Very excited to be participating, with video and performance, in an event by Simon Leung. 

The Kitchen, center for art, video, music, dance, performance, film and literature.

Fri Sept 27 & Sat Sept 28, 8pm at The Kitchen, NYC

http://www.thekitchen.org/event/simon-leung-actions

Simon Leung: ACTIONS!
In our age of precarious work, what is the role of the “art worker?” What constitutes an “art action?” Using conventions of workers’ theater, academic conference, vaudeville, and postmodern dance, ACTIONS! gives thought to these questions by looking again at moments when “actions” were directed at the Museum of Modern Art: in 1960/70s by groups such as the Art Workers’ Coalition and Guerilla Art Action Group, when art activism was tied to civil rights and anti-war movements; and then in the year 2000, when members of the Professional and Administrative Staff Association (PASTA) at MoMA, which included curators, librarians, sales staff, editors and others, staged a four month-long labor strike. Originally inspired by the 2000 strike, ACTIONS! also returns to the recent past of the last two years, when protests in the art world by activist groups such as Occupy Museums and Occupy Wall Street Arts & Labor bring to bear the conditions of working in the art world today. Among collaborators reconsidering the intersection of art, labor, community, and politics today are union members, museum workers, activists, and artists, including Yvonne Rainer, Arlen Austin, Kabir Carter, Benj Gerdes, Sasha Sumner, Pat Catterson, Marina Urbach, Valerie Tevere & Angel Nevarez, Beth Whitney, Chris Kasper, Julian Tysh, Carina Evangelista, David Kelley, Filip Noterdaeme, Lumi Tan, Marcus Civin, Burns Magruder, Benjamin Young, W.A.G.E., and Andrea Fraser. Saturday’s performance concludes with a live discussion among participants including Leung and Julia Bryan-Wilson, moderated by Tim Griffin. Admission is based on MoMA policies in the year 2000.

PHANTASMA: Carmen Miranda and Frida Kahlo

In this performance art piece, Sasha Sumner and Nadia Menco
channel the iconic figures of Frida Kahlo, Carmen Miranda,
and Billie Holiday in a contemporary setting.  As living spirits
of our time, these characters engage in a series of both large
and small gestures where sense of time and place are shifted,
where the past meets the present.  Music and video projections
are featured including clips from Occupy Wall St.

Evans/AP

Census Bureau managers Alvin Aviles and Sonya Merritt are accused of researching phone books and Internet to fake answers on surveys to meet deadline.

Two Census Bureau managers from a Brooklyn field office were fired after their bosses found they faked household surveys to meet deadlines, the Daily News learned.

Instead of pounding the pavement and knocking on doors, the corner-cutting people-counters mined the phone book and Internet to make up answers to questionnaires, regional director Tony Farthing said.

The managers – turned in by whistleblower employees – were caught last week. Now, at least 10,000 surveys need to be done or redone, officials said.

Census officials in Washington only admitted to a string of incomplete forms and poor tracking in disclosing the firings Friday afternoon. But Farthing corroborated worker accounts to the Daily News that managers Alvin Aviles and Sonya Merritt began dummying up responses in the final crush to finish the surveys, which field workers are supposed to compile from in-person household visits.

“Basically, people were being asked to forge [questionnaires],” said one worker in the North East Brooklyn office, which covers 95,000 households.

“We went in and did a full investigation,” Farthing said. “We found out two managers on the weekend of the 12th of June cheated by using phone books or Internet sources.”

A worker told the Daily News that when field interviewers returned to the office with blank forms, Aviles also enlisted some of them in the scheme. “He had people fill them in,” the worker said.

Aviles and Merritt could not immediately be reached for comment.

Farthing said he believes the branch’s earlier work is kosher, but the pair decided to break the rules at crunch time when they were looking at a huge stack of unfinished surveys, and their bosses were pushing for results, even if it meant more night work.

“We were telling them to go back on all non-interviews and hit this stuff hard. None of this 9-to-5 stuff, go when they know someone will be home,” Farthing said. It was then, Farthing said, that the managers “came up with the bright idea, or not-so-bright idea” – to save time.

The Census bureau was not able to estimate how much it will cost to redo all the work, but a spokesman said it was not an issue because the bureau was under budget on the massive project. Farthing said the honest workers left in the office are redoing 5,000 or so interviews that may be tainted.

“We’re not happy about what happened,” he said, noting that Aviles and Merritt were turned in by the very people they trained.