The convergent media collective was happy to cover the PechaKucha 13 event at the Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum on Feb 25th. We were made aware of the event by Mary Cantu of spare parts and then found out Doris Palmeros, designer and professor from the CART department at UIW would also be presenting. It was great hearing their talks and getting to see them share their enthusiasm with a great audience. We look forward to attending more of these events in the future.
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:
https://www.facebook.com/sparepartstudio
10bitworks:
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.