Below is a full transcript of the "Urban Literacy Center" manifesto.

Click on the play button to listen to an audio recording of the original text.

"URBAN LITERACY CENTER HERE"

Teachers of writing, web developers, reading specialists, poets, language makers of the street—this is the space for IMMINENT ACTION!

Rent it. Buy it. Make it a squat for the word.

We'll set it up as a center, a space, an Urban Literacy Center for IMMINENT ACTION of the unplanned, the unspecified, and yet the calculated textual intervention.

In a city with empty buildings, hollow centers, and abandoned spaces, the Urban Literacy Center is a reclamation, a moving in, an exodus from the isolated centers of textual learning.

Let the Urban Literacy Center become a place dedicated to the word, the text, the act-up seismic textual event. We traffic in written-on sidewalks, artful graffiti, the spoken word, and the poetic event. We traffic in the pamphlet, textual confetti, and secret notes. The scribbled-on hand is ours. The textual tattoo that lasts forever. We traffic in lost-dog posters, in TXT, in IM, and CSS. We will create it here, make community words and IMMINENT ACTION, then circulate it out to make good.

A hub. A group. An ACTION. A place for people to come together in the creation of texts, in the consumption of texts, in conversation about what the next text will be that will change the world. IMMINENT ACTION through design, rhetoric, and the new hybrid languages of our polyglot present.

This is to say that we are CALLING ALL SUCKAHS who know how to make a text, write a document, compose a website, doctor an image, or construct a three-fold brochure. We need your action here, now, at this site for the creation of Urban Literacy Center #1, the first in a series of 300+ ruptures in the way language is made and designed in our lives. 300+ ruptures dedicated to IMMINENT ACTION.

We make things. We glue them, ink them, bind them, and/or upload them to the web. Go Live! Make it here. Document it here. Change it here on the edge, on the track, on the rail of the city.

High tech, low tech, human potential. We're funded by The Big University, the private donor, the feds, and the city council. We're funded by tax payer dollars, by volunteers. Furnished by the found and the new, engaged as a non-profit for IMMINENT ACTION.

Based on the principle of mixed use, we can incorporate a food line, family planning, dance, crafts, and whatever other flexibility could inhabit this Space. It's a place where we make texts, talk text, plan ways for words to wrap around the building, around the city, into and out of our lives as they encompass the state of affairs.

We change things at the Urban Literacy Center. We maintain things at the Urban Literacy Center. We get personal. We go visual, digital, typographic, simple, and complex. We move into new modes of thinking at the Urban Literacy Center. We hit reset here, hit refresh, claim a new kind of center for the commercialized city.

Forty flat-screen displays on one wall. Big spools of paper. Ubiquitous computing and digital archives. Collage, collate, reproduce, publish.

For fresh, get it here. For real, get it here. For the globalized local, you know where you'll find it. For everything that coffee shops could have been, should have been, but for the silence, the isolation, the three-dollar lattés, get it here. We'll have the community here. We'll have all ages. We'll have the teachers. The writers. The ones who want to act up and act out with the word, through writing, through new kinds of texts online and on the line.

Spray paint stencils, make them here. Sidewalk chalk, get it here. Reading lessons and book groups at any level, get them here. Get your video blog online at the Urban Literacy Center. Cut it. Edit it. Doctor it up and go live. We have servers. We have machines. We have pencils and pens and typewriters and paint. We have people, so check the community tables and bins. The urban. The literate. The center. Now come on, come in. We're open for the business of IMMINENT ACTION.