[spectre] This Is The Public Domain - a panel discussion on open land - Tuesday 5th - organized by Amy Balkin at the Wattis Institute

[Will Bradley]

The CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts presents:

*This is the Public Domain*

7pm December 5th
Timken Lecture Theater
California College of Arts, 1111 8th Street, SF, CA 94107
Free admission

A panel discussion organized by San Francisco-based artist *Amy Balkin 
*to debate and explore ways to achieve a viable practical framework for 
common land in the 21st century.

with

*Keith Aoki*, UC Oregon law professor and co-author of, among other 
works, the comic book 'Bound By Law - Tales From the Public Domain'.
*Iain Boal*, Director of the Environmental Politics Colloquium at the 
Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley, and co-editor of the 
recent book 'Afflicted Powers'.
*Brady Moss*, senior project associate for the Trust for Public Land, a 
national, nonprofit, land conservation organization.
*Ramon Sender*, writer, activist and participant in the Morning Star 
Ranch open land experiment of the early seventies.

Amy Balkin's art practice combines cross-disciplinary research and 
social critique with a search for unrealized possibilities outside 
conventional systems. Her ongoing project This is the Public Domain 
(www.thisisthepublicdomain.org) is an effort to create a permanent 
international commons from 2.5 acres of land purchased near Tehachapi, 
California.

As part of the Wattis Institute's exhibition *Radical Software 
*(http://www.wattis.org/exhibitions/2006/software/), Balkin has 
organised a public conversation between artists, legal experts, and 
people who have been engaged personally and politically with open land 
and commoning, exploring the search for a real-world framework for —with 
the aim of proposing a solution that the artist will then implement.

Balkin's recent projects include Invisible-5, a collaborative 
environmental justice audio tour of the I-5 corridor between San 
Francisco and Los Angeles, and Public Smog (www.publicsmog.org).

For more information, call: 415.551.9251