tag:techtv.mit.edu,:Array/186244760 2009-06-15 18:17:56 -0400 Center for Advanced Visual Studies Join CAVS for an in-progress, hybrid performance/reading about the economic crisis. John Malpede promises a “100% non- threatening participatory event” where the audience reads text and the performers perform others. Readings and Performers will bounce off of one another arbitrarily; unpredictable trajectories will afford glimpses of our possible financial futures. Witness and contribute to the first phase of an ongoing project where Malpede remixes texts about the financial crisis. + Malpede is an eminent performer, director, and activist who often uses governmental, legal, and media sources as found texts. In 1985 he founded Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), an organization that engages the homeless population of Los Angeles through performance. LAPD’s current touring project, Agents and Assets, 2001-, recreates a House of Representatives hearing on the importation of drugs into the United States in the 1980s by Nicaraguan contra rebels with the CIA's complicity. In 2002-05 he performed as Antonin Artaud in Peter Sellars’ production of Artaud’s For an End to the Judgment of God, in Vienna, Rome, London, Brussels, San Francisco and Los Angeles. In 2004, he directed RFK in EKY, a site-specific regional recreation of Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 inquiry into poverty in Appalachia. Malpede has received the Bessie Creation Award from Dance Theater Workshop, New York; San Francisco Art Institute's Adeline Kent Award; and a Theater LA Ovation Award, as well as numerous government and foundation grants. He has taught at UCLA, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, the Amsterdam School for Advanced Research in Theater and Dance, and the California College of Arts and Crafts, San Francisco. John Malpede is a fellow at CAVS, and is developing a public performance for MIT’s campus in the fall of 2009. 0 tag:techtv.mit.edu,:Array/186141080 2009-06-22 15:52:10 -0400 Center for Advanced Visual Studies The American preference for traditional residential design masks a frightening reality: across the globe, individual buildings have been retrofitted to serve as interchangeable nodes in a vast abstract structure, held loosely together by legal and political restraints, made to allow the furious circulation of finance capital. An installation of models, photographs, videos, and drawings by artist-designer Damon Rich, Red Lines immerses visitors in a landscape of pulsing capital and liquidated buildings, exploring the relation between finance and architecture. During a year-long residence at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, Rich, founder of the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), surveyed the darkening realm of real estate markets: foreclosures, pro-formas, chains of title, block busting, exploding ARMs, and the obscure history of the mortgage, Old French for death vow. In the resulting installation, the head of Frederick Babcock, pioneer appraiser, gazes over a scattered field of diminished Detroit houses, still showing damage from 1960s real estate scandals. Looming behind Babcock, the flicker of a neon sign – BUY LOW SELL HIGH – reveals the spikes and troughs of a wall cut by the 20th century’s prime rate, the sharp line between lenders and borrowers. Projected videos haunt the gallery with the apparitions of financial engineers, federal regulators, and anti-foreclosure activists. Today, what has become known as the Subprime Meltdown continues to spread, pushing people out of homes, wasting neighborhoods, bankrupting institutions, and threatening global economic crisis. Red Lines aims to broaden and enrich the urgent conversation about how our society finances its living environments. 3682 tag:techtv.mit.edu,:Array/186104300 2009-08-04 15:55:53 -0400 Legatum Mr. Khoja’s involvement in the telecommunications sector in Afghanistan began in May 2002 as a volunteer consultant to the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development in an initiative to install the nationwide private communications infrastructure. In January 2003, Mr. Khoja was appointed as the Chief Executive Officer for the Telecom Development Company Afghanistan Ltd, t/a Roshan. Under his leadership, Roshan has grown to be Afghanistan’s largest mobile provider and today is the largest company in Afghanistan with over 3 million subscribers. Mr. Khoja is also Chairman of the Board of the Afghan Investment Climate Facility (AICF) and an advisor to the GSMA Development Fund. 820 tag:techtv.mit.edu,:Array/186031160 2009-10-02 12:12:52 -0400 The Community Innovators Lab Watch the <a href="http://techtv.mit.edu/collections/colab/videos/3907-colab-leveraging-the-stimulus-panel-91409">full</a> panel discussion to see the whole conversation. In the summer of 2009, MIT CoLab deployed student staff to organizations in <a href="http://www.belovedcommunitycenter.org/">North Carolina</a>, Mississippi, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Los Angeles, among others, to collaborate with communities interested in using stimulus money in especially innovative ways. The common stimulus dispute CoLab's community partners face looks like this: the City wants to spend its stimulus money on new boilers for City Hall, with a one-time installation done by an established contractor. Community groups, however envision something more like this: (1) a job skills training program for unemployed youth and former felons, including a leadership development component, which trains folks how to weatherize and retrofit buildings, and also how to start a small business. (2) newly trained workers get paid to to the work in their own neighborhoods. (3) With this experience, they could potentially start their own businesses. (4) Meanwhile, their neighborhoods would use energy savings from their now weatherized homes to engage in a collective mortgage reduction program, or as savings towards a community center building. 83