Boston Cyberarts produced Virtual Street Corners, a project by John Ewing

Virtual Street Corners

June 8-June 30, 2010, the storefronts of Brookline Booksmith in Coolidge Corner and A Nubian Notion in Dudley Square were transformed into large video screens, providing pedestrians of each neighborhood with a portal into one another's worlds.

The Virtual Street Corners project, created by artist John Ewing, attempts to bridge gaps and break down stereotypes by exploring the commonalities, differences, and shared issues between the two communities.
Coolidge Corner in Brookline and Dudley Square in Roxbury are only 2.4 miles apart. Though the Route 66 bus links these two communities, they are home to different socio-economic, ethnic and religious groups. People living in one neighborhood rarely visit the other.

Throughout the month, citizen journalists in Dudley Square and Coolidge Corner created videos, set up exchanges between figures of both communities, and anchored live broadcasts. Stories on each neighborhood
were shown in the other, to give residents a view of the other community.

On June 11, reporters from the project were at both storefront locations to engage the public and celebrate the project. Content was streamed live to both locations and is now housed on the project's website at www.virtualcorners.net.

ABOUT THE PROJECT

Virtual Street Corners received a Knight News Challenge grant, awarded to projects that use innovative ideas and technology to report community news, from the Knight Foundation in 2009. The project is produced by Boston Cyberarts Inc. with additional support from Black Rock Arts Foundation and the New England Foundation for the Arts. The interactive video technology is provided by Providea Conferencing.

John Ewing is a Boston-based digital media artist who focuses on public art that creates platforms for social dialogue. His past projects include Ghana Think Tank, currently a finalist for the Cartier Award, and Symphony of a City, portraying Boston from eight different perspectives with "headcams" on residents, that was projected 30 feet high on Boston City Hall and streamed on the web.

Six citizen journalists with backgrounds in traditional and non-traditional media, activism, and social
work participated in the project.

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For more information, visit www.virtualcorners.net or contact John Ewing

Visual Music

This is Michael Carter. The east-coast premiere of my piece, “Well (Live)” will be showing at Northeastern University's Visual Music Marathon on April 28^th during Boston Cyberarts 2007.

I feel like the term “visual music” is not so common and not so defined (even for an artist working in the “genre”), so I want to briefly say what it means to me and how I approach it.

For me, visual music is not about finding a one to one “translation” between music and image. I don't see the goal as creating a new language by connecting term for term the typical descriptions of sound and music (note, pitch, timbre, etc) with visual counterparts (color, value, shape, etc).

I'm concerned with infusing, or maybe even rejuvenating, visual art with the primacy, directness and effectiveness of music.

Music is unique among the arts in its directness and effectiveness in reaching and creating “inner” emotional and psychological states. Between musician and audience, music communicates “meaning” and “feeling” with potent results. The ability to experience the world from the point-of-view of another, which is so rare and difficult in the normal day-to-day world, happens almost effortlessly in music. We hear the music and we experience it; We feel it directly in our bodies. And, if we look at the moment before taste or preference kicks in, everyone hears the same sounds in the same way. It's message is immediate and intuitive and we are connected by this shared experience.

Yet, for the visual artist, this feat is accomplished without two important qualities: you can't see and you can't touch music. It has no physical form or substance. It is not materially “real”.

For me, then, visual music is a process of connecting the visible world to the invisible world. It is an admission that the unreal is real, that the intangible and imperceptible exist and affect us everyday.

The invisible manifest in the visible - That's what visual music means to me.

“Well(live)” is running during the 3-4pm block in an all-day program of current and historical works by many excellent artists.

Oh, and I had granola for breakfast this morning. ;)

Kinodance premiers DENIZEN @Cyberarts/Celebrity Series

In collaboration with the Bank of America Celebrity Series and Boston Cyberarts' Ideas in Motion festival, Kinodance Company will premier DENIZEN an expanded cinema performance at the Boston University Tsai Performance Center on Wed. May 2 (7:30pm) and Thur. May 3rd (8pm). With film by Alla Kovgan, sets by Dedalus Wainwright, lighting by Kathy Couch, costumes by Laura Coulter and performances by choreographers Alissa Cardone and Ingrid Schatz with a stunning cast (dancers Ruth Bronwen, Pape N'Diaye, Deborah Butler) Kinodance stages an intuitive synthesis of film, set, light, sound and movement. DENIZEN explores the act of hunting in the modern world and is inspired by the film Seasons (1979) by Artavazd Peleshian, an Armenian post-WWII Soviet avant-garde filmmaker. Captivated with Peleshian's filmic approach, and the images of Armenian people and rugged Armenian landscapes he portrayed, Kinodance traveled to Armenia in October 2006 to film in the exact landscapes of Peleshian's film. The images are incorporated into the stage work to magnificently manipulate time, memory, space and light.