How to Build a Fire Queer Sans Fin Convergence

When: Saturday Jan 8, 2011 
What: Workshops [Free] Noon-6pm, Performance [$10] 9-11p
Where: Mise au Jeu, 90 de la Gauchetière Est. Montrèal
Who: Damien Luxe and Heather Ács [New York], Silas Howard [Los Angeles], Jordan Arseneault and Laura Boo [Montréal]
Facebook: “How to Build a Fire Queer Sans Fin Convergence” Event || Workshops
Web: www.teachingartisttour.com, http://thedutymyth.blogspot.com/

The How to Build a Fire Queer Sans Fin Convergence is a full-day Performance Art extravaganza in which 5 artists from activist, literary, video, theatre and multimedia backgrounds will present free, empowering, knowledge-sharing workshops on their practices with the Montreal community, followed by an evening of queer performance-based art work, followed by a Q&A.

Workshop Schedule

12 noon: Heather Ács: Creative Strategies for Resistance: Exploring Educational Theatre Techniques
2-4pm: Silas Howard: Reality in Flight: A DIY story workshop focusing on using personal stories and metaphor to tell stories.
2-4pm: Laura Boo: DIY event tech skillshare from the creator of Cabaret Faux Pas!
4-6pm: Damien Luxe: Building the Gay Bomb: Open Source media skillshare for performance.
4-6pm: Jordan Arseneault: Fear Drag: Wear other participants’ fears in a role-play workshop to discover what yours are, and open your performance heart.

About the Performers

How To Build A Fire is a performance and teaching artist group from the US who travel queer landscapes to create legacies while telling tales of desire and survival, and in this incarnation it includes Damien Luxe, Heather Acs and Silas Howard. Through freak church services for magical creatures, fragmented memory, movement and costuming, and unraveling narratives, these escape artists trespass loopholes in the American dream. Queer Sans Fin is the moniker for Laura Boo MacDonald, who along with Jordan Arseneault, will represent Montreal’s queer underbelly spectacular in free workshops.

The Convergence brings together queer artists from across Canada and the US; from across gender lines and languages; from across performance disciplines and backgrounds, responding to the growing need for community building approaches to the performance art medium so often relegated to brief exposures in bars, cabarets, and professionalized art spaces.

We invite you to join the convergence, the conversation, and the events with us on January 8, 2011.

Co-Sponsors

With the help of current student Antonio Bavaro and alumnus Andrea Joy Rideout, this workshop and performance event is being made possible by the generosity of queer and inclusive student organizations and faculty groups: Concordia’s Fine Art Student Association, The Chair in Human Sexuality at Concordia, The Simone de Beauvoir Institute at Concordia University, Queer Concordia; and the community groups The Boxcutter Collective, The Teaching Artist Tour, The Duty Myth and Le Coeur est une Pompe.

But HELLO – there are about a thousand other worthy causes out there right now. Did you know that year-end fundraising gets so buck wild because folks with lots of money need to donate before the end of the year for tax purposes, and the rest of us get caught up in the whirlwind.

In this post I’ve collected ten organizations I believe in fiercely enough to give time or money to, and tell you a bit about them. They are categorized into Media Justice, Movement Building, and Progressive Leadership Development.

Our Resources, Our Disbursements*

Now that I can regularly afford groceries and postage and rent AND going to the doctor occasionally, I budget in** a little bit of redistribution of wealth to my holiday season. Because come early Jan, I will probably feel broke again even though I might not technically be [ps. please don't run around saying "I'm broke!" unless you truly are, ya hear?] and thus I know I need to disburse some of these resources now.

So whether you got a cute check from your family, or an unexpected gig, or a year-end bonus that you don’t have to throw directly onto the interest on your student loans [sigh] — this is a great time to find an organization or cause that it would be actually useful to put money towards, money that might otherwise go to taxis, boxing day sales, or into the void of banking fees. Plus perhaps you have friends who are fund raising for programs, surgeries, travel, etc. If everyone who had it threw $10 at a project, we’d move mountains of money a little bit at a time.

MEDIA JUSTICE

It is sad that $pread Magazine can not be on this list, so please, a moment of silence for an all-volunteer, sex-worker-and-ally-run indie magazine that made it over FIVE years before closing shop. [           ]. If you want to donate and get a magazine subscription in exchange, let me suggest instead the solid and smart Left Turn.

Democracy Now – “Dear Amy Goodman, Thank you for making going to my often-boring temp jobs more bearable by sending your authoritative voice over the radio, tv and internet waves five days a week all year long. Thank you for creating Left/Progressive Talking Points and resisting the  I really fucking appreciate everything. Here’s $25.”

Also the online news source, The Electronic Infantida, who “publishes news, commentary, analysis, and reference materials about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict from a Palestinian perspective.”

FLOODLINES: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six is a “firsthand account of community, culture, and resistance in New Orleans in the years before and after Katrina”. Order it. It also happens to be written by Jordan Flaherty, a writer/editor of Left Turn and also one of the most fierce media justice activists and POC allies I’ve had the pleasure of knowing.

MOVEMENT BUILDING

The U S Social Forum — perhaps you made it there this June or perhaps you are wishing you did. Supporting events and orgs AFTER their big event is one of the kindest things you can do, because followup and cleanup sucks, yet it must be done, *especially* if we want to see another one of these Convergences [we do]. PLUS for $25 you get a tshirt! win!

Critical Resistance – This is one of the only [*the* only?] activist org in the country who works full-time to dismantle the Prison/Industrial Complex, and they just lost a major source of funding. Every bit will in fact help them.

The Femme Collective – it’s never too early to donate to the Femme Conference for 2012. Oh – and don’t forget to fill out the survey if you went to the Conference!

PROGRESSIVE LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

You can go LOTS of places to learn how to bank and shop quietly and never acknowledge your priviledge or get tools to fight oppression. That’s called Leaving The House. These next few orgs empower individuals to do more with themselves, in many awesome ways.

FIERCE “is proud to be one of the few organizations that empowers LGBTQ youth of color to take action and create the better world we yearn for and imagine.” and they’ve been doing so for TEN years!

Also amazing, also working to empower youth of color include Safe Outside the System, a “an anti-violence Collective led by and for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Two Spirit, Trans, and Gender Non Conforming people of color. We are devoted to challenging hate and police violence by using community based strategies rather than relying on the police” working through the Audre Lorde Project.

Streetwise & Safe works with queer youth of color who are criminalized for association with sex trade work. *Note there’s a $50 minimum donation.

The Catalyst Program — focuses on movement-building specifically across race and on teaching White people how to wield all that unearned privilege. This is who runs the Anne Braden Program, too.

OTHERWISE

You don’t have to have or use money to give to or be involved with social change, as you know. Your time, spreading the word about a project or organization, and adding your voice are all also critical.

*I don’t know about you, but I get a weird feeling in the back of my windpipe when I want to talk about money in any way whatsoever, which is exactly the feeling that tells me I need to not be quiet.

**I think from growing up poor I became a manically excellent budgeter. Is anyone else like that? I hear it can go several ways but I’m too busy with my spreadsheets and tiny notepapers covered in calculations to really check in with Other People’s Banking. I like to budget one pro-bono client a month as a donation to Social Justice Work, and the income from one client at the end of the year towards economic redistribution. It’s kind of tidy that way for me but again no one else ever need be that anal.

Over the summer, that meant working with Philly Stands Up – a radical anti-violence group who uses transformative justice models to work with purpotrators of sexual assault. Their work is fierce so they needed to move from the free blog they had to a website in order to control the content [free=ads] and showcase the papers, organzing and upcoming action camp they are preparing.

Part of my mandate is to empower people to control their own media/means of production rather than take over and leave folks confused, so I met with PSU folks to pick a template, customize it, create a header, determine what kinds of pages and content they wanted to develop; and then we moved on to a skillshare on how to use accessible software to add the content they already had from their blog into the template pages I built. I think it’s coming along but I don’t believe they’re done — editing and choosing content is a *lot* of work!

This September, I worked with the amazing crew of Work Hard/Stay Hard to refresh the office, archives and website at IDA — thats for Idyll Dandy Acres — a collectively-owned-and-run queer farm/retreat land in rural Tennessee. It’s hard to explain how a committedly urban lady like myself was drawn there, so lets just say there is a magic to the warmth and welcoming of the community there that inspires one to give back.

I worked with the Office/Media team and IDA residents to determine what from the last website should stay and what new information needed to be included. You can now donate to IDA from the navigation, and there is legacy space prepared to showcase the work of the Archive crew in digitizing hours of VHS and piles of posters and newspapers!

It’s been a really satisfying few months; and while my plate is a bit full for the fall, I’m looking forward to the new collaborations that will come my way in the winter…and keep dreaming the dream I have about getting a grant so I could donate this kind of work FULL TIME!! Sigh…

I love print design, and I’ve been at it for years; first my making zines in the 90′s and next by making newspapers, magazines and promotional media over the last ten years. So it makes sense that people ask me for tips and recommendations regularly.

Some examples are this page from Femme2010 program, and my print portfolio.

Collected in this post are some freeware/shareware programs that might be right for your print project, and a few tips I tell people when they ask about layout.

Learning page layout software is awesome and so satisfying — but time-consuming, just an fyi.

If you’re just making one book I don’t know if its worth it to learn ALL of any program, but you might find you love the process and thus learning a non-try-only version would be advantageous because then you could use it again.

FREE

Free/cheap layout software is one avenue in which the world of freeware is less prolific than in, say, freeware for web design.

Scribus appears to be the best of the free, as it is from 2010 and Mac/PC/Linux compatible – but I haven’t used it so I can’t say more than to read the reviews/manual and see if you think learning it is more time effective than plowing through using Word.

This article has a lot of free print-creation software listed; remember that you might want to edit the photos before you put them in, or you might need to try a few different programs before you find one you “get” the best.

FREE TO TRY

Lots of programs are “free to try,” and often this means you get temporary access to higher-caliber programs — but I’d be careful and test them by exporting one page of my book before laying out the whole thing to make sure that you don’t have to buy the software to export your final product as a PDF.

Here’s a decent, recent list of free-to-try programs; this one, Rag Time Solo, seems to have some recommendations behind it.

Adobe’s InDesign is what I’ve used and loved for almost a decade [!], it is free for 30 days,  you will be able to export your finished file in it, AND there are good tutorials online so you don’t feel overwhelmed. Its a technically heavy program but you dont have to use all the elements.If  you are familiar with Photoshop, the “layers” feature in InDesign is similar and can give you those lovely effects of images behind text etc. Drawbacks? After 30 days you can’t make any more changes without paying the big $$…plus pirating Adobe is getting harder and harder.

DESIGN TIPS

1. No matter how you lay it out, please do your sanity the favor of paying attention to giving yourself at least 1/2-inch margins all the way around the page so printing/copying doesn’t cut off any text. That would suck, right?

2. I recommend exporting final files as PDFs — especially if you’ll be printing from a computer that was NOT the one you designed on, to help avoid opening your project on another computer only to find out that it doesn’t have the special beautiful font you chose and your project looks wonky. Sometimes this happens with your PDF anyway, especially if you’re going through a “real” print service. If you pick a special font it can be advantageous to keep a copy of the fonts in the folder where your document is, just in case. But making PDFs is a good idea for your archiving purposes anyway.

Part of my favorite media strategy has always been postcards. I love them: I let them collect in my purses to remind me of where I’ve been and what I’ve done, and I think they’re a really effective strategy to let people know about your art, your project or your business. Below the cut I’m pleased to display four of my newest postcards, but first lets talk a bit about production and printing. I have some links to cheap printers and tips to make your cards look great!

Designing a postcard:

You need good images. Get a photographer friend and dress up, like we did for the Animal Print photo shoot. Or source something copyright-free or copyleft and shareable from Wikipedia Commons or the Library of Congress Digital Collections or NYPL archives. Or get your digital camera out and take a picture of someTHING in this beautiful world. And credit your source!

Once you have your image in your computer, make sure it’s set to print resolution and not web resolution! 300dpi! This is critical so you don’t get that weird little-crystal effect when you print. To design, you can use photoshop or indesign, or GIMP [free!]. The most important part when you’re laying out your postcard is a little something called margins and bleed.

Next, before you perfect your postcard, know your print specs. How big is your image going to be? 3.75×5.5 is far off from 4.25×6, when it comes to font size and layout. This means sourcing your printer ahead of time. Will your image bleed off the edge or have a border? Make sure that text is not too close to the margins, and remember that the way things look on your screen often don’t exactly translate to the way they look when printed, so beware of color values that are too close to one another side-by-side.

Printing. I like using overnightprints.com because there are a lot of good discount codes out there for them, and they usually get your order to you in about a week. I just ordered 500 full-color one-sided cards for $20+shipping. Sweet. However, walking into your local independent printer cannot be beat in terms of putting a face to your process, and in my experience, chain-print-place employees are often really rad and discount-y after the managers leave at 5pm.

Here are my most recent products, if you’re curious. And they got here just in time to take to the USSF!

Postcard for performace + creative arts

This is from photo's I got from many of the performers and presenters from the upcoming Femme2010 conference!

This illustration is by Cristy Road

INFORMATION

About Image Size for Printing:

The internet is great because it gives us access to all kinds of images of ourselves and others, but tragically for the print-minded among us, most of the images found on the internet [like most of what's on Facebook, or the small images on Flickr] are NOT suitable for printing. These web-optimized images have been scaled down to contain only 72 “Dots” [also called pixels] of color information Per Inch [eg. "dpi", also called "resolution"]. Thats perfect for a computer monitor, but for a medium or big pic in a magazine, flyer, brochure, etc, really for any print instance, we need to get images that are 300 dpi or greater — 4 times more dense with color information as web-optimized images! — to look good to our eye when printed on paper, and not blurry and “pixelated”, like when you see something looking all choppy with the little squares in it.

What does that mean and how do you know?

If you  have an image file that you want to use for print, but aren’t sure if it’s dpi is correct, open that file in your image editing software [try PC: Paintbrush; Mac: Preview, iPhoto; PC/Mac: Photoshop, GIMP]  and look at the image size information, however your program gives you that info*. It will tell you how many actual dots of image data [pixels] are in your image, what the current setting on the image is, and how big that is in inches. You can do some simple math to see how big it would be on a computer versus printed, by dividing the number of pixels by the output method [web or printing].

An example:
A camera phone may take a 600 wide x450 tall pixel picture, which you then copy onto and then open on your computer. *In the program you open it in, there will be a drop-down menu called ‘Tools’ or ‘Edit’. Pick that, and then “Get Info” or “Image Size” and a window will open, telling you lots of info, including that the image is 600×450.

In print terms, that picture is 2in. x 1.5in [600/300 dpi for print=2in; 450/300=1.5in]. Small for a magazine or postcard, probably ok for a brochure. For reference, an image that is 750×600 is about the ‘print size’ of a playing card.

That same picture is in web terms sizes out to be 8.3×6.25 [600/72 dpi for web=8.3; 450/72=6.25, or big enough for a computer screen!].

For printing, we need images that are 300 pixels per inch, cuz that’s what printers print at. For your postcard and magazine needs, try to find/take/get images that are at LEAST 1200×900 or bigger [4x3 inches]. A full page image needs to be 2850×3600 pixels [9.5x12]. A brochure image should be NO smaller than 450×450 [1.5 inches square]. We want to see your brilliant face!

Resizing:

Please DONT “Resize” or “Upsample” options to resize an image from smaller to larger!!!!! That’s how you can guarantee your pic will come out with all the weird little squares when printed.

You can’t just use the “Resample” or “Resize” tool for print purposes, because doing so asks the computer program to make guesses [using math!] to fill in the missing image data from all the pixels that aren’t there, and that’s when you get images that print looking  what is called “pixelated”, because you can see the individual edges of pixels. That’s BAD]. That’s why you want large original images to work from.

You can “downsample,” that is, go DOWN in size, because your computer is not missing any image data information, it’s only cutting out the extra. That’s ok. But if someone is asking you for an image for printing, just send them the biggest thing you have. They will  downsize as needed.

Oranization

When you send someone who runs a magazine or a conference called, say, Lick The Moist Cherry, a picture or bio, you might be tempted on your computer, to name your picture or bio “Lick The Moist Cherry” — so that you know what it’s for — and email it away. Not only is that awkward, at least 30 other people are naming their images and bios the same thing and sending it to that organizer, who now has 30 Lick The Moist Cherrys, and no time for her own cherry because she has to rename everything that gets sent her.

Do these nice people a favor. Save the image or document as your name, or the name of your troupe, or your presentation title. It will save someone a headache, I promise.

**a note about file extensions. Unless you are a “computer” person, don’t change a .jpg to a .gif or a .doc to a .txt willynilly. Leave it be and it will be better than if you get all cray. Also don’t delete the extension accidentally, they help the other person’s computer know what it’s looking at. If you are a graphics person, you know that .tif or .pdf are preferred delivery formats for print.

Example:

• picture: DamienLuxe_LTMC.jpg [I've used an underscore - _ - because it helps Macs and PCs read the filename easier than if you leave spaces]
• bio: DamienLuxe_bioLTMC.txt – [I also anally appended the acronym of the event this bio is for, so I know from my computer what I sent it to.]

CLEAR, DIRECT INSTRUCTIONS

- get your pic onto a computer

- look at the size

- make sure it’s ‘big’ enough for your purposes

- save it with an obvious name [your name_event.xxx]

- email it with an obvious subject line in the email

- sit back satisfied, knowing you did your best

RESOURCES

What do you do when you aren’t the web design mastermind behind your site/blog, you find yourself needing to update it, and your friend who made it for you is MIA or really busy? Read below to see what choices are available to you as you go along. Most importantly, you need to get EITHER the domain or access to the webfiles, the latter of which are the real goal.

Option 1: ACCESS YOUR FILES/GET THE BLOG LOGIN and update the content yourself [or get someone else to do it]

Whether you can get to your domain name or not [see next], it’s the web files or blog pages or CMS [content management system] that you need to actually access in order to update what appears on people’s browser screens when they look at your site.

Either the files are on your server that you pay for, or on the designers’ server, or on the server of a third internet party like a blog host. You need to get access to the server they’re on to update them.

If you can get ahold of the designer you can ask for copies of the files for your site or a server login – or double check if they gave you FTP, server, blog login or copies of the files from the get-go**  Don’t dally once you get this info — just go ahead and log onto the server to get access to your files. If it’s an FTP server, use Cyberduck or another free software to help you navigate. If you get to log onto their server to get these files please be very, very careful and don’t delete anything. Some designers will prefer to send you a copy of your files instead of giving you access to their server.

If you have a blog you can get copies of the files but they are usually in a funky .php format [a major blog negative, plus that it's a separate project to transfer them over to a new site/blog], or you could just copy and paste the content to a folder on your computer or to your googledocs [something I reccomend doing every few months].

Either way, capture the pages/content, place it on your computer and take a moment to think: “That was easy, look at that list of filenames, pagenames, extentions, and folders!” Now you get to either learn how to update blog pages [easy!], use one of the many free web editing softwares out there.

If your friend can’t give you the files and the site is still up, you can “View Source” to copy the code of each page as it appears online. This won’t work if you have .php or framing on your site, and you also can’t get the CSS [page styling code] but is a decent last-ditch effort if you really don’t have another option. You can either open the pages in a web editing program or just copy and paste the content into new blog pages, and you’ll just have to reformat the links and reupload the images.

Option 2: ACCESS YOUR DOMAIN NAME and direct the domain name to a new site you’re making/one you have access to

If you purchased your domain name [also known as a URL], then you have the login info to the registration account which leads to where mysite.com, ourblog.org, etc. is registered, and then you have quite a bit of power! You can log into the website of the service you registered at and direct your domain name anywhere using the nameservers or the redirect. To the site your friend made which you or they are updating. To a new blog/site you are hosting somewhere else because the old site can’t be updated. To xtube. It’s up to you.

If your friend bought your domain name for you, I do hope they either provided you with a login or you can get ahold of them to get the files [next] or have them redirect. Because without access to the domain name AND the web files or blog login, you are looking at some startover action my friend.

For more info about domain names, you can see my post on the topic. There’s a lot in there.

USEFUL TIPS SO THIS NEVER HAPPENS TO ANYONE ELSE

1. Talk The Designer’s Language. It helps.
When someone is making your site for the first time and storing it on their FTP, you can ask to be a “user” on their “server” and so get your own login and access updates to your site via the server’s WYSIWYG. They might not want to give you access, FYI, but maybe they can section off a parcel of server for you if you’re really special.

2. Keep backups – and a non-online list! – of your logins and passwords
I know this is boring and annoying, but isn’t it MORE boring and annoying to spend days tracking down someone for something you could just have on your computer or desk?

3. *If you are the “friend who makes sites”, please make sure people buy their own URL’s so you never have to redirect namservers or transfer ownership or accidentally forget to renew a URL which ends up costing a client or — way worse — a friendship. It’s happened to the best of us.

4.**Copies of the files and/or FTP logins. Such good ideas! Sometimes hard to remember to ask for but, still!

Top-Level Recommendations

•    Sometimes, brand counts. Not in pharmaceuticals, but yeah in electronics.
•    Buying from a place that lets you return something that doesn’t work for you is golden. B&H Photo Video in Manhattan was great. BestBuy wanted to charge a restocking fee so I didn’t buy from them. [So, not best.] Also that means that eBay or some guy on CL is not the best if you don’t know what you’re looking at.
•    Set yourself a price limit and prepare to adjust it by maybe $100. But don’t get crazy.
•    Buying the cheapest item means you get a dinky trifling chintzy piece of plastic. The bottom of the barrel is not a good place for electronics to be found. I hate this but it’s true.

Terminology Basics:

Consumer: The “low end” of video cameras where we will be loitering for much of this discussion. The cameras in the $100 – $1000 range. [All your bills for the month added up.]
Prosumer: A term which has the aura of relators’ ingenuity for making up words that mean “upsell.” Used for cameras that are fancier than point-and-shoot but not so fancy you could take them to Hollywood. Wait scratch that. In the $700 – $1500 range. [yes, that's a month's rent.]
Professional: Cameras over $2500 [and up to $60K] which I am entirely unqualified to use, let alone talk about. [All the money you'll make this year.]

Media Types:

MiniDV – The Old Guard of camcorders’ recording media, these are the tiny tapes you put into your camera that record analog which you then have to capture using final cut or another program. Just a note and thought, most Professional cameras still record to tape [or film, of course] and when you use tape, you are allowing

Mini DVD – A tiny DVD that you record onto in the camera. If you have a desktop computer/certain PC’s, then you can slap the little DVD into your computer and grab the video. I personally would be terrified to shove it into my MacBook, but I could be a priss.

HDD/Flash Memory – any of the growing number of devices that burn the digital encoding of the video directly to the camera’s memory. Sometimes you have to buy an additional memory card sometimes the camera has a ton of internal memory [our friend RAM!] Remember that 20 mins = 1 Gigabyte of data, so if you want to record an hour you’ll need 3Gigs+ [the more stopping and starting you do, the less time you can use, as the memory gets cut up for your little recordings].

Recording Formats:

DEFINITION
HD – High-definition images, 1920 x 1080 pixels, generally widescreen, the newest of the new in video reccording. You know how when you take a photo/video of your TV or old-tyme giant computer monitor, and all these horizontal lines were showing up? In HD there are twice as many of those lines, thus getting about double the image info — and taking up double the digital storage space. “We all survived fine without HD until a few years ago, so…?” the video guy at B&H said to me leadingly. Unless you have a HD TV or plan to make videos for the big screen HD might be overkill. Then again – many of the HDD/Flash consumer cameras out there ONLY record in HD. It’s an improvement, of course, and a recent shoot I did in HD got me beautiful footage — that took up 6G for 15mins. Ouch. Also, not yet common in Europe.

AVCHD – Sony/Panasonic’s extra high-def HD format. If you really want to try to capture for Blu-ray, maybe low-end video camera’s aren’t right for you anyway? I feel this is the end result of people thinking they need to see JOhnny’s every pimple in their home movies. But maybe I judge?

SD – Standard Definition. 720×480 pixels* is the NTSC [N America] screen size. What everything tv/video was produced as since TV started being in color in, oh, 1951. Has the benefit of the fact that everything pre 2004ish is in SD, so anything public domain you pick up on Archive.org to mashup, will be produced in SD.

FILE TYPES
Tape – If you record to tape, you set the file type according to your capture program. [Final Cut makes my videos into happy QuickTime .mov files.]

If you use a DVD/HD/Flash Memory device, there are a few formats, and not all of them play nicely with each other or with all the other programs or platforms out there. Listing all thevariations is a statistical impossibility, so this is really a word of attention needed here: You might be on a Mac and find that all the Sony software is only for PC and be frustrated. My friends’ Flip recorded in .avi and that needed to be rendered every time I moved it a touch in Final Cut. You might have to convert your footage before you throw it in your editing program.

Converting Among File Types – You recorded in MPEG and you want to edit in MOV. Try ffdshow if you’re on a PC, Any Video Converter for PC or on your Mac! Or you can get QuickTime Pro for $25 [as opposed to QuickTime Regular Normal, which is probably already on your computer].

Bells and Whistles

What is the Image Capture rate? Does it zoom? Can it make sepia tone?

• Zoom: Optical [what the lens does], Digital [what the camera makes up for you] – listen; fuck digital zoom. It’s like when you ask Photoshop to resize a web image to print quality, the camera/program makes up the missing pixel image data, and it never looks right. Just worry about what the optical zoom is, k?
• Image sensor – 1/4″, 1/6″, 1CCD, 3CCD
• Microphone terminal mini-jack – this is a really nice bonus that a lot of Canon [and a fair amount of JVC] camera’s have. Plug in a mic and you can get better sound quality from your tiny camera!

Lastly, follow my above directives, hewn from the pain of researching and being forced to separate from money I made doing something that was not living the dream, with these words of sage advice: time is not just money, it’s much more valuable than money can be. Get your tools and go make your art!

*did you know the origin of the term: PIcture(X) ELement

1. Pick a name[s]! Decide!
I know that picking a name is the hardest part, but luckily we live in a plentiful linguistic world — so you do that part and come back. Before you get soooooo excited please check that it’s not already registered to a real person or robot by typing it into your browser of choice or use a domain search tool.

2. Buy & Register it: Goooo creepy bueruacracy!
Get yourself* to godaddy.com or dotster.com [two larger domain registrant organizations] and search to see if your domain name was bought in the 2 days since you decided what to use. Go ahead and make an account and buy the name**. When it gets to checkout you can choose crazy hosting packages for your site, which are usually a little OOC and you can always buy them later, and you can also choose whether to pay more to make your registration private. If you don’t use privacy, people who creepily search WhoIs databases can see the last name, city and zip code of who each non-private URL is registered to. Sometimes that won’t bother you and sometimes you are freaked out by that and want to pay for the privacy – your call.

*my recommendation #1 – register it yourself. Don’t get your buddy who is helping you with your site to do it, because if tragedy befalls your buddy or your friendship, well then whoops – you can’t access your internet name when you need to update your site / it expires and a german porn site buys it.

**recommendation #2 – buy your government name, too: the one you pay taxes under, and for god measure the one you f*ck under/travel under. If you have the extra $10 each, do it! Otherwise someone else will.

3. Be like a Domme and Direct It
Since you have control over your Domain name, you can log into the account you bought it under and either:

- Direct the “namservers” of the domain name to point to server space you bought or your friend is giving you [the server space will have this information]
OR
- Direct the domain name to a free or other servive you are using, such as blogger, wordpress, freewebs, etc. You have two options

1. Forwarding – someone types in yourdomain.com and wordpress.yourwordpressname.com comes up in the address bar of the browser
2. Masking – someone types in yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com remains in the address bar. This is good if you have some janky-looking free service name [www.cheapofreebizsite.com/damienluxe] and want to appear more professional than that. Bad because people will not ever be able to get directly to a page on your site because the address bar is masked with just your domain name.

4. Mom…I changed my name/I have six names
That’s ok. The internet will never judge, it’s just a series of 1′s and 0′s electromagnetically linked. Some of us like naming, it’s cool. You just need to go through steps one and two above and then…

a. Move your existing site/blog to your new URL [that's a whole other post].
b. Keep your “old name”/URL site active, but just have one index.html page instead of all your content
c. Automatically redirect visitors from the “old name” site to your “new name site” by placing the following HTML in the index page of your “old” site in between the <head></head> tags of your web pages or blog:

<META
     HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh"
     CONTENT="1; URL=autoforward_target.html">
So 1 is the amount of wait time before the viewer is forwarded and the ...html is the page the browser takes the viewer to.

• Silas, Heather and Leah are all really talented in different arenas so we make up a really interesting teaching team – covering theatre, writing, video, DIY booking, community healing, web and audio production…
• And because of that, each of us *performs* really differently, too. Silas’ piece on Hollywood, quistory and integrity; Heather’s highly performative work on loss; Leah’s multimedia razor word work…and the Hot Pink Jesus Trash work I’m bringing is some of my best, creating magic out of dirt and shame.

We decided to change the name to How To Build A Fire, because that really reflected what we are accomplishing with this project — by pairing our performances with “how-to” interactive workshops and/or lectures that offer practical, hands-on techniques, our participants are encouraged to deepen their critical anlayses of cultural production, and will walk away with a collection of  techniques, tools and technology necessary to create artistic work and sustainable community projects in their own communities — with the ability to build their own fires!