Author: ludwigvan968

 

The convergent media collective was able to catch up with spare parts and 10bitworks on a collaboration they were throwing called “Take it apart, make art.”  It was an event that merged hacking and art in one swoop.  Attendees took old electronics apart and then used the materials to make art.  The event was conceived by Mary Cantu of spare parts and hosted by Jeremy at 10bitworks hacker space.  The convergent media collective was able to participate as well as document the event through taking photos and videos.  A good time was had by all.  We look forward to future events by both spare parts and 10bitworks.  Please visit their sites and FB pages for updates:

spare parts:

http://sparepartstudio.org/

https://www.facebook.com/sparepartstudio

10bitworks:

https://www.10bitworks.com/

https://www.facebook.com/10BitWorks.HackerSpace

One of the unique things about our collective is our collaboration. In fact, a key reason we formed was to help each other’s efforts. We saw how we were all working on cool projects and wanted to join forces and go that much further.

A wonderful example of that is a collaboration that took place with Barbara Renauld Gonzales and Deborah Vasquez and the creation of a book titled, the Boy Made of Lighting.

The Boy Made of Lighting’s history can be read about at the San Antonio’s Express News’s website.  What was cool was that joey lopez and Kaye Cruz were key participants in the creation of the book.  Jonathan Guajardo and Christian Rios were two other members that contributed with the audio and video production of the project.  As the project fell on tough times as described in the Express News article, the Convergent Media Collective came together in the summer of 2013 to help put the finishing touches on the book. We also put together a social media campaign to help promote and bring awareness to the book and the importance of it as one of the first interactive children’s book that explores Tejan@ and Chican@ leaders.

The book can be viewed on the ipad and ipad mini by downloading it on itunes.

We would like to thank the Barbara and Deborah for being visionaries of the interactive book idea and for allowing us to collaborate with them!

Our hope is to keep promoting the book and bring cultural awareness so that other Tejan@ and Chican@ books are made in an effort to preserve the heritage of the community.

The Convergent Media Collective came to be because there was a group of students,professionals and makers who were regularly meeting up as friends working on projects for fun.  We collaborated on each other’s projects and helped each other learn new skills.

One of the first projects we undertook as a collective was the Bexar County Bibliotech project.  This project came to fruition when we the Convergent Media student organization was presenting at the annual UIW tech fair.

Across from us was the Bexar County technology group and they were very impressed with our work.  They interacted with Joel Peña and Charlie Young, who showed them some projection mapping and augmented reality.

They then contacted us to have a private meeting where we showed them some demos of our work.

Out of those meetings we were then asked to do a full demo to the CTO of Bexar county and other technologists at the county.

They were quickly impressed with the work we showed them and the ideas and theory we shared with them about social media, both in terms of campaigns and analystics. We presented on visual demonstrations as well as augmented reality.

They then asked us if we could specifically consult with them about Bibliotech, one of the first ever public digital libraries, located in the heart of San Antonio.

As a group at this point we hadn’t officially formed, we just had a chat on Facebook called “the bexar county library chat”.  But one day as we discussed somebody change the title of the chat to “Convergent Media Collective”.  And we were off!

We met regularly with the Bexar bibliotech project manager Laura Cole, who guided us through mutliple demos for various groups.  The highlight of our consultations with the Bibliotech project was consulting directly with Judge Neslon Wolff at the actual project site.  We showed them the technologies and media production ideas that would end up being incorporated into the final opening of the Bibliotech space.

The interactions and meetings gave students and community members first hand experience working with government entities as well as non-profits.  Pitching and demo-ing projects ideas and concept quicky became second nature for collective members.  Our meetings became more frequent, both online and in person.

We prototyped out some augmented reality ideas for them that ended up being directly incorporated, here is a video of one of our initial tests.

What was amazing was the interactions and the reception of The Collective’s ideas by the Bexar County officials, they were so open and encoraging when it came to us exploring ideas and presenting them.

We would like to thank Bexar county for giving us an opportunity to interact with them and give the collective a real world experience in the world of developing new convergent media ideas.