Speaker(s): Winnie Yoe, Anula Shetty, Michael Kuetemeyer and Roopa Vasudevan
“Power, Community, and Resilience”
This event will be held virtually via Zoom. The meeting will go live at 12pm, and participants will be muted on entry. Questions for the Q&A portion should be submitted through the chat function.
About the Event
This panel will preview two works from the upcoming Screening Scholarship Media Festival (SSMF), hosted by CAMRA at the University of Pennsylvania. Centered on the theme of “Rupture and Repair,” SSMF 2021 features a range of projects and perspectives about how we navigate pain, violence, struggle, trauma and/or loss—as well as the many forms of, and approaches to, repair and healing. The two works featured in this panel deal with questions of negotiating and navigating power, and highlight strategies of resilience and community building that can be used to push back and build strength in the face of seemingly insurmountable structural barriers. The panel will be moderated by Roopa Vasudevan, Center Steering Committee Member, SSMF 2021’s lead organizer and Annenberg PhD candidate.
Beyond Case Closed: From Making Sense to Building Resilience, by Winnie Yoe, is a series of creative research projects driven by Yoe’s experience filing a Title IX complaint and reflecting on the limitations of procedural measures for seeking social justice. Created over the span of six years, each of the three projects — a picture book, an interactive installation and a web-based resource guide — marks a different exploration in the search for resolutions all in attempt to answer the question: How can we build resilience facing traumatic and complex scenarios, especially when traditional means of protest are not feasible?
Places of Power, a virtual reality documentary by Anula Shetty and Michael Kuetemeyer, is an immersive portrait of the Fairhill neighborhood in North Philadelphia, which centers the unique strategies for community safekeeping developed by its residents. The project invites viewers to experience North Philadelphia anew as a tapestry of knowledge, healing and civic leadership. Shetty and Kuetemeyer aim to remove barriers between neighbors and generations, to highlight the important work of neighborhood leaders, to create markers, both in person and in VR, making visible the power and love that reside in the neighborhood.
About the Speakers
Winnie Yoe
Winnie Yoe is a multi-disciplinary designer, artist, and educator passionate about creating interactive stories and digital tools to communicate complex information around issues of social justice. Her work has been exhibited at the ISEA (KR), IMPAKT Festival (NL), CultureHub (US), and Tai Kwun Contemporary (HK) among others. She is a graduate of NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) and Dartmouth College.
Anula Shetty and Michael Kuetemeyer
Anula Shetty and Michael Kuetemeyer are award winning media artists and teachers of experimental and documentary media. They are recipients of a 2017 Pew Fellowship in the Arts and were previously nominated for a United States Artist Fellowship. Their films have been broadcast on PBS and screened at festivals and museums worldwide. Anula is a recipient of three Media Arts Fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and an adjunct professor at Temple University’s Media Studies and Production Department; Michael is an Assistant Professor in the Film & Media Arts department at Temple University, and a founding member and co-director of Termite TV Collective, a collective of video artists whose mission is to produce, distribute and facilitate the creation of experimental and activist media.
Roopa Vasudevan
Roopa Vasudevan (moderator) is an media artist, computer programmer, and scholar. Her artwork has been exhibited internationally, and she has been featured by the New York Times, Reuters, Hyperallergic, PBS NewsHour, and Public Radio International, among others. She was a 2020 Rapid Response for a Better Digital Future Fellow at Eyebeam (NYC), and is a current member of the Vox Populi artist collective in Philadelphia. Roopa is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication at Penn, exploring how media artists and creative technologists are influenced by the priorities of the tech industry.