The Convergent Media Collective has been very fortunate over the years to meet, collaborate with and document so many great initiatives.  Throughout the process of learning about the greater San Antonio, Tx area we began to take note of all the moving parts in the Art & Technology programming going on.   We also began to develop our own through attending maker faires, community events and going to K-12 schools and providing workshops and programming.

These experiences have influenced us so much that we have decided to dedicate a whole other website to document and brand our efforts in the Art & Technology community of the greater San Antonio, Tx area.

Our project is named openED SA (openedsa.org).  The website will host many of the community outreach blogs we previously hosted here (we will keep sharing them here as well), as well as provide an interactive mapping feature and submission page for Art & Technology initiatives.

For a full explanation click on the image or here to read our introductory article titled “The Pizza Slice.”

For the 3rd year in a row professor joey lopez attended the academy word sanctioned Ann Arbor Film Festival.  Last year he had the pleasure of including students Terrance Raper and Josh Lightner and moderated of diverse group college students who shared their insights into film making.  You can read all about it here.

This year, joey’s panel pertained specifically to women and abstract film making in the 21st century.  Using the format from the previous year, joey worked with the AAFF administration garner women film makers from Universities across the US to be on the panel.  UIW’s Communication Art’s sponsored three students to go on the trip, Brittany Dieke, Brittany Nelson and Mercedes Esquivel.  Each of the students produced works for the festival to show at the panel.

The panel went very well with all the students showing their work and approaches to ideating, creating conceptual works and producing final products.  They also spoke about what it is like to be a women film maker and the challenges and stereotypes they deal with.

In addition to the panel, joey and the convergent media students were able to attend other sessions and film presenations, as well as tour a bit of Michigan, making their way to both GM and Ford factories, as well as the Henry Ford Museum, which provided a great overall experience, though it should be noted the KKK exhibit was disturbing.

We also found a makerspace much like our own, 10bitworks, called All Hands Active.  We literally happen to run into a member on the street and we got a full tour even though they were not officially open, it was awesome to see that makerspaces are developing all over.

We have high hopes for professor joey lopez to put on another great panel in 2017, we hear it deals with civic engagement and film making.  So stay tuned!