ARTISTS/
DESIGNERS/
PHOTOGRAPHERS/
FILMMAKERS/
COLLECTIVES
involved include:

Jonathan Barnbrook and Pedro Inoue/

Jonathan Barnbrook runs a studio–Barnbrook Design, which is one of Britain’s most well-known design companies specialising in producing innovative books, corporate identities, cd covers. Along with former studio colleague Pedro Inoue he has designed a number of issues of the movements ‘journal of the mental environment’ Adbusters, and have produced innovative designs on the subjects of corporate control and the war on terror.

Jody Boehnert/

Jody Boehnert is an environmental activist, researcher, artist and graphic designer. She has been involved the Camp for Climate Action and designed the large-scale Climate Camp photographic poster exhibition that has been exhibited in dozens of locations over the past few years. She co-founded Transition Town Brixton, now the first urban Transition Town to have started work on an Energy Descent Action Plan. She established EcoLabsas a design-led activist organization committed to using visual imagery to investigate and communicate systemic issues lying at the root of the ecological crisis. EcoLabs produced a climate roadshow this year to accompany their first publication; EcoMag No.1 – Future Scenarios. She is currently helping design educators embrace ecological literacy with her new project ‘The 2012 Imperative‘ which was launched with a Teach-in at the V&A in October 2009. She is a AHRC funded PhD candidate at the University of Brighton.

Noel Douglas/

Noel Douglas is an artist, designer and activist whose practice is concerned with the relationship between aesthetics and politics, anti-capitalist uses of graphic communication and the privatisation and  commodification of space and popular culture. As well as producing graphic work that is an active participant in the demonstrations themselves he has worked in a range of media including the best-selling satirical packet of playing cards Regime Change begins at Home, book design and adverts for the Stop the War Coalition in the UK, identity work for anti-capitalist activist group Globalise Resistance and the design for Spanish ‘Adbusters’ magazine ‘Malababa’ in 2006 and 2008. He has been active in social movements for over a decade and helped co-organise the cultural programme of the European Social Forum in London in 2004.

David Gentlemen/

David Gentlemen is an artist, illustrator and designer who is most well known for his stamp and mural designs, since 2003 he has helped define the visual identity of the Stop the War Coalition in the UK.

Jess Hurd/

Jess Hurd is an award-winning photojournalist and campaigning photographer, with over 12 years experience supplying images and photo-essays to international newspapers, magazines, trade union journals, NGO’s and movements of social change.
Beginning her work as a staff photographer on Socialist Worker she has been a London based freelance since 2001 working with a broad range of campaigning organisations on social issues often inadequately covered by the mainstream press.
In the international sphere, she has worked at the global political grassroots – the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, the Zapatistas in Mexico, and urban social movements in Brazil, India, China and Africa.
Jess is a passionate advocate of press freedom which has come under increasing threat in the UK. She is one of the founders of ‘I’m a Photographer Not a Terrorist’  a campaign against police repression. She is also an organiser of  Photo-Forum, a monthly London event where professional photographers showcase their work, socialise and discuss photographic issues in a supportive environment.
She is an active member of the National Union of Journalists and proud to be organising the first London Photographers Branch alongside her membership of the International Federation of Journalists and the British Press Photographers Association.

kennardphillipps/

kennardphillipps is a collaboration working since 2002 to produce art in response to the invasion of Iraq. It has evolved to confront power and war across the globe. The work is made for the street, the gallery, the web, newspapers & magazines, and to lead workshops that develop peoples’ skills and help them express their thoughts on what’s happening in the world through visual means. The work is made as a critical tool that connects to international movements for social and political change. We don’t see the work as separate to social and political movements that are confronting established political and economic systems. We see it as part of those movements, the visual arm of protest. We want it to be used by people as a part of their own activism, not just as pictures on the wall to contemplate.

Josh On/

Josh On is a designer and activist who lives in San Francisco. He made TheyRule.net in 2001 and again in 2004, he is currently working on a new version. He graduated in Computer Related Design at the Royal College of Art, London in 2000.

Guy Smallman/

Guy is a Photographer and activist, and was one of the first photographers to go into Lebanon after the Israeli attacks in 2007

Cactus Network/

Cactus Network was a collective of artist and designers who produced a number of projects within the movement including the gift of the masks for the FTAA demonstation  in Quebec in 2001 (pictured)

Laboratory of the Insurrectionary Imagination/

The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (lab of ii) is a network of socially engaged artists and activists whose work falls in between resistance and creativity, culture and politics, art and life. We believe that playful forms of cultural intervention in everyday life and the development of convivial spaces that enable participants to cultivate full confidence in their own creative capacity are fundamental tools for social change.

Movement of the Imagination/

Movement of the Imagination was a collective producing street based poster displays and organising cultural events within the Anti-Capitalist movement from 2000 to 2005

Rebel Clown Army/

Roll up, roll up – ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, friends and foes – welcome to the unparalleled, the unexpected, the perfectly paradoxical, the grotesquely beautiful, the new-fangled world of the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (CIRCA).

We are clandestine because we refuse the spectacle of celebrity and we are everyone. Because without real names, faces or noses, we show that our words, dreams, and desires are more important than our biographies. Because we reject the society of surveillance that watches, controls, spies upon, records and checks our every move. Because by hiding our identity we recover the power of our acts. Because with greasepaint we give resistance a funny face and become visible once again.

We are insurgent because we have risen up from nowhere and are everywhere. Because ideas can be ignored but not suppressed and an insurrection of the imagination is irresistible. Because whenever we fall over we rise up again and again and again, knowing that nothing is lost for history, that nothing is final. Because history doesn’t move in straight lines but surges like water, sometimes swirling, sometimes dripping, flowing, flooding – always unknowable, unexpected, uncertain. Because the key to insurgency is brilliant improvisation, not perfect blueprints.

We are rebels because we love life and happiness more than ‘revolution’. Because no revolution is ever complete and rebellions continues forever. Because we will dismantle the ghost-machine of abstraction with means that are indistinguishable from ends. Because we don’t want to change ‘the’ world, but ‘our’ world. Because we will always desert and disobey those who abuse and accumulate power. Because rebels transform everything – the way they live, create, love, eat, laugh, play, learn, trade, listen, think and most of all the way they rebel.

We are clowns because what else can one be in such a stupid world. Because inside everyone is a lawless clown trying to escape. Because nothing undermines authority like holding it up to ridicule. Because since the beginning of time tricksters have embraced life’s contradictions, creating coherence through confusion. Because fools are both fearsome and innocent, wise and stupid, entertainers and dissenters, healers and laughing stocks, scapegoats and subversives. Because buffoons always succeed in failing, always say yes, always hope and always feel things deeply. Because a clown can survive everything and get away with anything.

We are an army because we live on a planet in permanent war – a war of money against life, of profit against dignity, of progress against the future. Because a war that gorges itself on death and blood and shits money and toxins, deserves an obscene body of deviant soldiers. Because only an army can declare absurd war on absurd war. Because combat requires solidarity, discipline and commitment. Because alone clowns are pathetic figures, but in groups and gaggles, brigades and battalions, they are extremely dangerous. We are an army because we are angry and where bombs fail we might succeed with mocking laughter. And laughter needs an echo.

We are circa because we are approximate and ambivalent, neither here nor there, but in the most powerful of all places, the place in-between order and chaos.

RUN AWAY FROM THE CIRCUS
JOIN THE FORCES OF THE CLANDESTINE INSURGENT REBEL CLOWN ARMY

Ultimate Holding Company/

Ultimate Holding Company have been producing cutting edge art and design projects as part of the UK’s environmental and social justice direct action communities since 2002. Our work includes Guantanamo Bay replica Camp X-Ray, No Heathrow and Bluefin tuna campaigns for Greenpeace UK, Camp for Climate Action artwork 2007/2008/2009 and current tattooing venture ExtInked

Space Hijackers/

The Space Hijackers are a dis-organisation of artistic anti-corporate activists who like a good party and attract trouble like magnets. Our projects have ranged from replacing pubic benches in Soho after the council removed them to move on the homeless, through to attempting to invade the worlds largest arms fair in FREDom our tank. We meet once per month in our secret east London HQ to plot and plan, and aim to level the playing ground between us the users of the city and the corporations, architects and government who control it.

This month we’ve moved our meeting to the exhibition space, so on Thu 19th November at 19:00 come along and help us plan our next actions. (Please note, Undercover Police are not welcome, thankyou.)

Reel News/

Reel News is an activist video collective, set up to publicise and share information on inspirational campaigns and struggles – not just in this country, but across the world.

Reel News is intended as a two way resource, so let us know about your campaigns. Better still, film them yourself and send us the video – if it’s inspiring, we’ll put it in the newsreel! We can also be commissioned to make campaign videos, and offer help on camerawork, video editing and other skills needed to make your own video. Rates are on a sliding scale depending on your resources – if you have no money at all, we will still help you!

Indymedia/

War Boutique/

The War Boutique was originally set up in the summer of 2003, at Area10 in Peckham, London, in part as a reaction to the illegal invasion of Iraq by US and UK armed forces, engaging local artists in the recycling of ballistic military materials (flak jackets, stab vests, body armour, etc), as a symbolic gesture of peace.
Through the artistic theory of non-verbal over identification, as a strategy, the War Boutique aims to record the events that all too readily escape from the column inches, becoming yesterdays news, documenting them as pieces of social commentary, within an historical context.

 

 

Plus a cast of billions worldwide…