Women for Networked Collaboration: Our Mashup Presentation

What a project!! And quite a test at learning collaboration, with my partner being on the other side of the country! And an ocean between us at one point!

Well, Andrea and I got along quitewell in collaboration efforts. It all started when she presented a video with pictures of the work of Artimisia Gentileschi , a female Italian Early Baroque painter who painted scenes and issues that were not “allowed” at this time for women to cover. I’m usually not one to address women’s issues, since I’ve been lucky to encounter few obstacles in my own life where gender has been an issue, but seeing this jumpcut and learning about the painter inspired me to build from that video, using Artimisia as an example of media empowering women’s efforts. We used her story as inspiration to introduce the Internet as a weapon for uniting and enforcing the intentions of women still fighting for equal rights.

Instead of building directly from each video, each time one of use completed a short mash-up, we would send it to the other for inspiration. I would take a look at the last thing Andrea did, perhaps make some changes or additions to it, and then make an entirely separate video build from the same or similar themes. She did the same, and our system worked well except for technical difficulties that came from error’s jumpcut has been having.

We planned to add all the videos together in sequence as a “set” for our final presentation, however this feature on Jumpcut caused us all sorts of problems. So, instead we’ve uploaded our videos to a group on Jumpcut, Women for Networked Collaboration, and this way you can take a look at all of our video’s in the same place, and the group can continue efforts towards online collaboration for womens rights beyond our jumpcut assignment.

MORE DETAILS ABOUT THE PROCESS:

Andrea used some great pictures of Artimisia and her painting, with titled themes and remarks between them to tap into questions and philosophy about Feminism. I thought she did a beautiful job overlapping the images, especially in Part II.

I decided to hit-up the footage already available on jumpcut (I love the idea of mashing all this freeshare footage together in ways very different from the footage’s original purpose). I got clips of gunny-pigs, and women’s rights campaigns, broken bottles, and resort spa’s and manages to fit them together with the message we had to get out: “Women, start looking to the Internet if you need a place to go to meet people, find information, or participate in activism when other opportunities may not be available; especially for mom’s strapped down in the home.”

I could have seen this assignment going in so many different directions, and that was the fun in building a project together with a partner, using the web’s great abyss of resources as our building blocks.

-Kelley