1. Practice
2. Finish website
3. Coordinate costumes
4. Write written report

Sam, Cristina, Nick and Lauren- Practice
Cristina- finish graphics
Sam- find corny music
Lauren- add more to written report
Nick- look for corny music and figure out whether to switch slides or have them side by side

Proposal:
Lauren: Hi and thank you for joining us in celebrating the launch of Onondaga Lake’s new fun filled attraction, Lights on the Lake.

Sam: This family orientated project highlights the history of one of Onondaga county’s most famous landmarks.

Cristina: By combining history and beauty, the 2 mile long sparkling display attracts audiences of all ages.

Nick: Lights on the lake is all year round. Viewers are able to take night time drives through the festive atmosphere or relaxing strolls along the shoreline. The scenic walk is a great way shed those extra holiday pounds.

Lauren: As our fabulous website points out, it only costs $8 per car or $6 on Monday and Tuesday with a Wegmen’s shopping card. This show cannot be missed. You can even have your companies name be part of the unique experience.

Sam: That’s right, Lauren. Companies such as Allied Signal and Solvay Process Company have jumped on board to help share Onondaga Lake’s history with all of Syracuse. There is so much fun to be had that you must experience it for yourselves.

Cristina: The Towering light displays, animals, amazing animations, flying fish, beautiful beach displays and breath taking architecture can only be enjoyed by those willing to fully immerse themselves in the lake’s culture.

Nick: If you visit our website, www.lightsonthelake.org, you are able to view pieces of the multi faceted, stunning production. Here (point to fish) we have two deceased fish that have entirely absorbed all that Onondaga Lake has to offer.

Lauren: Look how gorgeous they appear. Almost breath-taking. The beautiful beaches are represented by the 12 foot “no swimming” and “no fishing” signs that flash in different colors as you pass. When you can do everything on a play station who actually goes out and swims nowadays?

Sam: Very True. And speaking of fun toys like play station, Lights on the lake gift certificates make great presents for the holidays and you don’t want to miss the virtual tours that are now available to view on the website.

Cristina: We hope that you all come out to experience the sheer brilliance of all that Onondaga Lake has to offer. During the holidays Santa is known to stop by and give out gifts to the young children. These gifts include packets with safety warnings and precautions for the kiddies to take when playing near the lake. Safety is always our number one concern.

Nick: Thank you all for coming out and listening to our presentation. We hope that you attend the show. It is mounds of fun and should not be missed!

The Inconvenient Truth Light Show

Onondaga Lake Parkway is the site of annual "Lights on a Lake" festival. For our final project in CAS 100 our group was thinking of creating another lights on the lake but not with a Christmas theme. Instead we want to create a show of lights with the symbols of pollution like dead fish and smokestacks from the surrounding industries because of the serious contamination of Onondaga Lake. Also our light show would be year round because pollution is a problem all year not just during one time of season. The show should serve as a kind of public awareness and how it is not going to get better if we do not do anything. This light show will be open to the public for a minimal fee because the money we do make out of it will go into the clean up of the lake.

The "Inconvenient Truth Light Show " would be set up on a street or what ever open land there is next to the lake because the project is featuring the lake so it would be the appropriate location. This project is an integration of the community because we would want the community to give us ideas and help us set it up. As long as we get enough community members to participate in the development of the project, then getting permission should be no problem because we are only trying to raise awareness and raise money for clean ups. This project will not disrupt the daily life of people though it may spark some controversy with the companies who pollute. This project has inspiration from Damali Ayo's reparation project because in her dialogue she tries to raise awareness of the suffering of African American people back in the slave trading days. Likewise this project is also intended to raise awareness of the dangers of pollution in the clean looking lake.



http://onondagacountyparks.com/parks/olp/#

Click on this link to see the enlargement of the above map. Also Google Maps is a good site to see the location of Lights on the Lake in Syracuse.

The Battle of Orgreave

The Battle of Orgreave was threatening to be one of the most violent confrontations between riot police and pickets in British history yet the government, notably Margaret Thatcher’s classification of the strike as “mob violence” and her branding of the miners as “the enemy within” (Correia: 95), did not help to defuse the situation. Instead they provoked the miners to come at them by placing an enormous amount of authority in the way of them.

The police did not need to deploy in such big numbers at Orgreave during the picketing because it was relatively peaceful at the time. The authorities being there with their helmets, truncheons, shields, dogs, and horses was the cause for this violent battle. Of course at the time, it seemed as though the authorities, including the government, wanted this to happen so as to make it seem as though miners’ are all outcasts from the majority population with their “vicious” act. This picket line and the yearlong strike against the digging pits was the beginning of the end for the already diminishing coal industry in the United Kingdom.

The pickets knew that eight thousand plus police officers (East, Power, and Thomas 1985: 309) would not have been deployed to one picket line if a battle were not to happen. The loud battle cries they chanted in unison while banging their shields also confirmed it. Miners’ recalled driving over to Orgreave’s from all over the country, Scotland and Wales included, to join the strike expecting to be detoured somewhere else or be pulled over and get sent back. Nothing of the sort happened but instead police waved them on and helped park their cars. It seemed that the police intended that Orgreave would be a “battle”, and would not end until the pickets were “defeated” (East, Power, and Thomas 1985: 310). The determination and preparedness of the police force resulted in a kind of mini-war instead of the defusing the situation.

The government got what they wanted on June 18th, 1984. Who started the battle, no one knows for sure but once it started there was no turning back. The pickets’ threw bricks and stones and charged at the long shielded front line of officers. While the coppers on horses came out from behind the line and ran over people while hitting and bashing miners’ who were running away. There was an incident where a man climbed up a wall to let the horses pass by then one of the coppers knocked him straight across the legs with his truncheon and broke his two legs. There was another incident in which a man of about fifty sitting on a wall catching his breath was knocked across the forehead by a mounted copper, for no reason at all (East, Power, and Thomas 1985: 310). These incidents show the consequences of governmental intervention in a dispute such as the mining strikes.

On June 18th 1984, Jeremy Deller was watching a news broadcast of this event on TV with people, horses, and dogs running around chasing each other while punching and beating one another. He saw mounted coppers hitting people with their truncheons and coppers with shields hording off an attack by the street clothed people. This historical moment in English history in which state power was enforcing itself, would stay in Deller’s mind for years to come. Not until he undertook research of the event years later did he find out the historical perspective and significance of the confrontation. He found out that it was a day in which had been anticipated and planned for by the government (Deller, 2002: 7). With this discovery, he came up with an idea, a project to re-enact this event so as to brand this into the history books for the future generations to know about.

Mac McLoughlin, a former police officer during the mayhem, is from a family of miners’ so he understands the pain and hard work the pickets must have gone through to make a living. He remembers seeing an incident in which a police officer from Manchester, a non-mining town, had a picket in a headlock. McLoughlin did not know why because the picket was not fighting back or anything. Just then the officer calls over a buddy and tells him to hit the picket, which is followed by a nasty whack to the forehead of the seemingly cooperative kid. Many incidents related to ones like these shows the consequences of a state trying to assert its hegemonic power over its people. It also shows how determined each side were to make a statement to one another.

Jeremy Deller’s re-enactment of this historic battle at Orgreave on June 18th, 2001 was to serve as a historical and political piece of dialogical art. It took him and others a year to collect all the information needed for the re-enactment. They interviewed the ex-miners’ that were involved in the incident and also the police officers who were there. He got over eight hundred ex-miners’ to participate in his project and some former police officers as well (Deller 2002: 7). He wanted to make it as real as possible so he hired historical re-enactment expert Howard Giles, and riot police training officers to train the volunteers. He decided to shoot the film in the same vicinity of the actual battle because that would give it that much more significance. Jeremy asked most of the ex-miners’ to play the role of officers and former officers the role of pickets to make them see through a different perspective. The re-enactment was for historical and memorbilia purposes but the people involved were “at times veered towards real violence” (Correia, 2006: 100), insisting on a remaining edginess between ex-miners’ and former officers.

The media portrayed the battle as though the miners started the whole medley and should be looked upon as though they are the outcasts of society. This is a reminder of Roland Barthes
“The Blue Guide” and how people only focus on one aspect of place or event and forget about the rest. Thinking of Spain as only as a place of classical ballet and old monuments is like thinking the officers were all innocent and did not do anything to provoke the Battle of Orgreave. This re-enactment gave many of the ex-miners’ that took part in it to reassert the truth of what really happened on that day. In this sense the project gave a voice to the miners’ who were not given a chance to tell their side of the story. They could express their “criticism” and their “deep distrust” of official truth through this project, letting the anger out so the process of healing and cooperation can begin between the mining and policing communities.

The dialogical art project clearly depicted the violence that was unlawfully started by the government and was bent in supporting the miners’ action because during the “real” event, the police had all the support from the media. This re-enactment gave the miners’ a chance to tell their side of the story and how it all went down. It also showed the government’s weakness to have to resort to such extreme measures of sending mass amounts of officers to a picket line in which was not doing anything troublesome except protesting. The consequences of sending the coppers most likely provoked the Battle of Orgreave. I mean what would you do if the so called protectors of the streets started provoking you by waving money and calling you names because you were a miner?

The mass strike did not end at Orgreave but most definitely increased the hatred and bitterness between picketing and non-picketing miners alike. Many families were torn apart because of divided loyalties and still are into this day (Corriea 2006: 96) but the re-enactment in a way started the healing of family ties and now is slowly fading into history so people can be as one community again. The main reason that put pit communities into such poverty and
violence after the shutting down of collieries was the fact that jobs were taken away from generations of families. If you take the pit away from the pit communities, what exactly is it there for (Deller 2002: 22)?

The main intention for this project was to make The Battle of Orgreave’s a “part of the lineage of decisive battles in English History” (Deller 2002: 7). In other words he wanted to
show the people, mainly the English people, that events like the one in Orgreave were decisive moments in the rich history of England. “Intrapersonal interactions are really the key to political transformation” (Berger 1999: 97). This was a day in which a bunch of so-called “evil” miners’ defied the all mighty English government by standing up to them. This battle helped the miners’ in the sense of lifting their spirits but as a result lost their jobs when the coalmines closed down. From this film, the mending of relationships between the police and mining communities has began and was one of the main implications of this dialogical art project.

I thought the project was a very interesting one because of the fact that Deller included former miners and police officers. This is "the kind of interactions between the artist and the respective community partner" (Kwon 2002: 117) that needed to be established to be a success. Without this aspect it would not have been accepted by the English community because of the fact that it was a day in which many families were torn apart. By including the formers, the project was a success in the sense that people worked together and created a historical archive for this important event. The miners coming back to the battleground of the infamous battle where their lives were pretty much taken away is interesting and important because to have some closure in life, people must return to the so-called “battleground” and forgive. This is what I think Deller was trying to do by gathering some of the formers and reuniting them under a better situation.

This film is also a very reveling of the English way of life and probably brought to light to the people of the world, and maybe to the English themselves, that England has its problems too. When people think of England they think of old castles, beautiful old houses from the 1500s, red suited soldiers in black hats but just do not know the truth of the matter. “Through the work I try to construct a concrete, immediate and personal relationship with me and the viewer that locates us within the network of political cause and effect” (Berger 1999: 61). This quote gives a good description of what the art project was trying to portray, which was the political and the personal sides, which resulted in the battle.

The Battle of Orgreave

Topics:

1)Describe the battle and its significance
2)The consequences and results
3)How Deller came up with this idea and how it has shaped the way of life in England
4)The participants and the audience
5)Consequences and how the battle was only told from one perspective
6)The Artist's intention for this project

2 Thesis:

1)Why is this project so significant in the way it portrays the miners and officers?

2)How did this project help bring to light the suffering of the miners even years after the battle (Families torn apart and no jobs)?

4 quotes:

1)I wanted to make The Battle of Orgreave"a part of the lineage of decisive battles in English History" (Deller's Book)

2)"People at times were veered towards real violence" in the re-enactment (Journal article)

3)This project is based on "the kind of interactions between the artist and the respective community partner" (Kwon's Book)

4)"I saw one man, about 50, sitting on a wall trying to get his breath. A mounted copper came along and hit him on his forehead right over the wall" (Journal article)

The Battle of Orgreave

Jeremy Deller- The Battle of Orgreave

2 Questions:
1)I want to know how Jeremy Deller came up with the idea to re-enact the battle?
2)Why were the riot police so vicious in attacking men and women miners' alike?


4 Books and Articles:
1)The English Civil War Part II, Personal accounts of the 1984-1985 miners' strike.
Author: Jeremy Deller

2)The Death of Mass Picketing (Journal of Law and Society)
Database: J-STOR.
Author: Robert East, Helen Power, Philip A. Thomas

3)Jeremy Deller (Art Monthly)
Database: Wilson Web
Author: Dave Beech

4)Interpreting Jeremy Deller's The Battle of Orgreave (Visual Culture of Britain)
Database: Wilson Web
Author: Alice Correia

"Culture in Action"

The Haha and Flood network made up of activists and volunteer health care workers came up with a project to grow food for HIV and AIDS patients. They came up with this project so they could have a "communicative sphere" in which the theme of AIDS could be brought up. They did this by filling half a Chicago shop with special plants that do not require soil to grow but require constant attention and made the other half of the room into an AIDS information center. The "Hydroponic" garden was to be seen as a metaphor for social interaction and responsibility for the public.

In the 1990's the role of public art has shifted from that of renewing the physical environment to that of improving society, from promoting aesthectic quality to contributing to the quality of life, from enriching lives to saving lives

The HIV/AIDS project is very much related to this quote because it brings up the issue of disease into the publics view, which may save lives. You can create a conversation between this project and the quote by talking about the many diseases in the world and how art can bring them into peoples perspectives. Maybe then people will start caring and start doing something about it. One question I do have is how exactly did the activists/artists come up with this project in the first place because, to me, it is very strange.

Video and Resistance

Photography is embraced more as a scientific tool than a leisure tool because of its importance in today's world. Photographs are used for military reconnaissance and for keeping information from disappearing from our memories. Following the invention of the camera came the film movie camera which led to the making of documentaries. Early documentaries functioned primarily as advertisements, but as time went on the making of documentaries has vastly improved. But in doing so it has blinded our perception to what is considered real history and what is not. In this sense history is created by the movie industries themselves.

The authors of "Video and Resistance" and Sontag have the same kind of view in the sense that photographs and movies are an important aspect in our daily lives. Without photographs in our lives today, families and relatives would not have concrete visual records of their loved ones and militaries could not spy on each other. They also think that because of all the technological advances today, people are having a harder time distinguishing between reality and fantasy. Photos and movies are deceptive in the way they portray different issues and because of it, people are losing their sense of what reality really is.