Party with a Purpose
December 3, 7-11pm @ The Venue, 21 N. Market Street, Asheville
Tickets: $30 in advance, $35 at the door
Food, beer and wine included
Bring cash for raffle & silent auction
Purchase tickets here - Be sure to note that it's for the MAP!

The MAP's history of partnering with the Asheville Affiliates have helped us to raise a ton of cash for artist grants and other MAP endeavors. The Asheville Affiliates is a group of professionals in Asheville that helps nonprofits plan and produce events – they provide sponsorship, guidance during the planning process and invite their network of 3,000 people to attend each event.

This year the Affiliates are celebrating their 10th Anniversary, and are having a reunion party on December 3 at the Venue in downtown Asheville – “Party Like It’s 1999”!

As a past beneficiary, the MAP has the chance to win a portion of the proceeds from the event – estimated at $3,000, which would help us to continue our support for the media arts community in WNC. In order for us to qualify, we only have to sell 10 tickets. They are $30 each - you can purchase them online at www.wncap.org (WNC AIDS Project is partnering with the Affiliates to produce this event).

IMPORTANT!!! For your ticket to count toward our 10 to qualify, you must enter The Media Arts Project into the “Nonprofit Affiliation” line in the online order form. The deadline for us to qualify is Monday, December 1st... so do it now!

Please help us celebrate our partnership with the Asheville Affiliates, and earn the chance to win some funds for the MAP. This event is expected to sell out, so please order early and bring your friends to Party Like It’s 1999!

Enacting Exhausted Language / Exhausting Enacted Language
An Artist Talk @ Bobo Gallery
November 24, 8pm ... $3

New media artist and UNCA assistant professor Curt Cloninger will discuss his art work and related research at this month's Off the MAP event. Cloninger's art undermines language as a system of meaning in order to reveal it as an embodied force in the world. His materials are spoken words, sounds, hand-written words, lines, objects coupled with words, objects as words, light, and time. He orchestrates these materials using video, software, performances, installations, and networks. By layering, restructuring, hashing, eroding, exhausting, and (dis)splaying language, he causes language to perform itself until its "meaning" has less to do with what it denotes and more to do with how it behaves.

This talk is in conjunction with Cloninger's upcoming performance at Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center on November 29... info is here.

Curt Cloninger is an artist, writer, and Assistant Professor of Multimedia Arts & Sciences at the University of North Carolina Asheville. His work has been featured in the New York Times, ABC World News, and at festivals and galleries from Korea to Brazil. Exhibition venues include Digital Art Museum [DAM] Berlin, L'Instituto de México à Paris, Living Arts of Tulsa, and The Art Gallery of Knoxville. Cloninger also maintains lab404.com, playdamage.org, and deepyoung.org in order to facilitate a more lively remote dialogue with the Sundry Essences of Wonder.

The seventh annual Asheville Film Festival is happening this weekend - a somewhat pared-down version of the festival in years past, but a chance to support local talent, see some good flicks and sharpen your skills at the workshops. Highlights:

The "Focus on Local" screening is tonight (Friday, November 13) at the Diana Wortham, and it features Paul Schattel's Alison, a film he made here in Asheville with the help of a Media Arts Advantage Fund grant through the MAP. (See Paul's blog post below.) Also screening tonight is Beer Y'all...  on everyone's favorite subject. Films from UNCA students screen on Saturday at the Fine Arts. Tickets and screening schedule are here.

YMI hosts two days of workshops, many of them from friends of the MAP: an animation session with UNCA's Lei Han and Philip Delacruz, a directors' panel with Rod Murphy, Paul Bonesteel and Paul Schattel, and a talk on sound design from David Schmidt of A Cappella Audio. Apple workshops at Pack Place run all day today and tomorrow. The educational offerings are all free - here's the schedule.

Have fun and support your local filmmakers...

UNC Asheville is hosting an International Human Rights Film Festival next week, and the Visualizing Human Rights "anti-conference" happens Saturday, November 14. The event brings the arts and artists to the endeavor of human rights. Theater, dance, poetry, 2D and 3D art, photography, and animation all work together to put a human face on himan rights.

Look for work/performances from The Beehive, Jinx Pace, DeWayne Barton, Ben Betsalel, and Heinz Kossler, among other artists and activists. The local organizers include Jolene Mechanic and Ken Betasalel, and it's sponsored by Amnesty International, the Center for Global Initiatives at UNC-Chapel Hill, the Human Rights Center at Duke, and the Elon University Department of Political Science. Heady stuff.

Highlights include a play about homelessness in Asheville and a discussion about human rights and photography. On Saturday night, "A Jerusalem Between Us" is a one-man show in black box format by Aaron Davidman. On Sunday afternoon, Global Playback presents a production called "Human Rights: Stories of Resilience and Hope."

And! It's all FREE. More info is here.

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