about the work

Port Huron Project 2: The Problem Is Civil Obedience, 2007
The Problem Is Civil Obedience, 2008
Mark Tribe’s Port Huron Project, named after Tom Hayden’s 1962 New Left Manifesto, is a series of reenactments of protest speeches from the New Left movements of the 1960s and ’70s. Each event is staged at the site of the original speech, and is delivered by a performer to an audience of invited guests and passers-by. Port Huron Project 2: The Problem Is Civil Obedience is a video documenting the July 14, 2007 reenactment of a speech given by Howard Zinn in 1971 on Boston Common. As the camera captures the sparse crowd, other video cameras recording the scene, and the applause following the unnervingly resonant statement “we need to do something to disturb that calm, smiling, murderous president in the White House,” the line between genuine, spontaneous response and performance, as well as between the past and the present, becomes ambiguous. The commitment and zeal of the New Left activists evokes both nostalgia for an impassioned time of resistance and melancholy over the now-apparent limitations of Vietnam War-era protests to enact definitive political changes, as evidenced by the eerie parallels between that time and our current situation.

about Mark Tribe

Mark Tribe is an artist and curator whose interests include art, technology, and politics. He is Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media Studies at Brown University, where he teaches courses on digital art, curating, open-source culture, radical media, and surveillance. He is the co-author, with Reena Jana, of New Media Art (Taschen, 2006). His art work has been exhibited at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, and Gigantic Art Space in New York City. He has organized curatorial projects for the New Museum of Contemporary Art, MASS MoCA, and inSite_05. In 1996, he founded Rhizome.org, an online resource for new media artists. Mark now chairs the Rhizome.org board of directors. He received a MFA in Visual Art from the University of California, San Diego in 1994 and a BA in Visual Art from Brown University in 1990. He splits his time between Providence and New York City.

For more information, please visit www.nothing.org.