Dear NCV community,

The Issue # 21 has been in the works for awhile now. Our friend and netizen Katie Zien wanted to explore various facets of our ever-changing identity on the internet. Coincidentally enough we only know her through the net! After seeing her humorous and thought-provoking play with Facebook status updates, we decided it was time to do a show. Katie is currently living in Panama working on various projects including a doctorate degree in theatre. Read more below.

Hope you enjoy the show, passing the mic on to Katie..

Curator’s statement:

This installment of No Commercial Value examines the many manipulations, disguises, avoidances, and convergences that happen daily in the complicated dance of identity, play, and intercourse transpiring on the internet. As we manufacture, mask, maneuver, and manipulate ourselves and each other through digital channels, we must make fast decisions that result in meaningful material consequences for our emotional states, subjectivities, perceptual faculties, and social and ideological structures. A slip in the façade, an unintended moment of intimacy, and the seemingly ephemeral liquid of the internet inflates, gains weight…

contd. @ No Commercial Value Issue: 21

FEATURING:

Katie Zien is a doctoral candidate at Northwestern University currently researching Latin American and Caribbean theatre history and U.S. imperialism in Panama with a Fulbright fellowship. Her dissertation investigates the twentieth-century history of theatre and performance in the Panama Canal Zone in the context of collective identity formation, racial inequality, and spatial politics.

In Katie’s own performance/art practice, as well as in her personal life, questions around Internet-based social networking, virtual relationships, and the digital archive surface frequently. For this reason, she invited her artist friends to contribute memes of their own and others’ making for a collection that would explore some manifestations/ramifications of the culture of our epoch, what Katie envisions as a swirling sea of (generally) garbage, with a few gems occasionally clearing the clutter to resonate for a while.

Jason Lazarus is a photographer based in Chicago. Jason’s work has treated themes such as the cult of celebrity and the elision of images, blurring the lines between events and their representation.

Aay Preston-Myint, also based in Chicago, alludes to a variety of subjects in his work – punk and queer sensibilities abound, along with remastered recapitulations of past watershed moments in the understudied histories of suppressed subcultures.

Awilda Rodríguez Lora and André Austvoll have danced together as part of the New York-based company D UNDERBELLY, in addition to their own solo performance practices. In the piece included in this edition of No Commercial Value, they collaborate across time and space, dancing between Norway and California.

Colleen Asper, based in New York, is interested in exploring interfaces through which people communicate and transmit information. She also works with the materiality of the internet and its spatiotemporal traces.

Jorge Nieto, based in the Dominican Republic, is a visual artist whose collages represent various levels of globalized pop spirituality.

–

amir husak

prem sooriyakumar

www.NoCommercialValue.org

info@nocommercialvalue.org

Dear all,

After a long, long… well, a very long break, we are back with more delight!

The issue #20 is all about the magic of urban space. We are very happy to feature three pieces from the InnerCity project by Noelia Santos, plus a selection of sound works by Raqs Media Collective, Daijuin Yao/Beijin Sound Unit, and ru*mor* (Rui Viana Pereira) created exclusively for the 2002 Invisible Cities sound installation project . Please read below for more information about the works and their creators.

We ask that you stay tuned, as NoCommercialValue will be getting a new look (hello, Web 2.0!) plus a series of shows to celebrate our FIRST ANNIVERSARY (yes – we’ve been around for a full year now, folks!). As always, your comments and suggestions are more than welcome. If you have an idea or a piece of work that you would like to exhibit at NCV, please write to us. And now, let’s look what we have for you today:

boxes 1-3 (top row):

InnerCity by Noelia Santos

InnerCity is an attempt to portray our visceral experience of the city in virtual form. The site is composed of photography, prose-poetry and moving images portraying urban spaces which contain, frame, enclose and disclose our lives. A work-in-progress, InnerCity will grow over the next few months with fresh content, including a series of short films that together form an overarching narrative about the city as a body of interconnected pathways, stories and memories.

Biography

Noelia Santos is a freelance writer, editor and videographer based in New York. Her work has appeared in MovieMaker Magazine, mySA.com, the Independent Film & Video Monthly, Citysearch.com and Seattle Weekly. She is a graduate student in film at The New School.

boxes 4 – 6 (bottom row):

Selected works from Invisible Cities

Curated by Fällt designers Fehler, ‘Invisible Cities’ offers the opportunity to experience an intimate series of portraits of the world’s cities painted with sound. Through the interface of a gallery wall, each city, represented by an audio work of five minutes duration, is accessible through headphones. Participants in the gallery can transcend distance – moving from Moscow to Montreal, from Berlin to Beijing – in the time it takes to plug a pair of headphones into an alternative location.

A series of artists were invited to contribute a five minute audio work inspired by and utilising the sounds of the cities they cherish. Their contributions range from quiet and contemplative to noisy and frenetic with styles ranging from the pristine digital crackles of Baltimore based artist Richard Chartier (Whitney Biennial, 12k, LINE) to the near-silence of Tokyo based ultra-minimalist *0 (Nosei Sakata).

Invisible Cities was commissioned by Queen’s University, Belfast for Belfast Festival at Queen’s 2002 and is supported in its touring format by the British Council. To date it has exhibited in: Lisbon, Portugal; Naples, Italy; Brussels, Belgium; and Valetta, Malta.

- text from http://www.fallt.com/invisiblecities

Enjoy!

Amir Husak

Prem Sooriyakumar

–

www.NoCommercialValue.org

info@nocommercialvalue.org

Dear all,

This week we welcome back Ashley Singley as our guest curator.

Ashley selected a series of photographs by Dreamboats Collective, a new agency featuring four young photographers: Adam Golfer, Joe Leavenworth, TJ Proechel, and Daniel Shea. Unlike our previous shows, this one can be experienced both online and in person (if you happen to be in New York City). The exhibition will be on view from November 5th through December 22nd, Monday through Saturday 11–6 pm, at Umbrage Editions gallery in Dumbo, Brooklyn. As a special holiday feature, each artist will make available a limited edition 8”x10” and 11”x14” affordable print series (ranging from $35 to $200) for sale at the gallery.
About the show:

As a group, Dreamboats adds to the growing disambiguation between working personally and working editorially. Membersof the collective, who met at Maryland Institute College of Art, are primarily engaged in contemporary fine art and social documentary practices, but their professed intention is to circumvent the traditional photographic establishment to create a self-sustaining network of distribution and support for the creation of new photographic works. The works selected for the exhibition are from each artist’s recent body of work:

Adam Golfer’s series, Kin*,

Joe Leavenworth’s Pictures from Home,

TJ Proechel’s Dream House, and

Daniel Shea’s Untitled (Baltimore).

BOX 1

Adam Golfer’s Kin* is a photographic investigation into the abstract relationship between Germany and the Jewish people over 60 years since the fall of the Third Reich. Thisproject began as a way to explore Golfer’s personal feelings and biases towards Germany, as a grandson of Holocaust survivors. In 2008 Golfer traveled throughout Germany, exploring the landscape and spending time with young people in their twenties, coming-of-age as part of the third generation, on the other side of a shared history. The photographs created during Golfer’s travels throughout Germany focus on the ways in which psychological aftereffects and trauma are passed down through generations through family, national identity and religion. Golfer is a Brooklyn based photographer who has worked with clients such as W Magazine, NEON, and The Guardian. His first solo show in New York with be at the 92nd street Y in January, where he will be featuring his entire Kin* series.

www.adamgolfer.com

Kin* PHOTO EXHIBIT  captions: here

BOX 2

Joe Leavenworth’s Pictures from Home is a selection of photographs created when he returned to live in his native home of Woodbury, Connecticut for the first time in four years. Interested in revisiting landscapes familiar only inmemory, Joe walked to collect traces of a past in present. Leavenworth began his career in New York as a preparator at Pace/MacGill Gallery and as an archivist for the Museum of the City of New York. He is currently based in Woodbury, CT and continues freelancing for such clients as W Magazine.

www.jleav.net

BOX 3

T.J. Proechel’s Dream House is an exploration of the foreclosure crisis in Minnesota. Dream House started in late 2008 in the midst of the housing crisis. During this time, Proechel took a job as an REO housing contractor and began photographing the houses he worked on and the people he met whose lives were affected by the foreclosure. Proechel is based in St. Paul Minnesota and has had 4 impressive solo shows. He has received a multitude of grants throughout his time at MICA and continues to freelance.

www.tjproechel.com

BOX4

Daniel Shea’s Untitled (Baltimore) attempts to demystify Baltimore, Maryland, a city whose reputation is frequently enlarged through the lens of pop culture. Untitled (Baltimore)doesn’t represent a value judgment; rather, a fascination with the congruous relationship between its cold reality and its larger, passive representation. Shea currently runs an intensive after school photography program for teens in addition to freelancing in Chicago IL. He has worked for clients such as NPR, Rolling Stone, Russian Esquire, W Magazine, and Vox Pop. Shea was also represented by Catherine Edelman Gallery for the Chicago Project, where he recently exhibited work.

www.dsheaphoto.net

Curator Bio:

Ashley Singley is the Associate Editor and Director of Exhibitions for Umbrage Editions Gallery and Publications. Based in DUMBO, Brooklyn, the Umbrage Gallery strives to be a leader in the contemporary visual arts community and provide a voice for artists through a diverse system of media, with a concentration in photography. Umbrage also produces high-quality visual books, curates traveling exhibitions, and creates multimedia projects that vary in subject matter from classic photojournalism to cutting-edge art, from pop culture to global human rights, from the closets of drag queens to the runways of fashion. Ms. Singley has been with Umbrage for over two years as a coordinator of exhibitions and publications editor for photographers such as Eddie Adams, Robin Bowman, Tim Hetherington, Graciela Iturbide, Kent Klich, and Sylvia Plachy. Before her position at Umbrage, she worked in many capacities at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, IL.

We hope you enjoy this week’s show. As always, your comments are welcome.

Best,

Amir Husak

Prem Sooriyakumar

–

www.NoCommercialValue.org

info@nocommercialvalue.org

Dear NCV friends,

We would like to welcome you back to another installment of nocommercialvalue.org.   This week, we recruited some friends to helps us continue the discussion generated by the last week’s show, “Who’s hungry?.”  So, we continue by going to the farm.

Decades of industrialization, massive migrations, and rapid technological developments have altered the way we produce and consume food, often putting farming and agriculture in the center of heated political debates. As we enter the so-callled “green” age, spotlights turn to farming once again. This week’s show will look at farmlands, and we will explore narratives about various relationships to this type of land:  from ownership to loss, from expansion to reinvention, from past to present to future. Here is what we have for you:

❶❷❸
❹❺❻
|CONTENT|

❶ THE HUTTERITES
by Colin Low
1964, 27m5s

via NATIONAL FILM BOARD OF CANADA

The followers of religious leader Jacob Hutter live in farm communities, devoutly holding to the rules their founder laid down four centuries ago. Through the kindness of a Hutterite colony in Alberta, this film, in black and white, was made inside the community and shows all aspects of the Hutterites’ daily life.

➋ FARM FRENZY 3
by ALAWAR
GAME

EXCERPT: GAME REVIEW By JohnB

“The basic premise remains the same, though, which is good news for everyone. You begin with a small patch of dirt and a few egg-laying birds. Click the ground to plant grass, wait for the birds to eat, then gather the eggs and store them in your warehouse. When the warehouse gets full, click on your truck to load it up and send it to town, selling your goods for cash!

After a few levels, Farm Frenzy 3 introduces what it’s most famous for: refinement buildings. Why sell an egg when you can turn it into egg powder and sell it for a higher profit? Why sell egg powder when you can turn it into cookies which go for even more? Refinement buildings are where the fun is at, and using them efficiently is the key to mastering any Farm Frenzy game.”

➌ VALLEY OF TEARS
by HART PERRY
2003
VIA SNAGFLIMS

Hart Perry (Director of Photography – HARLAN COUNTY USA), has documented the lives of Mexican-American migrant farm workers in Raymondville, TX since 1979 when the onion workers’ strike broke out. What followed was a fight not only for higher pay but also for equal rights and representation. For 24 years, the county’s Mexican-American residents were determined to fight for what is right. VALLEY OF TEARS is a complex story of the long journey of individuals who endure hardship in order to make a better future for their families.  (description by snagfilms)

➍ COMMON GROUND
motionphoto essay by SCOTT STRAZZANTE
VIA MEDIASTORM

On July 2, 2002, Jean and Harlow Cagwin watched as their home — the last remnant of their 118-acre cattle farm in Lockport, Illinois — was torn down clearing the way for a new housing development. Several years later, Ed and Amanda Grabenhofer and their four children moved into the new Willow Walk subdivision, their house just yards from where the Cagwin’s home once stood.

Common Ground introduces us to the lives touched by this land, as photographer Scott Strazzante takes us on a visual journey exploring the differences and similarities of these two families while simultaneously asking us to look at what is common among us all.

❺ Small Is Bountiful
by Peter Rosset
The Ecologist, v.29, i.8, De99

Dr. Peter Rosset is based in Oaxaca, Mexico, where he is a researcher at the Centro de Estudios para el Cambio en el Campo Mexicano (Center of Studies for Rural Change in Mexico), and co-coordinator of the Land Research Action Network.

An article advocating farming on small scale.

❻ VERTICAL FARMING?

THE IDEA
Vertical Farming concept by Dickson Despommier
The concept of indoor farming is not new, since hothouse production of tomatoes, a wide variety of herbs, and other produce has been in vogue for some time. What is new is the urgent need to scale up this technology to accommodate another 3 billion people. An entirely new approach to indoor farming must be invented, employing cutting edge technologies. The Vertical Farm must be efficient (cheap to construct and safe to operate). Vertical farms, many stories high, will be situated in the heart of the world’s urban centers. If successfully implemented, they offer the promise of urban renewal, sustainable production of a safe and varied food supply (year-round crop production), and the eventual repair of ecosystems that have been sacrificed for horizontal farming.

CONCERNS
“The third green revolution?” by Jim Thomas
an article addressing various concerns about vertical farming

________

We hope you will enjoy the show.
As always, we would love to hear any ideas you would like to see explored here.

Peace,

Amir Husak
Prem Sooriyakumar
www.nocommercialvalue.org

Dear all,

We hope you have enjoyed these last few days of summer. Hopefully our last show inspired you to bring more play into your life.

As we enter September, NoCommercialValue.org goes from play to… ahem, hunger. This week, we start by asking: who’s hungry?

Our friend Julius Onah recently made a short documentary that inspired us to address the widespread food shortages and the rising prices of food in many countries around the globe. As a reminder, estimates by the UN World Food Programme show that one in six people on this planet do not get enough food to be healthy. In other words, 1.02 billion people are undernourished. Many get gravely ill or die. There are many factors that contribute to this situation: agricultural reforms, economic problems, energy prices, natural disasters…

Onah’s film “Szmolinsky” documents an unusual attempt to alleviate problems of hunger in North Korea. Codeword: Rabbit!

The film premiered at the 58th Berlin Film Festival, and screened at numerous festivals around the world since. We are very pleased to present it here on NoCommercialValue.org, and we suggest you start by seeing the film (in the first box, top left), then work your way down through the other boxes.

You can also listen an exclusive audio interview with the filmmaker here: 

We hope you will find this installment of NoCommercialValue interesting and engaging. As always, your thoughts and comments are more than welcome.

Don’t forget to share!

Our best,

Amir Husak
Prem Sooriyakumar

–
www.NoCommercialValue.org
info@nocommercialvalue.org

Dear all,

We hope you didn’t forget us after this long break. The summer is almost over, but we hope you had enough time to play. If not, you will probably think more about it after you check out this week’s show. We welcome back Valeska Populoh with another great installment – and this time it’s all about playing!

Curator’s statement:

Over the last few years, the much-talked about demise of play in children’s lives, coupled with research about the role of play in human development, creativity and problem solving has spurred innumerable initiatives and projects . This week’s installment features a few compelling examples, from festivals aimed at reinvigorating the public use of space through play to researcher Stuart Brown’s provocative claim that play is not just fun, but vital to our survival. Enjoy!

Curator’s bio:

Valeska Maria Populoh lives in Baltimore, Maryland. She is on the faculty at the Maryland Institute College of Art and works in collaboration with a variety of community arts organizations. Her costume and performance work, often created in collaboration with other artists, is informed by street theater, festival and parade traditions, variety entertainment and puppetry.

Questions, comments, ideas for a show?? Write to us!

Best,

Amir Husak

Prem Sooriyakumar

–

www.NoCommercialValue.org

info@nocommercialvalue.org

Dear NoCommercialValue friends,

This week we continue with the second installment of the “Art + Service” show . Our guest curator Eric Leshinsky has prepared an intriguing selection of images, text, audio, video and websites that will help you delve deeper into this topic. Read on and explore…

Curator Statement:
Service-based artwork is not a new phenomenon but, as I write this, it does seem to be rapidly gaining a wider following. Just a few days ago, the City of Baltimore, through a guest jury that included curators from the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, awarded its annual $25,000 Sondheim Prize for Visual Arts to not an individual artist, but a collective of artists named the Baltimore Development Cooperative whose work seems partially aimed at providing free social services to existing and emerging communities. This is just one anecdote to suggest a growing willingness for society to appreciate, or simply accept, a strain of art-making that is often not object-based, not comercial, and could easily be confused with the professional practices of other disciplines outside of art. But aside from its value as a conversation-starter about how art is made in the 21st century, the relationship of art and service is also a major intersection (something like where Fifth Avenue and Broadway meet in New York City) in the ever-evolving and complex relationship between art and architecture. As a practicing architect whose practice is always treading the line between art and architecture, notions of “service” have provided a welcome means of steering the conversation about these two fields away from the physicality of their existence: it’s not about what artists and architects produce, but rather how they produce and why they produce. I hope the following exhibits will help expand this discourse and I welcome your feedback.

Curator Bio:
Eric Leshinsky is a Baltimore-based architect and designer whose practice includes urban research, building projects, exhibition/event design, site-specific artworks, graphic design, journalistic writing and teaching. He is an adjunct faculty member of the University of Maryland School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation and collaborates frequently with other artists, architects and designers. His recent projects have included an exhibition design with Baltimore-based artist Ryan Patterson for the Humane Metropolis conference in Baltimore and ongoing investigations into adaptive urban systems with Baltimore-based architect Fred Scharmen. The Museum for Missing Places, a project that he created and curated for 6 months in 2005-2006, is currently being re-exhibited through its original website, www.missing-places.org, as part the 2009 exhibition “NO ZONING: Artists Engage Houston” at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. More information about his work can be found at www.leshinsky.net

Comments? Ideas for a show? We love to hear from you. Write to us!

Regards,

Amir Husak
Prem Sooriyakumar
info@nocommercialvalue.org

Dear NoCommercialValue family,

After a very long (and unplanned!) break, we are back with a brand new show ! This week we are very happy to welcome Valeska Maria Populoh as a guest curator with the “Art + Service” issue. Valeska lives in Baltimore, Maryland. She is on the faculty at the Maryland Institute College of Art and works in collaboration with a variety of community arts organizations. Her costume and performance work, often created in collaboration with other artists, is informed by street theater, festival and parade traditions, variety entertainment and puppetry.

Curator’s statement:

What is the social responsibility of the artist? This question is at the forefront of my thinking as a politically engaged performing artist and as a teacher at an art school. The manner in which this issue has been taken up by artists, philosophers, critics and politicians throughout history intrigues me, as does the way the dialogue manifests in contemporary art practice.

In particular, the concept of artists ‘performing’ services has been receiving attention. The field includes a broad array of work, from the painting of murals to the facilitation of community arts workshops, from the remediation of toxic soils to designers using their skills to respond to human need. It also includes the popular entertainments of street theater and the performative ‘service work’ of artists that acts as a kind of social critique.

‘Art + Service” thus seemed like a worthy issue to take to No Commercial Value. This first installment looks at how artists meet a community’s need for festival, laughter, ritual and play, while addressing issues of equity, access and civic participation in public life. In subsequent installments, other artists will bring their perspectives to bear on the same theme as a kind of extended dialogue. We welcome your responses.

Regards,

Amir Husak

Prem Sooriyakumar

Hello everyone,
We would like to apologize for our delay in delivering you this weeks show. Thank you for your patience and understanding, so without further delay here is this week’s show and our launch into summer: Jamaican Sound System Pt. 1 contributed and curated by Tristram Keefe and Prasanna Balasundaram.

Our first installment will be mainly focusing on the LONDON sound system scene. Prasanna Balasundaram and Tristram Keefe documented a variety of these dances when they were studying there in 2007.

| BIO
Tristram Keefe is a cook, writer, and music enthusiast from Dorchester, Massachusetts. He is the editor and co-creator of MusicMNP

Prasanna Balasundaram is a photographer interested in immigration, identity, culture, and cities. Brought together by a common love of hip hop and ping pong, he became quick friends with Tristram Keefe while studying in London. Together they pulled random missions to all corners of the city in search of good music.

| CONTENT
RECOLLECTION / RESURRECTION by Tristram Keefe
This essay was written with the hopes of contextualizing and historicizing a series of photographs taken at London sound system dances during the spring of 2008. It provides an introduction to the reggae sound system as a vital element of the modern British cultural landscape.

DANCE AT LAMBETH HALL pictures by Prasanna Balasundaram
Photographs taken over several dances at the Lambeth Hall, located in Brixton, South London.

FESTUS of COXSONE SOUND cutting a Dub! (Sound Business, 1981)
A short clip from a classic documentary film that depicts the London Sound System scene in the early ’80s.

VINTAGE LONDON DANCE RECORDINGS selects by Tristram Keefe
Jahrevalationmuzik sound system (UK’s official Twelve Tribes of Israel) recorded live during the Joseph dance held on Saturday the 25th of February 1984 in Peckham, South London. A great example of early ’80s British dancehall business, featuring the great Brother Culture along with General T and Sister Culture

SOUND SYSTEM FLYERS 2007-2008 selection by Tristram Keefe
The graphics and images portrayed on flyers and promotional posters can have a large impact on the outcome of any music event. This selection is all taken from sound system events in the London area during the beginning of 2008.

DUB SELECTOR flash by Jim Johnstone
An interactive flash piece that has been around for some time. The piece allows the user to manipulate graphically various dub sound elements.
—

Thank you for tuning in, and we will be here bringing you more shows this summer. We are also planning updates to the website itself, and we would love to hear about your nocommercialvalue experiences and ideas for making the site even better.

Wishing you well, wherever you are in our ever growing global community.

Amir Husak
Prem Sooriyakumar
–
www.NoCommercialValue.org
info@nocommercialvalue.org

Dear all,

This week nocommercialvalue.org brings you fake love, fake babies, and fake divorces. Our friends Ellie Brown and Zach Webber embarked upon a little experiment, engineering a 7-day relationship via Craigslist.
The results are now in front of you. We hope you will enjoy it.

Artist Statement:
The story started with a craigslist advertisement. The story ends with a true collaboration on the project. This resulted in a narrative of a truncated relationship based on social norms that both Zach Webber (the creator of the concept) and myself (the photographer) don’t necessarily fit into in our own minds. We wanted to try living this life in a way that is not making fun of those who choose this path, but rather to try it on for size so to speak. There were many unexpected emotional layers that surfaced for both of us during the project, mainly resulting from unexpected real reactions in fictional situations. Mostly we are proud of how convincing this project was for us as well as the people we encountered along the way. We didn’t know what to expect going into the project and the outcome was the result of this organic collaboration we found developing a real working relationship within the boundaries of a fictional relationship.

Bio:
Ellie Brown is a native of Boston, MA where she attended Massachusetts College of Art. She received her B.F.A. in photography in 1997 and her M.F.A. in Photography from San Jose State University in 2002. Ellie has received numerous awards including: a 2008 Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, a Leeway Foundation grant, first prize from the Fraser Gallery’s International photo competition, a featured artist from women in photography international, the Calumet Award from the Print Center’s 2006 and 2008 International Photography Competition. In addition, Ellie has attended artist in residencies at the Santa Fe Art Institute in 2006, Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, FL with acclaimed photographer Graciela Iturbide in 2002 a 2007 residency in Costa Rica at the David and Julia White Artist Colony. Both her bookwork and photographs are exhibited extensively nationally and internationally including Mexico, Romania, Greece, a solo exhibition at the International Museum of Contemporary Art in Anchorage, AK. She had 2008 solo exhibition at the Galeria Nacional in Costa Rica. Ellie debuted her Lover’s Books in Philadelphia and spoke about it at the regional Society for Photographic Education conference in November 2006. Ellie has been photographing girls’ issues since 1996 and making altered bookwork since 2002. From 2005-2007 Ellie has taught in NJ, NY, CA, PA and as a full-time lecturer in photography and 2D foundations at Tyler School of Art from 2005-2007. She has just published the work about her sisters called Identity Quest: About My Sisters 1996-2006. Ellie just finished a visiting professor position of Digital Information at the University of Ulsan, South Korea in December 2008.

Zach Webber grew up in rural upstate New York. In 2005, he received his B.A. in Creative Writing from Oberlin College. His rock band of childhood friends broke up a couple years back, and since then, he’s been living in Philadelphia. He’s been working– until very recently– as a dog walker, braving the elements and getting lots of thinking done. Out on the city streets with other people’s pets, Zach began to develop an interest in the idea of conceptual dating. Along with dog walking colleague and fellow writer Will Dean, he began to implement some of their ideas, which led him to collaborate with photographer Ellie Brown on the Capsule Relationship project in the spring of 2009.
——

As always, your comments are more than welcome.
If you have ideas for a show on NoCommercialValue, please write to us. We would be happy to host it.
With real love,

Amir Husak
Prem Sooriyakumar
info@nocommercialvalue.org