The ALLIANCE eBulletin

your latest media arts + culture news—October 2018

From the Executive Director

October Love.

October is a good month for love + gratitude. I’m grateful for the fall colors I love, the leather jacket-and- boots weather, Warriors basketball, and the invitations to gatherings of tribes around the world where the voices of artists are rising.

I’m grateful for a trip to New York to meet with a new Alliance partner I love named Charlton McIlwain, Vice-Provost and founder of the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies at NYU. We have begun to develop an extensive education research study designed to bridge gaps between learning systems, digital production, equity and opportunity. We are exploring the idea that artists and creative producers are innovators and economic engines of our country, but traditional media arts training models threaten to disproportionately prevent creative digital producers from underrepresented groups to successfully enter, advance and thrive in the new creative economy. We will be looking at a diverse set of programs, geographies and demographics, at community-based training models, and 2 and 4-year university programs, apprenticeships, fellowships, project-based and skills-based learning. Is one of these models more successful than others producing a highly skilled, connected, networked, entrepreneurial digital creative? How might we create, develop and sustain training models that best ensure that producers underrepresented in the creative industries can advance and become future leaders in the creative economy? If you have thoughts about these questions, please get in touch!

After NYC, I head to London for the always exciting Mozilla Festival to co-present the work of the Alliance VR Colored Girls Museum team. In collaboration with The Colored Girls Museum, Microsoft, 371 Productions and producers Amanda Shelby and Emily Kuester, we are developing a cultural model for VR in the browser – and will be creating interactive curriculum, maker toolkits and producing international story labs throughout the design and development process. In addition, we will produce a short standalone VR poem, The Skin I Own, directed by Amanda Shelby, as an immersive introduction and invitation to the browser-based museum experience.

And the last exciting announcement I’m very grateful to make is that The Alliance will be producing/moderating two panels at SXSW next year – one highlighting the work of The VR Colored Girls Museum project, and the other focusing on our Arts2Work initiative, the first federally-registered National Apprenticeship Program in Media Arts + Creative Technologies. Please join us in Austin for Art, Race + Open Web VR: The Colored Girls Museum in the Experiential Storytelling Track (March 8 – 10, 2019 ) and Creative Apprenticeship: A New Frame for Arts Ed as part of SXSW EDU (March 4 – 7, 2019). We’ll share exact times and dates for panels, receptions and meetups on the website as soon as we know them!

And check out the second issue of THE ISSUE, hot off the digital presses. Our National Youth Media Network is on fire with creativity.