The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) along with students from West Forsyth High School are sharing the results of an international video art program developed by SECCA with their teachers and parents. The special video screening will be held:
Time: 3:45 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.
Date: Thursday, April 23, 2009
Place: West Forsyth High School, Room 905
What: Sharing the final videos created by both teams of students.
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. — The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) is helping young students to understand each other, their diverse backgrounds and the places where they live through an innovative video project. During the program, students from West Forsyth High School, a Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Public School, worked with students living in South Korea.
Called The Switch Video Project, SECCA’s educational program involves students from two high schools — West Forsyth High School in Clemmons, N.C., and Lincoln High School in Seoul, South Korea. The program has been taught by Maya Gilliam, a local artist/educator and owner of III Eye Digital, a local multimedia firm.
This project is part of the educational program developed to support SECCA’s Inside Out: Artists in the Community ll public art program. An imaginative cultural exchange program, Switch Video is presented in conjunction with Berlin, Germany artist Anna von Gwinner’s video installations, a part of SECCA’s year-long public art program. Von Gwinner is one of seven artists creating public art in Winston-Salem during 2009.
The students explored and documented their specific “locales” through video and other new media tools.
Students in each class used Skype™, a web-based video-conferencing software, to communicate with each other in real time. As part of these dialogues, students considered the differences and similarities with their counterparts’ places and lifestyles. During the project, students explored the intersection of place, identity and how they construct their identities and understand the unique status of project participants from their partner country.
After documenting their lives, the West Forsyth students “switched” or traded their video footage with the Korean students who reconstructed each other’s video content. The switch underscores the importance of each groups’ communication during the process in order to construct a result that is authentic to their counterpart’s vision for the final video. The final videos will be presented at West Forsyth High School on Thursday, April 23 at 3:45 p.m. in Room 905.
Sponsors for The Switch Video Project include West Forsyth High School, III Eye Digital, a Winston-Salem multimedia design firm and the Flip Video Spotlight™ program.
Inside Out: Artists in the Community ll is supported by a grant from The Arts Council of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art, and by a program grant provided by the James G. Hanes Foundation
SECCA is designed to involve audiences in the art of our time. SECCA is an operating entity of the North Carolina Museum of Art, an agency of the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources. SECCA is also a funded partner of The Arts Council of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County.