Laila Shereen Sakr is a poet, VJ, and digital artist. Sakr has co-founded media and art collectives in Washington, DC including the Guerrilla Poetry Insurgency and Word of Mouth. Current projects include R-Shief, an Arabic-English web-based archive for scholars; and VJ Um Amel Video Series, a conceptual art project. Presently, she is lecturer and research associate at UC Santa Cruz. She holds an MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University, and an MFA in Digital Arts and New Media from UCSC.
In the digital world we live in, being a viewer is passé. Web 2.0 tools-—social networks, wikis, blogs, voicestream, You Tube, Google Docs—-have allowed users to be participants. Instead of creating isolated users, such technologies foster community and collaboration. Why is collaboration important today? Global economic crises are affecting the way companies and organizations do their work. Corporations, governments, educational institutions, and others are being asked to adapt their organizational structures and processes to adapt to the current economic climate. How might collaboration as an art practice methodology service as a tactic to be used in other fields?
Students in this class will engage in these questions through readings, seminar discussion, and direct artistic collaboration with other members of the class that will culminate in a multi-channel video installation of our collective art work(s) at the end of the course. This two-unit course will meet twice a week for only five weeks leading up to the Porter College sponsored conference on The Art of Collaboration: Processes, Technologies, Authorship on Thursday, October 22, and Friday, October 23, which students are required to attend. Students in this course will present their collaborations at the conference on Thursday, October 22 in the new DARC Reflective Lab. Students in this class will produce collaborative art work(s) in an inter-campus crowdsourcing feedback with students at the University of Maine by reviewing each other’s works via The Pool.
Click here to see website designed and developed by students for the project. (...includes media gallery, biographies, and more information.)Check out or join our Facebook group "Seminar in the Arts UCSC"Shandrah Faith Lopez, Diana Caamal
Sarah Deicke, Marlee Fry, and Xian Chua
August Spafford, Cara Mammon
Jose D'alenaes, Peik Lui, and Thomas Fairfield
Molly Schau, Brandon Rafison, and Grace Ellison
Christopher Campbell, Jamie Morton, and Pamela Ong
