//Arabic-speaking cyborg asks the audience to participate//
Be a part of this historic art event as we bring in the audience to participate in the live VJ storytelling, tracking the crowd's emotions via real-time imagery. The audience gets to decide how the story is told in this interactive live cinema performance on Feb. 25th. In this 30- minute performance, VJ Um Amel (Arabic for ‘Mother of Hope’), an animated cyborg who is also a mother, invites the audience to get present with our post- 911 world. According to her, she believes that "a shared procedural literacy in new media productions might provide a key to 21st century democratic practices." Um Amel, along with her robot companions, Femme Bot and Shashi, move in and out of media from 1950s Egyptian cinema to present day video games, full-length films, and the Internet in search of Um Amel’s child. As if at the turn if the 21st century, all that is left in Pandora's box is hope: what does ‘hope’ look like in the 21st century?
This collaborative performance has been made possible by the support of many.
Special thanks goes to Creatives DC, Laurie Blair (artivist and community organizer), Mark Stephens (yoga teacher and writer), Paper Cutz, The Fridge DC art gallery, and the Digital Arts and New Media program at UC Santa Cruz.