, creator of the Brooklyn Pirate Radio Sound Map, and DJ Cintronics, the founder of the unlicensed hip hop station WBAD, which became known for playing music you couldn’t hear on mainstream hip hop radio. Two New York Times articles on Steal This Radio from the 1990s: https://www.nytimes.com/1998/04/19/nyregion/neighborhood-report-villages-east-and-west-fm-mouse-roars-at-fcc.html https://www.nytimes.com/1996/02/27/arts/pirate-radio-in-touch-with-the-village-not-the-fcc.html DJ Arrow Chrome: https://www.facebook.com/DJ-Arrow-

"There's only a certain amount of time that a person can languish in prison while they prepare for a trial." To kick off our fall season of Audio Interference, we're speaking with folks from the criminal justice reform organization Just Leadership USA about their work to cut the US correctional population in half by 2030. Just Leadership USA empowers people most affected by incarceration to drive policy reform. In this first episode, we interview Marvin Mayfield, Nishan “Prince” Jackson, and Shanequa Charles, three of the folks who are spearheading a city and state wide campaign to end mass incarceration in New York. To learn more about Just Leadership USA, visit www.justleadershipusa.org. There you will find more information about #FreeNewYork as well as their other campaigns. www.justleadershipusa.org/freenewyork The bills that Shanequa, Prince, and Marvin worked for and lobbied on behalf of during the 2018 legislative session did not pass. The following is a statement from Just Leadership USA aboutthe s

"They saw this region as affected by a kind of colonial influence from the larger urban areas, sort of extracting resources from Central Appalachia historically, for over a hundred years, and not giving anything back." In this episode of Audio Interference, we’re looking into Appalachian Movement Press, an offset print shop and publishing house that was based in Huntington, West Virginia, from 1969 - 1979. We speak with Shaun Slifer, artist, writer, self-taught historian, and Creative Director & Curator at the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum, about his research into Appalachian Movement Press and about the identity movement in Appalachia in the 70s. To learn more about the article Shaun wrote for Signal: A Journal of International Political Graphics and Culture: https://justseeds.org/product/signal06/ You can read an excerpt of Shaun's article in the Signal:06 issue here: https://justseeds.org/appalachian-movement-press-an-excerpt-from-signal06/ And to learn more about Shaun's research process, see: https:

"We were exploding and we were asking women all over to explode with us." SisterSerpents was a radical feminist art collective founded in Chicago in 1989. In this episode, we speak with Jeramy Turner, one of the group's founders. She explains the history of SisterSerpents and how they used art as their weapon in the fight against women's oppression. Interference Archive houses some of SisterSerpents material. Additional material may be found in Loyola University of Chicago's Women and Leadership Archives. Music: "Buzz Chant" by U.S. Girls and "That Breed" by Weyes Blood, courtesy of Free Music Archive. Produced by Interference Archive.

Letters from Comrades on the Inside: In this episode, we hear from Andrea Benson, a contributor to Survived and Punished's Inside-Outside Newsletter about her experiences as an incarcerated person and her thoughts on justice and abolition. This episode of Audio Interference is part of a series in collaboration with Survived and Punished, a coalition of defense campaigns and grassroots groups committed to eradicating the criminalization of survivors of domestic and sexual violence, and the culture of violence that contributes to it. Visit audiointerference.org to listen to more letters from their comrades on the inside as well as a longer interview with two Survived and Punished Members. Visit www.survivedandpunishedny.org to read Survived & Punished NY’s newsletters and explore their work. We'd also like to thank Lae Sway, Yves Tong Nguyen, Heena, Zoe Vongtau, Red Schulte, Mariah Hill, and Martina Ilunga, along with everyone else at Survived & Punished, for working with us on this episode. To learn more

Letters from Comrades on the Inside: In this episode, we hear from Annette Farrell, a contributor to Survived and Punished's Inside-Outside Newsletter about her experiences as an incarcerated person and her thoughts on justice and abolition. This episode of Audio Interference is part of a series in collaboration with Survived and Punished, a coalition of defense campaigns and grassroots groups committed to eradicating the criminalization of survivors of domestic and sexual violence, and the culture of violence that contributes to it. Visit audiointerference.org to listen to more letters from their comrades on the inside as well as a longer interview with two Survived and Punished Members. Visit www.survivedandpunishedny.org to read Survived & Punished NY’s newsletters and explore their work. A huge thank you to Annette Farrel for sharing your stories. We'd also like to thank Lae Sway, Yves Tong Nguyen, Heena, Zoe Vongtau, Red Schulte, Mariah Hill, and Martina Ilunga, along with everyone else at Survived

"Adjunctification is really this process of replacing full time academic positions with part time academic positions at lower wages and usually inferior, if any, benefits as a cost saving measure." In this episode, we speak with Carly Smith and Susan DiRaimo, two adjunct professors at the City University of New York, the public university system of New York City and the largest urban university system in the country. They tell us about the daily reality for adjuncts and how their union, the Professional Staff Congress, helps them fight for better wages and working conditions. Their current battle is for a minimum salary of $7K per course that they teach, a radical demand that could finally bring many adjuncts out of poverty and change the national conversation about funding for public education. Music: "Better World," by Woody Guthrie. Produced by Interference Archive.

"It’s like we’re always reinventing the wheel, but some of these posters tell you what worked and what didn’t work a generation ago or more." - Carol Wells The Center for the Study of Political Graphics, based in Los Angeles, is home to a collection of over 90,000 protest graphics and the largest collection of post World War II posters in the United States. In this episode, Carol Wells, Founder and Executive Director of CSPG, gives a tour of the archive to Kevin Caplicki, one of the co-founders of Interference Archive and a member of Justseeds Artist Collective. For more information about CSPG, visit: http://www.politicalgraphics.org/ Music: "Favorite Secrets" by Waylon Thornton, courtesy of Free Music Archive. Produced by Interference Archive.

"All the messages from pop culture present Asian American as an apolitical thing. It was really shocking and liberating to find out that actually, Asian American politics was rooted in radical organizing and rooted in grassroots arts movements." -- Ryan Wong This episode of Audio Interference focuses on Basement Workshop (active 1970-1986), an arts and political organization based in New York City's Chinatown that served as a hub for the developing Asian American movement. Elena Levi speaks to curator and writer Ryan Wong, whose exhibition, Serve the People: The Asian American Movement in New York was presented at Interference Archive in 2013-2014. The episode also includes portions of Ryan's talk at an event celebrating the release of the latest issue of Signal (http://s1gnal.org/), a journal of international political graphics and culture. Ryan's article on Hyperallergic includes more information on Basement Workshop and other Chinatown arts organizations: https://hyperallergic.com/330442/a-brief-hist

This episode features a performance by Koyt Far Dayn Fardakht (http://koytfilth.band) at Interference Archive's 2017 block party, as well as an interview with the band, , who describe their music as "queer/trans antizionist Yiddish punk," broadcast live on Radio Free Gowanus (www.radiofreegowanus.com). All music by Koyt Far Dayn Fardakht. Produced by Interference Archive.