Free outdoor cinema cut loose from the context of theater and gallery—and other institutional constraints.

Artist-curated screenings of a provocative group program projected in the windows of a second-floor loft at 115 West 23rd St.

A silent outdoor cinema to arrest the attention of unsuspecting passersby, of walkers and wanderers… a deliberate yet unpredictable intervention to detour, displace, disrupt, and disorganize the ceaseless flow of everyday street life.

We expect “State of Emergency” to rehabilitate loitering, allowing an activity spuriously associated with criminal tendencies to regain its luster.

“State of Emergency” is a silent shout-out against the ever-deepening devastation of democracy, a group response to the manufactured “state of emergency” in which we live. A program that slashes through the red-white-and-blue rhetoric of media so embedded in misrepresentation that even when alerted to massive governmental transgressions the media are helplessly compliant, the institutional variant of a battered wife.

*Participating artists include

The Visible Collective, Mary Kelly, Alan Sekula, Yvonne Rainer, Jenny Lion, Sherry Millner & Ernest Larsen, Annetta Kapon, Michael Mandiberg, Louis Hock, Gregory Sholette, and Leslie Thornton.

Where: 115 West 23 St, Second Floor Windows When: 5:00 to 7:30 Thursday-Saturday thru the month of June

The projected videos depict such contested subjects as post 9/11 attacks on ordinary citizens by the legitimate forces of law and order, the protests against the WTO in Seattle, the gestural authority of a U.S. immigration officer, the misrepresentations of cable news, excess patriotism as an national outbreak of hysterical blindness, the current state of a Nevada nuclear bomb test site, global biochemical contamination, all of that and more.