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Guest Speaker: VJ UM AMEL

Mon, Feb 13, 2012, 12:00 am
Location: 
Communications 150 (Studio C)

Guest Speaker for FILM 136C - Visual Culture and Technology: History of New Media

VJ UM AMEL presents By the Demand of the People: Archiving digitally born information in Arabic

Date: Monday, February 13th
Time: 3:30 - 5:15PM
Location: Communications 150 (Studio C)

Free and Open to interested faculty and students

VJ Um Amel's practices as an artist have recently been expressed through archiving and remixing social media from the Arabic-speaking world.  Her motivation to collect and analyze content comes from a desire to find the voice of the Arabic-speaking body politic over the last turbulent years.  The virtual lab, R-Shief (ARabic for the word "archive") explores a world where information is born digital.  This type of data exploration is a type of cultural analytics, rooted firmly as a digital arts and humanities project.  Outcomes of this research, so far, have varied from written publications, to real-time data visualizations, to 3D interactive environments.  

VJ Um Amel is an Egyptian-American media artist and critic.  She is the creator of R-Shief, a virtual lab that collects and analyzes data in real-time from Twitter, Facebook, and other social media.  Focused on the Arab world, her works map the Arab uprisings and revolutions through semantic analysis of social media feeds in Arabic, French, and English.   Her data visualizations have also been shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, DC Fridge Art Gallery, Tech@STate, among other venues.  As a poet, she is published as Lalia Shereen.  She joined the resaerch team at the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab to develop semantic web technologies in order to survey the importance of social media in political change.  She also is a member and affiliate of the USC Critical Code Studies Lab.  Ms. Sakr hols an M.A. in Arab Studies from Georgetown University and an M.F.A. in Digital Arts and New Media from University of California, Santa Cruz.  She is pursuing a Ph.D. in Media Arts and Practice at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts, where she has been awarded an Annenberg Fellowship and nominated as a HASTAC scholar.  Recent reviews of her work have been published in Fast Company, Science, The Wall Street Journal's MarketWatch, Al-Masry Al-Youm, the Digital Media and Learning blog, Art Territories, and The Creators Project.  

At the request of the instructor of FILM 136C, Um Amel has provided urls on her work: http://vjumamel.com

Any of the last 5 articles published last year and might be of interest: http://vjumamel.com/publications.php

The manifesto Um Amel wrote last April: http://vjumamel.com/manifesto.php

More can be found on R-Shief.org