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May 19, 2023

Its a small program that attracts international students to the University of Manitoba and has an outsized influence on the art scene in Winnipeg, Manitoba and Canada. From May 23 June 23, the five artists graduating from the School of Arts Master of Fine Arts program are set to show their work at the 2023 MFA Thesis Exhibition.

The show includes work from each of the MFA candidates Hamideh Behgar, Timothy Brown, Sonny Cai, Ashkan Nejadebrahimi, and Niki Saghar who have designed their own installations, after receiving professional training in curatorial practices and exhibition design last fall in a week-long workshop with curators Rodney Latourelle and Louise Witthoefft from Berlin, specialists in exhibition installation, public art, colour and light concepts.

It will be an eclectic mix of works ranging from video and performance, through sculpture to drawing, says, Oliver Botar, associate director, graduate studies and research at the School of Art.

Three out of five of the students are originally from Iran, and a theme of displacement runs through the works, he says.

Botar encourages people to come out. He points to the calibre of artists who have graduated from the MFA program over the last 12 years of its history.

The School of Art has produced a long roster of artists that have gone on to local, national and indeed international fame, including a goodly list of international art stars, some of whom continue to live here, and others whove gone on to major careers in larger Canadian art centres such as Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, but also to New York, Chicago and Berlin, says Botar. In other words, through our graduates and our network, we are an art school that is present way beyond our borders.

As a female artist who grew up in an environment full of restrictive societal norms, Hamideh Behgar experienced many boundaries, limitations, and high expectations. Through her artistic journey, she has explored the societal pressure to achieve perfection, despite the inherent imperfections that exist in the natural world beyond our control. Her current artistic practice is inspired by childhood imagination and the importance of free play and play sculptures.

Timothy BrownProcessor 1 (still), 2022videoImage courtesy of the artist

Wavesis a temporal conversation taking place across a variety of media, in which Timothy Brown addresses the grief and trauma from the loss of his mother while also re-examining his identity in relation to the birth of his son. The exhibition utilizes audio, video, installation, drawing, and text whilealso inviting the viewer into the exhibition space as a participant. WithWaves, history, lineage, identity, grief, trauma, control, and emotion collide, re-examining the relationship between viewer, artist, and artwork.

Sonny CaiImage courtesy of the artist

The exhibition title,Three Begat All Things, comes from the description of Yinyang in Tao Te Ching: the existence of the laws of Yinyang, the human understanding of these laws, and the physical manifestation of these laws. These three concepts come together to form Tao and produce all things. The direct translation of Yinyang from Chinese to English is Sun and Shadow, which is perfectly embodied within Sonny Cais choice of medium: The seriesThree Begat All Thingsuses Cyanotype techniques creating a beautiful blue visual effect in accordance with the sun and its shadows.

Ashkan NejadebrahimiImmersion I, 2023Mixed media (wire, wood, clear acrylic sheets, ink, spray paint), 70 x 70 x 35 cmImage courtesy of the artist

Ashkan Nejadebrahimi makes abstract drawings on 2D surfaces and sometimes the lines he draws move into three-dimensional space, taking on sculptural qualities. Drawing for him is an act of probing what is going on inside and around him. He employs Surrealist Automatist techniques, which allow him to suppress conscious control over the creative process. Ashkans work researches the interactions between Self and Other in psychological and social senses, and in his studio, subjects such as monsters, the unconscious, and the quality of non-finito, that is unfinishedness, meet on the ground of drawing.

Niki SaghariImage courtesy of the artist

Niki Saghari is an Iranian multidisciplinary artist currently based in Canada. Her work encompasses photography, performance, video, sound, and installations. She aims to draw attention to the seemingly mundane aspects of daily life and transform them into works that challenge our preconceptions. Through her art, she explores the complexities of human relationships and identity, as well as the passage of time and the impermanence of all things. By revealing the unconscious and exposing our shared experiences, Saghari aims to promote empathy and understanding between people from different cultures and backgrounds. Saghari will be presenting a performance as part of her thesis show at 6PM.

May 23-June 23School of Art Gallery

Opening reception: May 26; 5 8 p.m.

Botar notes that the School of Art and the MFA program have a lot to offer the city and the province. The School of Art is the only art school with a graduate program between Regina/Saskatoon and Toronto/London, and there is no such program in North Dakota or Northern Minnesota. This points to high demand for the graduate program.

With the establishment of our MFA Program some 12 years ago, we also began to attract a good number of international students from countries such as Iran, China, Korea and Latin America (among others), that has helped internationalize our art scene.

Enrolment numbers have been kept small despite the demand says Botar, running to an intake of about five per year for the competitive program which typically see 85 applicants per year. Students accepted to the program get a large studio, receive personalized instruction in small groups from an outstanding roster of faculty, and their degree culminates in a professional MFA thesis show that includes a hard-cover publication of the exhibition.

And the program is growing. We have just doubled our potential intake to 10 due to the demand, which will ensure a larger, more dynamic cohort of students, something that is beneficial for artists at the start of their careers, says Botar. The newly established MA Program in Art and Architectural History (beginning Fall 2023) will further increase the annual cohort by two for the time being.

That personalized instruction, along with outstanding production facilities and full technical support in the award-winning ARTlab are large draws for the program, along with numerous professional development opportunities including workshops, studio visits from top curators, artists and journal editors, says Botar.

We also currently have an artist-in-residence, Prof. Emeritus Erwin Huebner (Biology), who offers one-on-one instruction in scientific imaging techniques and art making to my knowledge the only such instruction and facility in an art school in the country, says Botar.

Without this art school, that was founded together with the Winnipeg Art Gallery in 1912, Winnipeg would not be the cultural centre that it is. Our graduates are the foundation of a complex and rich art scene in Winnipeg, including not only the WAG-Quamajuq, but also many artist-run centres in the fine arts, including video/moving image, installation, printmaking, craft, ceramics, and more.

UM Today Staff

Link:
UM Today | School of Art | It's time for the 2023 MFA Thesis Exhibition - UM Today

With parents across the country concerned about the impact of social media on young children, a bipartisan group of senators two Democrats and two Republicans drafted a bill they say represents millions of American parents who believe social media companies have too much negative influence on teens and younger children.

"We simply say kids 12 and under shouldn't be on a social media platform at all," said Hawaiian Sen. Brian Schatz (D).

So they've written a simple straightforward measure that's easy to understand.

"Normally, you see a bill come out of D.C. that is sometimes thousands of pages long this one's eight," said Alabama Sen. Katie Britt (R).

The bill has three key points:

1) Kids under 13 would be banned from social media.

2) Children 13 through 17 would need a parent or guardian's consent to create an account.

3) It would forbid social media companies from using algorithms to recommend content to users under 18.

"And I think people appreciate the simplicity if a parent can't understand the bill, it's hard for them to rally behind it," Sen. Schatz said.

Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy (D) has seen both the positives and negatives of social media.

"You know, sometimes the silly and entertaining content that they get on those sites brings joy to their life," Sen. Murphy said. "But I've also seen the tremendous downside of seeing how some of their friends who are in trouble get very quickly spun into deep, dark corners of the Internet."

Sen. Schatz believes the growing evidence is clear: social media is making kids more depressed and wreaking havoc on their mental health. The National Institutes of Health found children under 18 are susceptible to social-media health-related problems including depression, eating disorders, and anxiety.

The CDC shows 60% of girls using social media report feeling persistent sadness or hopelessness, with 30% seriously considering suicide.

Cyber-Bullying, Doomscrolling, Loss of Christian Faith: How Social Media Is Harming Our Kids

The senators' bill is one of several measures being proposed in Washington calling for stricter regulations on social media companies. Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton (R) says their bill puts parents back in control of what their kids experience online.

"I've had so many people reach out to me and say, 'thank you for proposing a solution, for helping me get my responsibility, my rights as a parent in the digital world that I have in the real world,'" Sen. Cotton said.

The senators know there will be pushback from tech companies. And any legislation proposing to regulate Big Tech and social media will face major challenges in Congress itself including disagreements about overregulating and questions about civil liberties. So, it remains to be seen if any bill can successfully move through both the House and Senate.

Click Here to See the Bill

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'Kids 12 and Under Shouldn't Be on Social Media': Bill Could Put ... - CBN.com

In the early 2000s, the nature of online exchange started to shift. Things started to "go viral."

One of the most talked about early cases of this was when then future BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti, a college kid at the time, tried to put the word "sweatshop" on a customizable pair of Nikes and the email exchange with the company that resulted went from the hands of a few of his friends to thousands of people.

In his new book Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral, Ben Smith, former editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed News, lands on his promise to chronicle the rise of digital media through the story of a snowballing, head-to-head competition between characters like Peretti and Nick Denton of Gawker Media, between the right and the left and, eventually, between the new found power of social networks and the institutions they helped create in an attempt to answer the question: How did we get here?

Peretti was able to replicate the viral nature of the Nike exchange, building it into a business. But while Peretti managed to wield pockets of control on the internet, the social forces he helped create eventually became too strong for anyone to command.

In true BuzzFeed fashion, here are five takeaways from Traffic. (Peretti might have gotten a lot of things wrong, but the accessibility of lists was not one of them).

1. Conservatism has always been at the fringes of viral internet media.

The same Huffington Post that made an early political bet on Obama was co-founded by right-wing media personality Andrew Breitbart. People like Breitbart, Steve Bannon, and alt-right columnist Benny Johnson, once dismissed as minor characters, became key players in the rise of digital media. As Smith writes, when Arianna Huffington was building The Huffington Post as a liberal counterpart to The Drudge Report, she wanted to bring on someone who held the key to the conservative news aggregation website's booming traffic. There was no one more fitting than Breitbart, who, at the time, was silently running The Drudge Report. With one hand in the early beginnings of The Huffington Post and another in The Drudge Report, Breitbart went on to found conservative site Breitbart News, which, during its inception, Smith described as "a kind of funhouse mirror to Gawker Media."

2. The close relationship between social media and news is no accident.

Today, it seems intuitive that articles are shared on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, but the concept of a "news feed" has its roots in virality. In its early days, BuzzFeed was between a content company and a platform; it was still unclear how the company could be both editorial and scalable. But looking at the rise of Facebook and Twitter, BuzzFeed realized that these tech companies would one day be their source of revenue, similar to how older media companies like CNN relied on cable networks to provide channels for them. In 2012, Facebook even offered to buy BuzzFeed, but Peretti turned it down. Instead, Smith recalls, Peretti proposed the two work as partners in a kind of thought experiment, with the intent of further indulging in his obsession with BuzzFeed "taking informational content and packaging it with emotion and wit so it spreads on Facebook and other social platforms."

3. At the core of traffic is identity.

In the early days of the internet, the elemental unit of traffic could be measured by one page view. But if you wanted to measure and control traffic, you had to look towards human behavior, Smith writes. "Traffic was human emotion, human psychology, desire and curiosity and humor. It was easiest to see this sort of pattern when you felt like an outsider, an alien." As social media became more popular, editors at places like BuzzFeed and Gawker would have to learn that it, too, centered around identities. What was once perceived as a digital force has always been a social one; the implications of such an observation came too little too late.

4. On the other side of aggressive transparency is dishonesty.

Denton and Gawker had one vision for the future of media and it was this: revealing the naked truth. Whether it was a leaked sex-tape, a dick pic, or mining experiences purely for content, if it brought traffic, Denton wanted it, Smith writes. Such an attitude brought plenty of problems onto itself, but perhaps one of its most unintended consequences was that along the way, it produced dishonesty and self-censorship. "If Facebook's staff thought Barack Obama was the culmination of what they'd built, it turned out he was just a way station on the road to Donald Trump," Smith writes. The left-winged media's race for attention always had the right looking over its shoulder and long after Gawker shut down in 2016, Smith notes, Denton reflected, "Transparency has to be coaxed, not forced."

5. In the end, Facebook dominated.

In 2018, Facebook announced a change in its algorithm, marking it as one that would focus on "meaningful social interactions." In the midst, the platform propped up emotional engagement successfully identifying what people were actually prone to sharing and talking about. "Their algorithm was holding an ever-more-precise mirror up to Americans' psyches, and intensifying their strongest reactions," Smith writes. And as BuzzFeed attempted to keep up, Donald Trump and the alt-right were way ahead transforming what was once traffic, into real political power.

Link:
Books: In Buzzfeed fashion, 5 takeaways from Ben Smith's 'Traffic' - NPR

State Representative Dustin Burrows (R-Lubbock), author of House Bill 2127

Have you contacted your city or county government recently, asking for enforcement of a local ordinance? Email Andrew Schneider at andrews@houstonpublicmedia.org or contact him on Twitter @aschneider_hpm.

Over the past several years, Republican state lawmakers have passed laws blocking local governments from regulating issues ranging from fracking to ridesharing services. Now, legislators are poised to adopt a far broader measure to limit the self-government powers of cities and counties.

"This is a kind of Death Star bill"

Bill Kelly has been tracking efforts by the State of Texas to limit local government powers ever since he started working as Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner's director of government relations seven years ago. He said Republican lawmakers are more aggressive this session than they've ever been before. But there's one measure that concerns Kelly above all: House Bill 2127, known as the Texas Regulatory Consistency Act, which passed the House and is now in the Senate.

"Its very concerning for Home Rule cities like Houston and about the 349 other Home Rule cities, because it takes eight different fields of government code and basically says you will not legislate in this area unless we give you permission to," Kelly said.

Those fields include labor and occupations, the environment, and finance, among others. Kelly said the only matter Houston regulates in its finance code is payday lending, loans at high rates of interest that need to be paid back immediately and target low-income residents and communities of color.

"Really awful practices that youve seen us and over 30 cities in Texas, from very conservative Midland to our friends in Austin, everybody has got these local ordinances that regulate payday lending. Those would be wiped out," Kelly said.

Hany Khalil, executive director of the Texas Gulf Coast Area Labor Federation, fears a wide range of protections for working class Texans would vanish.

"This is a kind of Death Star bill," Khalil said. "Local governments ability to protect tenants from slumlords could be banned. The ability to respond quickly to hurricanes and industrial fires could be banned. Many of the things that we have fought for, like a $15 minimum wage for airport workers and for workers on county construction projects."

This last is particularly of concern to Khalil. He said his organization has worked closely with Harris County to craft a recently enacted policy enhancing worker safety on county construction jobs.

"Work in construction in Texas is extremely unsafe, with something on the order of about one worker dying a day due to safety considerations in Texas on these kinds of jobs," Khalil said.

Harris County's policy requires construction companies to show that they have a positive safety record. It prohibits companies that have a bad safety record from being able to apply for jobs for several years. The policy also requires that all workers on construction jobs have 10 hours of OSHA safety training and that managers have 30 hours of training.

"These are key ways to significantly reduce the number of fatalities on construction jobs in Texas, and local governments can use their existing authority, their existing procurement authority to do that. But if this bill gets passed...that authority very much is at risk," Khalil said.

The potential benefits for businesses of "regulatory consistency"

So why are Republican lawmakers going so big when it comes to preempting local control? State Representative Dustin Burrows of Lubbock is the author of the bill. He says local governments have a patchwork of regulations that increases the cost of doing business in Texas.

"This bill provides the regulatory stability and certainty that enables business owners to expand their businesses to other cities within Texas with more consistency, creating more jobs and prosperity in the process," Burrows told the House at the start of the floor debate over HB 2127. "At the same time, it actually gives local governments a hand by giving them a simple reason why they wont, in fact, be bringing a vote to countless issues that activists have been harassing them to pass locally."

Burrows gave the examples of a restaurant owner with two restaurants on either side of a city line, as well as of tradesmen operating in the same area but having to cross multiple jurisdictions in their daily work. "We want those small business owners creating new jobs and providing for their families not trying to navigate a Byzantine array of local regulations that twist and turn every time they cross (a) city limits sign," Burrows said.

State Senator Brandon Creighton authored an identical bill to HB 2127 in the Senate. He's now the lead advocate for Burrows' measure in the upper chamber.

"I had a CEO in my district out of the Conroe area that had businesses and trucking-related aspects to his business," Creighton said. "He had hired three additional people to keep up with compliance city to city and had to let go of others and terminate their positions to be able to afford those new positions."

Creighton balks at the notion that the bill would prohibit cities and counties from performing their functions of regulating on behalf of their residents. "I think were addressing what really for years has been an out-of-bounds aspect of what local governments felt like they have the authority to be doing in the first place," Creighton said.

Senator Creighton says HB 2127 is likely to pass the Senate no later than next week. "The session before last," Creighton said, "I passed a version of this bill five times out of the Senate. And it met its demise in the House very late in the last few days of session. It just ran out of time. But this has been a process over a few sessions and shouldnt be any surprise."

Opposition from local political leaders

Rene Cross, senior executive director of the University of Houston's Hobby School of Public Affairs said HB 2127 will put the state in the position of having to act on matters it traditionally does not regulate.

"Texas has had a long-term history in having very limited government. That came out of the Constitution of 1876, post-Civil War. And the idea was to limit government, allow the localities to draft the best ordinances for the local people."

If the bill passes, Cross says a lot of people could wind up falling through the cracks.

"And especially in a state such as Texas, where the populations, even just the land, the geography, everything is so different, one-size-fits-all could possibly cause some problems later on down the road."

Those potential problems have earned the bill opposition from a wide range of local politicians. Fort Bend County Judge KP George, a Democrat, says the bill is both irresponsible and politically motivated.

"The same people putting these bills in place, their mantra was local power, and now theyre doing the exact opposite," George said.

Senator Creighton noted that the bill was not bracketed to Democratic-led cities and counties, which may be why opposition to the bill has spread to Republican-led local governments as well.

"This isnt just something that the Democratic leaders of a Houston, Texas or Austin, Texas are afraid of," Cross said. "Weve already been seeing mayors and county judges that are Republican that are concerned about this. For example, Ive just read about the mayor of Bryan or the mayor of Irving (opposing the bill). Those arent exactly hotbeds of liberalism."

Several dozen North Texas mayors, led by Irving Mayor Rick Stopfer, recently co-authored an op-ed for the Dallas Morning News condemning the bill as government overreach.

Other preemption bills

As wide ranging as HB 2127 is, it's far from the only bill preempting local control on the agenda for the 88th Legislature.

"We are actively tracking well over 1,000 bills that would impact city services," the City of Houston's Bill Kelly said. "And this is, by far and away, the most that we have ever had on our oppose' track."

There are some bills where the city has made some progress in limiting the potential consequences of preemption. One is Senate Bill 1015, which governs rate increases by electric utilities. Kelly said that, from 2017 to the present, the City of Houston has saved residents $80 million by protesting rate increases from CenterPoint.

"We get to be able to protest because CenterPoint uses the exclusive right of our right-of-way to provide electricity," Kelly said. "This initial legislation would have completely taken our authority away to be able to do those protests. That is in no way in the interest of anybody that cares about paying on their electric bill, and thats something we fought hard for and are trying to get those protections added back."

Kelly said that the city has had some success, and it's hoping to moderate the bill further as it moves through the House.

Another measure Houston has been able to blunt the effects of is HB 1526, governing municipal parklands. The bill has already passed the House and is awaiting action in the Senate.

Kelly noted that, for every new home constructed in Houston, the city charges a flat fee of $700 that goes to fund parks.

"The last time that we increased that fee was when (State Senator) Carol Alvarado was a councilmember back in 2007." Kelly said. He noted that HB 1526, as originally worded, would have reduced that fee to $7. "We were able to really push, and with repeated testimony, to be able to get that back. We completely exempted single family housing from it. But still, I just dont understand why people would want to reduce the money thats there for parks."

Then there's SB 577, which has passed the Senate and is now in the House. SB 577 primarily deals with food safety regulated by local health departments, but it also covers sound ordinances that is, regulations dealing with noise pollution.

Kelly pointed to Houston's sound ordinance as the product of two years' work by Councilmembers Sally Alcorn and Abbie Kamin. The ordinance is enforceable by the Houston Police Department. SB 577 would nullify it.

"It makes no sense to me why the state of Texas would want to say, We have a one-size-fits-all sound ordinance for the state,' when were the largest American city without zoning," Kelly said. "(Noise pollution) should absolutely be something that you can call your councilmember on if you have a problem, because Council meets every week. It shouldnt be something that you have to call your state rep or state senator on, who meet once every two years. Thats not protecting the quality of life."

Originally posted here:
A Death Star bill aimed at overriding a wide range of local government control powers is likely to pass the Senate - Houston Public Media

WHO is concerned with continued attempts by the tobacco industry and their surrogates to further its interests to influence scientific research, public perception, policy making, and the media; all aimed to ensure proliferation and sale of nicotine and tobacco products.

The tobacco industry continues to amplify misinformation in the media, including the recent egregious attacks on tobacco control organizations[1]. The tobacco industry is the only one that stands to benefit by undermining tobacco control organizations.

There is a fundamental and irreconcilable conflict between the tobacco industrys interests and public health policy interests. WHO urges all Member States to ensure that they are not partnering with or accepting funds from the industry or its front groups.

The international community must not forget that the tobacco industry knowingly denied its products were linked with cancer and falsely claimed there was no harm from secondhand smoke.

This misleading conduct continues today with tobacco, e-cigarette, and other nicotine companies concealing the addictive nature of their products, while directly targeting children and young adults with advertisements for their harmful products. The tobacco industry has no place in tobacco control or harm reduction policy.

The tobacco industry should not be a partner in any initiative linked to setting or implementing public health policies, knowing that its interests are in direct conflict with the goals of public health.

Decades of duplicitous behavior serve as proof that tobacco companies put profit before public health.

The tobacco industry uses a broad array of tactics to interfere with the setting and implementing of tobacco control measures. One strategy is undermining the credibility of WHO and partners so that the public calls into question scientific evidence that proves the harm of tobacco and nicotine products.

Inversely, WHO and WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC) use evidence-based approaches that have helped save millions of lives.

The international community must protect the implementation of the WHO FCTC, a legally binding instrument that is celebrating 20 years since its adoption at the World Health Assembly.

The WHO FCTC helps keep the tobacco industry from interfering in public health policies. Article 5.3 of the WHO FCTCcontains a legal obligation for Parties to protect public health policies from the tobacco industry. The Guidelines for implementation of Article 5.3 of the WHO FCTC, assist Parties on limiting interactions with the tobacco industry and rejecting partnerships with the industry.

WHO and its tobacco control partners[1] continue to uphold the adoption of evidence-based policies to curb tobacco use like MPOWER tobacco control measures that support the full implementation of WHO FCTC. WHOs work with global tobacco control partners has strengthened public health and has now protected over 5 billion people with tobacco control measures.

These great strides in tobacco control are constantly being threatened by the tobacco industrys multibillion dollar campaign.

WHO and its global tobacco control partners do not work with or accept funds from the tobacco industry or by organizations and individuals that work to further the interests of the tobacco industry.

WHOs no tobacco unit with NGOs, foundations, academic centres and governments at all levels in our tobacco control work.https://www.knowledge-action-portal.com/en/about/gcm-participants

https://www.gatesfoundation.org/ideas/media-center/press-releases/2008/07/michael-bloomberg-and-bill-gates-join-to-combat-global-tobacco-epidemic

Originally posted here:
WHO and tobacco control partners urge countries not to partner or ... - World Health Organization