BY J.B. Nicholas
Soon after the sun set Thursday evening, a lone man pushed a lop-sided, nearly broken shopping cart down Church Street, toward the site of the proposed Islamic Cultural Center. A ratty gray blanket covered the cart, making it virtually indistinguishable from those routinely seen being pushed by homeless people in the neighborhood, enabling the man to glide along essentially unnoticed in the dusk.
But the man pushing the cart, Vlad Teichberg, 38, was not homeless. Instead he was an activist, associated with a group called the Glassbead Collective, and this night he was on a mission to promote religious freedom and counter the voices that oppose the Cordoba Initiative’s Park 51 project, known around the world as the “Ground Zero mosque.”
Around the corner, Teichberg, reached beneath the blanket and gave a cord a swift, sharp pull, firing up a portable generator at the bottom of the cart. Then, after connecting some wire, a large video projector came to life, and Teichberg, slowly pushed the cart around the corner toward the Park51 site.
A renegade, anarchist-associated group, Glassbead specializes in culture jamming, a technique employed to disrupt and subvert mainly neo-fascist and corporate images and ideas. Lately, Glassbead has become slightly infamous for large-scale, high-power video projections. In 2007, for example, on the fourth anniversary of the Iraq War, the group projected anti-war images onto the Deutsche Bank building, overlooking Ground Zero.
For this project, the group developed a short, animated projection depicting the world being surrounded by a circle, along with the words “unity” and “equality” in twelve different languages.
“The far right,” Teichberg said, “is using the Mosque building to rally the forces of hate. By projecting these images onto the space we re-contextualized it. We hope to strip the right of this power.”
Teichberg and his cart came to rest across the street from the site. After pushing a few buttons, the group’s projection was shot onto the façade of the building, over the police car parked out front and over the two patrolmen standing sentry on the building’s front steps.
Typically, Teichberg said, when Glassbead does an “action” such as this it faces official opposition, occasionally including arrest. This time, however, he and the group were left alone. For nearly a half-hour the projection ran, causing passersby, New Yorkers and visitors alike, to stop, to stare, and to add their voices to the debate, none of which were in opposition.
“That’s so cool,” said one spectator, who requested anonymity.
