eSights, eSounds

eSights, eSounds
Scribe's New Media Initiative

eSights, eSounds premiere!

Friday, September 18, 2009
8:00 PM at apogee@brandywine
728-730 S. Broad Street
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As part of our 25th Anniversary celebration Scribe is launching eSights, eSounds, a special New Media initiative that is commissioning four works by both individual artists and members of community groups who are exploring social, cultural and political issues of concern to the region. This project, which is being supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation, supports artists in using new technologies -- cell phones, interactive web sites, video games, podcasts, etc -- as creative tools to tell their stories. This special program is a chance to enlarge and expand the creative palette at Scribe Video Center, a media arts center know internationally for its community-based media projects.

The four projects are guided by New Media artists Shu Lea Cheang, Michelle Halsell, and Mendi and Keith Obadike. Project Coordinators are Michael Kuetemeyer and Anula Shetty of Termite TV Collective.
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Announcing 2008-2009 eSights, eSounds Projects

Folk Arts/Cultural Treasures Charter School - Asian Americans United - Phila Folklore Project
The Folk Arts/Cultural Treasures Charter School, in partnership with Asian Americans United and the Philadelphia Folklore Project, is putting the curatorial skills and responsibilities in the hands of students, parents, and community members through the Cultural Treasures Project, an online museum that highlights the everyday richness of Philadelphia's diverse communities.

Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign
As a multimedia database filled by the testimonies of the country's impoverished, the "Faces of the Fallen" website serves as an accessible resource both for those with stories to tell and for those who seek to listen. While providing online training and instruction for people wishing to upload material, the website encourages wide participation in the documentation of economic human rights violations and in their cogent and assertive exhibition.

Serena Reed
The "Philly Homegrown Project" is an interactive website that provides enough resources for any Philadelphian to become an expert in local wholistic health. Through user-created audio, video and text, the wesite offers an impressive bredth of alternative health education anchored in Philadelphia through strategies of local authorship, community news, and an animated transit map that allows viewers to plan their own routes between the city's wholistic health resources.

Timothy Portlock
Following in the tradition of some of Philadelphia's finest artwork, Portlock's project aims to bring a new media mural to an empty wall in the city. The project visually juxtaposes different understandings of "economic wellbeing" through four different video projections, each of which is animated and altered by live, streaming data from internet sources.
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More About the Guest Artists

Shu Lea Cheang, a multi-media artist working in the field of net-based installation, social interface and film production. In 2007, she launched "MobiOpera", a collective public cinema made with mobile phones as part of the New Frontier section at the Sundance Film Festival. Now based in Paris, Shu Lea Cheang previously presented works at Scribe in 1989 as part of our first series of Producers' Forums.

Mendi and Keith Obadike are a poet and a composer/sound designer. They are among the first artists in America to explore the Internet as a creative medium. Their work has been commissioned by the Whitney Museum of Art, Yale University, the New York African Film Festival and Electronic Arts Intermix. Their upcoming projects include a new installation and album entitled TaRonda Who Wore White Gloves and an Internet opera entitled Four Electric Ghosts. The Obadikes have been guest presenters at Scribe Producers' Forum.

Michelle Halsell is the CEO and a Co-Founder of Missing Pixel, a web design and interactive media company. Her ongoing collaborations with award-winning artists have led to the development of web sites, CD-ROMs, DVDs, digital video projects and interactive installations. She teaches graduate seminars in Interactive Documentary production and Social Activism at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, and has taught a Master Class at Scribe.
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More About the Project Coordinators

Anula Shetty is an award winning filmmaker who received her Master of Fine Arts degree in Film & Media Arts from Temple University. She is a producer and co-director of Termite TV Collective, a group of video artists who produce experimental and activist media. She is a recipient of three Media Arts Fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She has taught film and video production at the University of the Arts, Arcadia University, Asian Arts Initiative and Scribe Video Center.

Michael Kuetemeyer is an award-winning experimental and documentary filmmaker and a founding member of the video collective Termite TV. He has received a Fulbright Fellowship to teach film in India and, as an assistant professor, teaches video and new media at Temple University.