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tags: opportunities
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# Eyebeam Rapid Response Application: "Exit Surveillance Capitalism"

- Open Call: April 21st – May 30th (11:59PM)
- Results announced: mid-June
- Work period A, Idea Development, 27 artists: June 22 – September 1 ($5k to 27 applicants)
- Work Period B, Project Development, 5 artists: September 4 – early 2021 ($25k to 5 applicants)

https://www.eyebeam.org/rapidresponse/

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## Part 1: Applicant Information

**First Name**
Casey

**Last Name**
Gollan

**If awarded, where do you plan to conduct your work from? i.e. city, town, municipality etc.**
Online/distributed, currently between New York, Louisiana, and California. Additional collaborations anticipated in Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, United Kingdom, among others.

**Are you a former Eyebeam Resident?**
No

**Are you applying as an individual or a collaborative?**
Collaborative

**What is the name of the collaborative project?**
Disorientations

**Please list the names of the additional collaborators who will be participating**
Joanne Cheung, Matthew Turland

**Email Address**
[e-mail]

**Short Bio - STRICT Limit: 120 words / CURRENT: 190**

Casey Gollan is an artist based in New York. He co-organized Free Cooper Union, campaigning for "free education to all" and publishing three Diso Guides. He has exhibited in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, been a Fellow at the Vera List Center at The New School, and participated in Triple Canopy’s inaugural publishing intensive.

Joanne Cheung makes drawings, designs architecture, and writes about democracy and digital culture. She currently works at IDEO in San Francisco and teaches at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

Matthew Turland has been a professional software engineer since 2001. He is a published author, conference speaker, computer scientist, and contributor to numerous open source projects.

**Curriculum Vitae - Acceptable file types: pdf**
[Combine PDFs]

**Website and social media handles**
https://disorientations.org
http://twitter.com/diso_archive

## Part 2: Project

**In this section please explain your idea**

### Phase 1 Proposal: Your idea - (suggested word-limit: 300 / CURRENT: 555)
_Please explain your idea and how it enacts solutions for rebuilding digital systems, and improving the overlap and interplay between them and lived, social experience._

"Disorientation: Pandemic Edition" is a project to catalyze student activist publishers around urgent questions arising from COVID-19.

The pandemic has brought about a state of mass disorientation — imbalance, loss of direction, uncertainty about the future. As activists know all too well, rapid societal shifts lead to ruptures in the status quo, and in these ephemeral spaces the world around us can be reimagined. For students entering college this fall, these tensions will be felt especially acutely.

Generations of student activists have collectively explored the transformative affordances of "disorientation" and installed its ethos across college campuses through the "Diso Guide". This student-led publication subverts the glossy narratives put forth by admissions brochures and introduces incoming freshmen to crucial issues on campus and basic principles of social justice. Released just in time for orientation each fall, the local Diso Guide suggests an alternative strategy for new members of the community: "disorient yourself!"

Disorientation publications are vital examples of grassroots literature. They’re written and produced by students on the ground, and typically self-published anonymously or under a group affiliation to prevent retaliation and repression. Like other activist ephemera, many of these zines don't make it online, are lost to time, or face deliberate erasure. (The artist and teacher Wendy Ewald, who worked with students to produce a newspaper addressing sexual assault at Amherst College, said that the administration shredded the entire run before it could be distributed.) In addition, these publications, though abundant, are very disconnected. The future sustainability of this student-led effort will benefit from an openly accessible and safe space that connects disorientation literature across schools and decades. To that end, we have already released an open-source scraper and aggregated 100+ publications in a prototype archive.

This project is made increasingly urgent in the context of the shared disorientation from the pandemic. Now is a compelling moment for creating a collaborative Diso Guide between a network of student groups. What is top-of-mind for incoming freshmen this fall will be radically shifted from the past. The pandemic edition aims to offer a process and a community that, across the digital distance, engages with urgent issues including an intersectional look at health and mental health, the privacy implications of ed-tech platforms, a "distance learning" survival guide, an honest appraisal of the value of attending college remotely, and more.

We propose to work directly with student activists, augmenting their work with our funding, organizing, and design capabilities to create an open-access publication shared across schools. This will help center the narrative around questions that students urgently face. We plan on engaging student activist publishers at 17 institutions across 10 states which have an active diso culture. However, the invitation to collaborate will be extended to all student activists. We have also initiated conversations with Project STAND, a consortium of archivists at colleges across the US with an interest in archiving student activism.

The publication will launch in the first week of September 2020. We estimate that 90% of the Phase 1 budget will go directly to student activist publishers, 5% will be set aside for production expenses, and 5% for contingency.

### At this time do you have actionable plans for this project for Phase 2?
_In Phase 2, the project/development phase, a minimum of five artists, selected from the initial group will be selected to participate and be awarded up to an additional $25,000 to build their ideas into actionable projects, based on their potential for real-world impact._

Yes

### Phase 2 Proposal: Project development - (suggested word-limit: 300 -- CURRENT: 316)
_Please explain the next steps in building your idea into an actionable project and how it will have real-world impact._

Following the publication of the collaborative "Disorientation: Pandemic Edition" in September, our project's focus will shift to building out and enriching the open-access Disorientations Archive, and establishing a sustainable organization, platform, and network.

In this 6 month timeframe, we will work directly with student groups and archivists to experiment with a collaborative organization that incorporates cooperative governance, distributed leadership, and public accountability.

The mission and theory of change will be shaped collaborately by our members, and will seek to promote the total endeavor of student activist publishing:

- maintaining an alternative information hub for students entering college, enriched through archival care practices
- connecting student activists between campuses and across decades, by convening collaborations, discussions, and workshops
- catalyzing the creation of new disorientation guides, through a microgrants program and outreach to campuses which don't yet produce an annual guide
- contextualizing disorientations as a form of resistance, by initiating an oral histories project and calling for critical theory and further studies
- creating paid work for precarious student activists (including archival research, data entry, transcription, outreach, indexing, curation, writing, design, development, and leadership roles) as well as volunteer opportunities for allies with more financial security
- and encouraging the use and re-use of these materials, through an open-access platform, a well-documented API, and engagement with (as well as contributions to) the open-source community

In the spirit of "DIY practicality", we acknowledge that there is a version of this project which could thrive if undertaken bit-by-by over many years with little financial support. The $25,000 grant would afford us the opportunity to establish "Disorientations" as a public interest organization for the present moment. We estimate that 60% of the Phase II budget would go to student labor (organizing, archiving, design, and development); 25% to operating expenses (site infrastructure, internal tools, insurance, miscellaneous expenses, and contingency), and 15% to consultants (incorporation, accounting, and legal fees).

### Project stage
3 = Idea and have concepts developed online

### Video or Audio Statement
_Acceptable file types: mp3, mp4, wav, mov, avi, flac._

_Provide a one minute video or audio statement about your project idea. You do not need to edit this statement. Imagine you are explaining your work in the time it takes an elevator to reach its destination. Close captioned or computer automated statements are applicable._

:::info
title card: DISORIENTATIONS
over zines
:::

"Diso Guides" are student-led publications which subvert the glossy narratives in college admissions brochures.

:::info
shredding
:::

They're vital examples of grassroots literature. But like other activist ephemera, most zines don't make it online or face deliberate erasure.

:::info
publication spreads
:::

Now the pandemic has now brought about a state of mass disorientation.

:::info
title card: disorientation checklist:
- imbalance
- loss of direction
- uncertainty about the future
:::

As activists know all too well, rapid societal shifts lead to ruptures in the status quo, and in these spaces the world can be reimagined.

:::info
Title card: PHASE 1
:::

Now is the moment to create a collaborative Diso between student groups, centering the narrative on questions faced by students.

:::info
Title card:
Disorientations: Pandemic Edition:
- an intersectional look at health and mental health
- the privacy implications of ed-tech platforms
- a "distance learning" survival guide
- an honest appraisal of the value of attending college remotely
- and more
:::

We'll work directly with student activists, augmenting their work with our funding, organizing, and design capabilities to create an open-access publication shared across schools.

:::info
Publication covers with caption:
Amherst College (MA), Barnard College (NY), Cambridge University (UK), Colby College (ME), Columbia University (NY), City University of New York (NY), Duke University (NC), Emerson College (MA), Harvard University (MA), Johns Hopkins University (MD), Occidental College (CA), Pace University (NY), Stanford University (CA), University of Chicago (IL), University of Pennsylvania (PA), Vassar College (NY), and Wellesley College (MA)
:::

:::info
title card: PHASE II
:::

In September our focus will shift to building out the Disorientations Archive.

:::info
screen recording of scrolling the archive website
:::

Over the 6 month timeframe, we'll work directly with students to wrangle the logistics of forming an organization that incorporates cooperative governance, distributed leadership, and public accountability.

:::info
title card - disorientations archive
- cooperative governance
- distributed leadership
- public accountability
:::

We're inspired by groups like these -- some of which we have already started conversations with, and hope to collaborate further.

:::info
Title card:
- Archiving/publishing efforts
- Project STAND, Interference Archive, Tamiment Library, Barnard Zine Library, Queer.Archive.Work
- Online pirate archives
- Aaaaarg, Scihub, Leftove.rs, Ubuweb
- Activist infrastructure providers
- Riseup, Social.coop, Platform.coop
- Radical technologists
- Radical Networks conference, Decentralized Web Summit
(to name just a few...)
:::

This grant will allow us to establish "Disorientations" as a public interest organization for the present moment.

:::info
- alt info hub for incoming students
- connecting, convening, collaborating
- catalyzing new disos
- adding context: oral histories, call for critical theory and further studies
- $$$ paid work opportunities for precarious student activists (from archival research to leadership roles) with room for volunteers, too
- encouraging the use and re-use of these materials, through an open-access platform, an API, and engagement with the open-source community
:::

Nearly all of the funding will be redistributed to student activists — playing an outsized role in building capacity for efforts which tend to lack support structures.

Eyebeam will not only help establish a new project, but set Disorientations to become an independent and self-sustaining longterm endeavor.

:::info
pie charts
:::

:::info
end on something funny or cool instead of a pie chart? lol & TBD...
:::

### Please tell us what you are hoping for in a virtual opportunity like this one - Limit: ~1 sentence
_ie: Skill sharing, group critique and conversation or other methods of engaging virtually_

Thinking critically with the Eyebeam cohort, alumni, and staff on the role technology plays in both phases of this project. And a push to get this project off the ground.

### Please tell us why is Eyebeam the right place to develop this project right now? - Limit: 120 words

Being selected for Eyebeam’s Rapid Response call, alongside other justice-oriented projects, will contextualize this work as an urgent and timely intervention within the fields of art, activism, academia, and technology — far beyond the confines of one institution or the next.

Amplification to Eyebeam’s community will provide generative connections, and help build our bench of volunteers and supporters who celebrate the work of student activist publishers, and want to lend a hand to their efforts.

The funding — redistributed almost entirely back to student activists — will play an outsized role in building capacity for efforts which lack support. Eyebeam will not only help establish a new project, but set Disorientations up to become an independent and self-sustaining longterm endeavor.

### Please tell us how your work relates to building a better digital future - Limit: 120 words
_All applicants must read the Open Call Statement before applying: eyebeam.org/rapidresponse_

Of the Diso Guides which do end up online, they are almost all hosted on ad-supported PDF-hosting platforms such as Issuu — billed as "YouTube but for PDFs". These "walled gardens" prohibit PDF downloads (crucial for printing zines!) and are plastered with ads for fake N95 masks, Clorox wipes, and "miracle foods that fight memory loss". The advertising-driven business model of these platforms conflicts with the spirit of Diso Guides.

The problem is not just that venture-backed platforms don't care about activists, or that tech companies are leeching value from activist work, but that the widespread use of these platforms by activists forecloses the immense imaginative possibilities of connection and care that could be envisioned through an activist platform.

### Which of the eleven areas of focus feels most urgent to you? (please choose no more than 3)

Top 3:

1. Increasing accessibility of online platforms
1. Ethical or values-driven technology
1. Impacts of Covid-19

Other categories:

* New, online public spheres
* Health and well-being
* Development of public policy
* Creating space for imagination
* Individual autonomy, borders, and immigration
* New and necessary skills for artists
* Democratic engagement and fortification
* Artificial and natural intelligence