Writers, performers, artists, musicians, designers!
Take a look at this cool opportunity and please pass on to fellow artists you think would be interested. The Orphan Works series at The Chicago Underground Library is looking for participants:

Orphan Works is a reinterpretation series, which will begin appearing again in 2009 on a bimonthly basis (third week of every other month) in May. The Chicago Underground Library is calling upon a variety of the most creative minds in Chicago to burrow deep into their collection of anonymous works or ones for which no further information on the author can be found. Commonly referred to as “Orphan Works,” these lost publications will be brought back to life: read, reinterpreted, and reunited with the audience they’ve been missing. These works may never see the light of day again unless you adopt them. (Each show features three interpreters performing, displaying, reading or otherwise showing their work.)

To participate please contact:
Hannah Kushnick
[email protected]

About the Chicago Underground Library’s archive:
The Chicago Underground Library is a location-specific archive of independent and small press media. We are always seeking books, magazines, zines, journals, broadsides, newspapers, and art books of all types, genres, and print runs as long as they were produced outside of mass media outlets. We accept everything from the area, regardless of perceived quality or importance, in order to create a detailed index from which connections among the publications will emerge.

The CUL seeks to give the underexposed a voice, give the community something new to chew on, and encourage artistic producers to make connections between different media, different backgrounds, and different social groups.

Image via Knot 84 Rooms

P.O.S.’s latest release Never Better comes with a one-of-a-kind transparent plastic Digipak with artwork cards you can mix and match to enhance and change the look of the album:

If there is one documentary you need to see this year, it is the recent Oscilloscope Laboratories release Flow - an incredibly informative & beautiful film about the global water crisis.

Here’s the synopsis from the site,

Irena Salina’s award-winning documentary investigation into what experts label the most important political and environmental issue of the 21st Century - The World Water Crisis.

Salina builds a case against the growing privatization of the world’s dwindling fresh water supply with an unflinching focus on politics, pollution, human rights, and the emergence of a domineering world water cartel.

Interviews with scientists and activists intelligently reveal the rapidly building crisis, at both the global and human scale, and the film introduces many of the governmental and corporate culprits behind the water grab, while begging the question ‘CAN ANYONE REALLY OWN WATER?’

Beyond identifying the problem, FLOW also gives viewers a look at the people and institutions providing practical solutions to the water crisis and those developing new technologies, which are fast becoming blueprints for a successful global and economic turnaround.

Dubbed “the scariest movie at the (2008) Sundance Film Festival” by Wired Magazine, I found this film to be absolutely riveting but also touching. It serves both as an urgent wake-up call and poignant love letter to the substance that sustains us all. So drop what you’re doing and go see this film!!

If it’s not in a theatres near you, you can buy the Flow DVD and find Flow on Netflix.

For street artists who struggle with the legal implications of their often hard-to-remove art, Buff Diss has found a solution: masking tape art. His creations are striking yet ephemeral - it must be neat to watch them battle wind and rain over time.

Here Buff Diss creates the work “Huw Moran RIP”:

Photos via BuffDiss

Blimps, polygraph landscapes and head-nodding beats - all in a day’s work for the creator of Dabrye’s video for “Smoking the Edge” off his album One/Three. It’s a few years old but deserves some recognition.

I’m happy to report that graffiti culture appears to be alive and well in Chinese cities like Beijing and Shanghai.

For this episode of DanweiTV, the original Internet TV station about Chinese urban culture, host and producer Adam Schokora (小石) meets up with three of Shanghai’s best known graffiti artists: Popil, Zhang Lan (AKA: Mr. Lan), and HKer, to get their perspective on the local graffiti scene and catch them in action painting a few pieces.

Photos via oopsilon

This just in from Chicago-based art collective Material Exchange, a group that deals with objects and materials whose “valued properties have diminished”: low-tech, homemade games are sought for a project that challenges the dominance high-technology.

The idea strikes me as a reverent albeit nostalgic look at simplicity for modern lives consumed by the newest, the latest, and the next big thing. Submission deadline is March 22nd, 2009.

Photo: Material Exchange Analog Pinball Machine

Yesterday I received an email from Van Jones of Green for All telling me to watch Earth: The Sequel on Wednesday, March 11th. Despite the fact that I don’t know Van Jones personally and it was clearly a mass email, I always click when I see his name because I know it will be something meaningful. This one was no different,

Our friends at the Environmental Defense Fund have partnered with the Discovery Channel to bring green energy technologies to life as never before. Am I really writing to ask you to watch TV on Wednesday? Yes. Because this special tells the story that the whole nation needs to know: We have an abundance of clean energy alternatives already available to solve the global warming crisis and rebuild a clean, green America.

Check out the trailer and, if you like what you see, sign up to watch the show: www.earththesequel.com

Pretty cool, huh? You better believe that when the new green jobs advisor to the Obama administration tells me to watch something, I’ll be tuning in.

Thumbnail image via Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Dorothee and Mark recently returned from a trip to Guatemala where they documented a medical mission to the town of Jalapa for Latin American Medical Providers (LAMP). They also shot footage at a nearby girls orphanage to raise awareness for the Chicago-based H.E.A.R Foundation. Stay tuned for the release of both videos!

Dorothee interviews women waiting in line to be treated at the hospital where LAMP doctors see over 250 people a day for one week:

Mark gets his gear ready to accompany a team of doctors to a remote mountain village in the Guatemalan countryside:

Dorothee decided it would be awesome to climb on the roof to get a shot of the long line outside of the hospital in Jalapa…

Last week President Obama (I still love saying that) announced plans to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq by August 2010. But what about the millions of Iraqis who have been displaced as a result of the war? 1 in 5 Iraqis have been uprooted by violence in their homeland. Many have fled to Syria, and their situation is growing increasingly desperate.

In response to these recent developments, Refugees International has launched a new campaign urging President Obama to do more to help Iraqi refugees.

The campaign features a petition urging the Obama administration to:

1. Assist Iraqi refugees.
2. Ensure a safe, voluntary return home when possible.
3. Pressure Iraq to meet its responsibilities to its own people.
4. Increase resettlement for those who can’t go home.

Supporters can sign the petition here: http://www.refugeesinternational.org/iraq

The campaign also features two candid videos about the lives of Iraqi refugees in Syria:

The View From Syria

Khaled’s Story