[Purple-Blurb] Roderick Coover & Nitin Sawhney tomorrow 5:30pm

[Nick Montfort]

I hope you can join us for the first Purple Blurb of the semester:

Video @ Purple Blurb
Roderick Coover & Nitin Sawhney
Monday, March 1
5:30pm-7pm (note that this is earlier than last semester)

All events this semester are in 14E-310.

Please note (or recall) that 14E is the east wing of Building 14, the 
building which also houses the Hayden Library. This is *not* building E14, 
the new Media Lab building.


RODERICK COOVER

Canyonlands (www.unknownterritories.org) is a film and interactive 
documentary about the works of the novelist and essayist, Edward Abbey 
(1927-1989). Abbey worked as a seasonal ranger and forest lookout in 
Western parks and forest-lands, wrote in praise of wilderness, and called 
attention to the destruction of the desert landscape. His descriptions of 
eco-sabotage in his novel The Monkey Gang were an inspiration for the 
formation of the environmentalist organizations such as EarthFirst! 
Canyonlands takes users into a virtual representation of the Colorado 
River and Utah canyonlands. There, users will follow Abbey’s road and 
fascinating side routes as they weave their way through history.

Roderick Coover makes panoramic interactive environments, collaborative 
streaming visual poems, and multimedia documentary projects about 
histories, narratives, and the sense of place. Some titles include Unknown 
Territories (Unknownterritories.org), Cultures in Webs (Eastgate Systems), 
>From Verite to Virtual (D.E.R), The Theory of Time Here (Video Data Bank), 
The Language of Wine (RLCP), and Something That Happened Only Once (RLCP) 
among others. An associate professor of film and media arts at Temple 
University, Roderick Coover has received awards from USIS-Fulbight, a LEF 
Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation, among others. URL: 
http://www.roderickcoover.com

NITIN SAWHNEY

Strawberries, Roosters and the Chocolate Seas is an upcoming 
feature-length documentary. It is a personal journey into the heart of 
Gaza using a satirical and poetic rendering of everyday life and the 
extraordinary events witnessed by the filmmaker, during his visit there 
one year after the devastating 22-day siege in January 2009. The film, 
shot during two intense weeks in January 2010, includes interviews with 
fishermen, farmers, physicians, teachers, and working professionals, 
interspersed with footage that captures dramatic events like the large 
convoys of aid arriving in Gaza despite the blockade, tunnels used to 
smuggle goods, hip hop bands striving for creative expression, and the 
floods that turned Gaza’s seashore from deep blue to chocolate.

Nitin Sawhney is a research fellow in the Program in Art, Culture and 
Technology in the Department of Architecture at MIT. He co-founded the 
Voices Beyond Walls initiative for digital storytelling in Palestinian 
refugee camps. The program was founded in 2006, when pilot digital media 
and storytelling workshops were first conducted in the Balata and Jenin 
refugee camps in the West Bank. Since then local and international 
volunteers have conducted nearly a dozen workshops in six different 
refugee camps. See: http://www.voicesbeyondwalls.org Sawhney was selected 
as a Visionary Fellow with the Jerusalem 2050 Program: 
http://envisioningpeace.org/visions/media-barrios He has recently returned 
from a trip to Gaza and is sharing footage from a documentary he is 
co-producing: http://www.GazaRoosterFilms.com

-- 
-   Nick Montfort         nickm at nickm.com     http://nickm.com
--
-   Associate Professor of Digital Media
  -  Program in Writing & Humanistic Studies, MIT
--  77 Massachusetts Avenue, 14N-233, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307