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This wiki page is a list of projects currently under development by the Public Media Project Group, a working group of graduate students in the Digital Arts and New Media program at UCSC.

VJ Um Amel --> a laila shereen project

Key Words: Arab, Digital, Rich-media, Archive, Scholarship, Social, Justice, Public Media, Translation, Bilingual, Middle East

This project takes on building a bilingual platform in which a community of collaborators are able to construct a repository for Arab digital media. The intention of building this archive is to contribute to the information architecture that is becoming the epistemological bank of the future. At the same time, the process of archiving allows for the immediacy of "knowledge" in the public domain, creating public intellectuals and artist collaboratives and collectives. Looking at the works of contemporary blogging academics, like Danah Boyd, Juan Cole, As'ad Abu Khalil, Mohja Kahf, and many more, we can say that contemporary research is engaging in this post-Fordist, "just-in-time” scholarship (Henry Jenkins) with the public(s).

The goal is to make inaccessible work accessible—whether it is research being done in universities among Arabists, or the local experimentations with digital media and urban culture among transnational Arab artists. The work considers itself relevant to social justice, situating Middle Eastern culture as its main node. The project is developed in collaboration, with the intention of making use of existing social networking sites.

The output of this multi-modal project has three interfaces for projecting the remixes/mash-ups of the newly archived media:1- VJ live at institutions like universities, art galleries, and museums; 2- recorded and made accessible online; 3- projected on buildings in strategic locations.