Discussing the Arab Uprisings with Digital Journalism Students at UCSD

05/22/2012

Invited to UC San Diego to address Liz Losh's Digital Journalism class

VJ Um Amel's practices as an artist have recently been expressed through archiving and remixing social media from the Arabic-speaking world. Her motivation to collect and analyze content comes from a desire to find the voice of the Arabic-speaking body politic over the last turbulent few years. The virtual lab, R-Shief, (Arabic for the word, "archive"), explores a world were information is born digital. This type of data exploration is a type of cultural analytics, rooted as a digital arts and humanities project.

iMappening - Annual Showcase for USC's Media Arts and Practice PhD Program

05/09-10/2012

Including exhibits and talks from the artists, designers, and scholars of the iMAP program.

The Interdivisional Media Arts and Practice (iMAP) PhD program in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California will be holding their annual showcase event, iMappening 2012, on May 9th and 10th, 2012 from 10am-5pm. The event will take place at Fox Stage 3, SCX-105, in the School of Cinematic Arts.

Roundtable on "The Insight of Insider/ Outsider Approaches to Scholarship"

04/11/2012

With Alexandrina Agloro, May Alhassen, and Erin Kamler at Annenberg Graduate Fellows Symposium

How do social identities, embodied privilege, and oppression operate within engaged scholarship? Drawing upon our research, participants will discuss the tools, resources, and best practices. What are specific skills we need to negotiate both roles -- as practitioners and scholars? Through a process of dialogue, we seek to interrogate methods of research.

#OccupyData Hackathon round two in different locations

03/23-24/2012

OccupyResearch, DataCenter, R-Shief Labs, and the MIT Center for Civic Media announce OccupyData Round II

Hackathon II builds on demos and other tools from the first and turns our collaborative energy on visualizing the 5000+ responses to the OccupyResearch General Demographics and Participation Survey (ORGS), as well as R-Shief's Twitter #occupy datasets aggregating since September 2011 and other datasets people might want to use. This event is not only for hackers or coders, but for anyone who's interested. Bring your ideas, skills, creativity, questions and critical perspectives as we explore occupy datasets using free and open source tools and software. We'll make connections from one place to another – open to all participants!

Wizard Science Electronic Party at The 418 Project in Santa Cruz

03/09/2012

Performing live visuals with GRIMBLEE, BASSEX, RUDEBRAT, and GuR

To celebrate the launch of our new crew we've decided to fly out one of our current favorite producers GRIMBLEE. Get ready for some BIG BAD BASS because this guy really doesn't fuck around. Subsonic support provided by Bassex, Rudebrat, and GuR!

By the Demand of the People: Archiving digitally born information in Arabic

02/13/2012

Invited guest lecturer on the history of new media art at UC Santa Cruz

The Spirit of Tahrir: on the anniversary of the Egyptian Revolution

01/29/2012

Honorary guests Alaa Abd El-Fattah and Ahdaf Soueif join live from Cairo

The program includes an exclusive keynote via phone from Cairo by prominent blogger and activist, Alaa Abd El-Fattah, and honorary guest Skype call with bestselling author and political commentator, Ahdaf Soueif. VJ Um Amel joins DJ Ma'at for an afternoon of world music synchronized to a remix of Egyptian cinema and media emerging from the revolutions across the Middle East and North Africa. Drawn from the databases of the R-Shief initiative, this performance pays tribute to the vision of the people.

Review in Egypt Independent year-end

12/29/2011

"A year in review: When history becomes art," by Helen Stuhr-Rommereim in Egypt Independent

"Sakr wrote, "human experience… is in a constant state of becoming. In this case, R-Shief is designed to embody this in its code and machine intelligence," describing the archive as a technological innovation that learns, experiences, and draws connections like a living brain. R-Shief reads the internet and learns from it, organizing the unfathomable information web into something slightly more fathomable."

Article out on Jadaliyya's launch of O.M.A.R. page

12/19/2011

Published "The Materiality of Virtuality: Internet Reporting On Arab Revolutions" in Jadaliyya

"Today, the irony is that in the midst of Arabic cries for justice, democracy, dignity, and freedom, Western interpretation of social media data on the Arab uprisings are privileged and continue to predominate. In addition, the material experience of new media, virtuality, is easily misunderstood...As I mentioned, we remain challenged with the localization of Arabic language tools freely available in open source. And the slippage of misconstruing data for knowledge perhaps is the most dangerous of all, especially when these believable truths are cause for action."

Review in latest edition of Fast Company

12/12/2011

"The People's Skype' and Occupy Wall Street Hackathons", by Neal Ungerleider Fast Company

" Laila Shereen Sakr, a doctoral student at the University of Southern California, has played a crucial role in the lab's efforts and has demonstrated her findings to, among others, executives at Facebook."

Egyptian Body Politic REMIX installed at Cultural Festival in Rio de Janeiro

12/03/2011

Invited to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to exhibit video remix in digital culture festival.

Invited to participate in Brazil's first digital culture conference.

"Arab Uprising, Understanding the Causes of Change" at Munk School of Global Affairs at University of Toronto

11/10/2011

Invited to participate in conference via Skype

In two panel discussions (1:00pm-2:30pm and 3:00pm-4:30pm) we seek to understand local and regional forces of change that fuelled the uprisings and how they have impacted different countries in the Middle East. In addition, we will discuss whether there has been any meaningful reform in this region, what has changed, and what has not.

Word Cloud Visual part of installation Art Territories exhibition in Vienna

10//2011 - 12/2011

Curated by Camera Austria director Reinhard Braun in Vienna, Austria

COMMUNITAS. Among Others, curated by Camera Austria director Reinhard Braun, seeks to address the unimaginable social reconstruction that has seized our lives, turning the question of one's own social or cultural location into a more difficult task than ever before. The exhibition asks which values, convictions, traditions or revolutions, protests, resistances, subversions of all kinds put pressure on this social location or allow it to become imaginable nevertheless?

"Music, Freedom, and a Bit of Egyptian Cinema" sponsored by National Gallery of Art in Amman

10/23//2011

Hosted by Makkan Art Gallery, VJ Um Amel & DJ Ma'at perform live in Amman, Jordan

In this live performance, VJ Um Amel joins DJ Ma'at for an evening of electronica and world beats against a remixed display of several musicals from Egyptian cinema including Lahn el-Wafa' (1955) starring Abdel Halim Hafez and Chadia; 'Afrita Hanem (1948) starring Samia Gamal and Farid El-Atrache; and Fatma (1947) by Ahmed Badrakhan with visualizations of social media, art, and design emerging from the revolutions of dignity spreading across the Middle East and North Africa.

Review and informatics published in Science magazine

09/30//2011

"Social Scientists Wade Into the Tweet Stream," by Greg Miller in Science

"One of the largest repositories of Arabic-language tweets is a database started by Laila Shereen Sakr, an Egyptian-born graduate student in cinematic arts at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Shereen Sakr says the project originally sprang from an activist impulse to make sure the voices of Arabic speakers were heard. But she's grown increasingly interested in the research potential. She's found intriguing spikes in certain hashtags, the terms used to flag a topic on Twitter, preceding the fall of Zawiya and Tripoli in Libya, for example."

"Turning Information in to Insight Panel" at Tech@State conference in Washington, DC

09/23//2011

Invited to roundtable discussion on Data Visualization

Invited to conference on Data visualization with Keynote address by Edward Tufte. Followed conference with visit to Ferrum College as part of lecture series on "Transformations of Human Identity in the 21st Century."

Headline in USC's Daily Trojan for participation in first Fellows Forum

09/15/2011

With Maytha Alhassen and Dr. Laurie Brand on "New Perspectives on Islam and the Middle East"

About 50 students and faculty came to "New Perspectives on Islam and the Middle East," which focused on issues related to events that have transpired in the region during the past few months.

Live video performance with Poet Remi Kanazi and Hip-Hop Artist Nizar Wattad

09/10//2011

"Remi Kanazi Live" with Hip-Hop Artist The Philistines and VJ Um Amel in Los Angeles

Palestinian American performance artist Remi Kanazi will appear at the Levantine Cultural Center, along with special guests VJ Um Amel with a live visuals show and Philistines master rapper Nizar Wattad. Mix together outrage at the illegal occupation of Palestine and the passionate performance of spoken word artist Remi Kanazi and you get an evening of "Poetic Injustice," slated for Saturday, Oct. 1, at the Levantine Cultural Center.

Two articles analyzing Twitter trends

08/09/201, 08/29/2011

On Tripoli, Libya and "Collateral Damage: #Oslo Attacks and Proliferating Islamophobia" in Jadaliyya

"Laila Shereen Sakr...followed the Arab Spring closely, creating a massive database of Arabic-language tweets. Instead of selecting terms herself and searching the database, Sakr let a computer program aggregate data and identify patterns. While aggregating tweets from Libya, her program identified spikes in certain hashtags or selected key words. These word spikes became a sort of pulse, an early warning identifying the fall of the town of Zawiya. A short while later, similar words spikes reappeared allowing Sakr to identify the impending fall of Tripoli. She was accurate to within a few hours."

Arab Techies 2011 Workshop in Cairo

07/31//2011

Second consecutive year to participate in Arab Techies Workshop

This year's Arab Techies workshop was help at the AUC Tahrir campus in Cairo, Egypt. Collaborated with 30-40 participants from around the Arab world around current events.

R-Shief and VJ Um Amel in the News

06/27//2011

Press coverage in Egypt Independent, Digital Media and Learning, and Art Territories

Having just presented at The Access to Knowledge for Development Center's (A2K4D) second annual workshop at AUC's Tahrir Campus in Cairo, Egypt on June 14, 2011, R-Shief Project Lead Laila Shereen Sakr (VJ Um Amel) and R-Shief are generating a lot of interest this last week in June.

"Al-Sha'ab Yureed" (The People Demand): Transmitting the Revolution" at AMC

06/27//2011

A2K4D's Second Annual Conference at American University in Cairo to Allied Media Conference in Detroit

After just returning from a two-week trip to Cairo, Egypt where I was invited by the Access to Knowledge for Development Center at the American University of Cairo to participate in their second annual conference on "Democratizing Knowledge," I participated on a panel on "Al-Sha'ab Yureed" (The People Demand): Transmitting the Revolution" at the Allied Media Conference in Detroit, Michigan via Skype.

Conference on "Democratizing Knowledge" at AUC Tahrir Campus in Cairo

06/18/2011

Access to Knowledge for Development (A2K4D) Second Annual Conference at American University in Cairo

The Access to Knowledge for Development Center (A2K4D) held its second annual workshop at AUC's Tahrir Campus on Tuesday evening. The event, titled "Access to Knowledge, Democratizing Technologies and Development," looked at ways that knowledge and technology can intersect to maximize access and democratization, which are held as crucial catalysts for human development.

Live video performance at Bass Synthesis in Los Angeles

06/18//2011

Perform live visuals at Dubstep electronic party produced by Weird Science

We're bringing in some up and comers in Santa Cruz and Bay Area scene to Los Angeles. From the crew that brought you When Worlds Collide, get ready for Bass Sick Synthesis! With Performances By: *TROWA* (Play Me Records/Westbay Music) (LA - Dubstep), *BASSEX* (Vital/Play Me Records) (SF - Electro-Sex-Step) , *LUCXKE* (SC - Glitch/Electro/Dubstep), *Andrew the Pirate* (Dub Pirates/Raindance) (SC - Dubstep), *Smasheltooth* (Bad Bitch Brigade) (SC - Hyphy-Step), *Zaggasaurus* (Primal) (SC - Dubstep), *WobbleBros. (GuR + Brent)* (SC - Dub-House-Hop-Step), *Swing of Things* (LA/SC - Dubstep), *Pope John Paul* (SC - Dubstep), and *Zipse* (SC -Dubstep). Lighting by Flash Entertainment. Visuals by VJ Um Amel & Spaceboy Coop. And Belly Dancing by Jingles.

Visit to Facebook Headquarters and The Wall Street Journal Interview

05/18//2011

Presented on "Visual Nesting: Facebook's Design for Building Community" at Facebook Headquarters

"On Wednesday, Shereen Sakr will present her findings to Facebook executives at the company's headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif....'At Facebook, I'm going to tell them that I'm seeing really interesting analytics and that social media can offer cultural analysis to understand the motivations of people who are creating change and transforming the Middle East today,' Shereen Sakr said."

USC Annenberg Double Header

04/01/2011, 04/05/2011

Annenberg Innovation Lab's Inaugural Conference and Annenberg Fellowship Creative Symposium

Invited to perform live remix on "Media Methods: Youth, Revolution, and the Arab States" at Annenberg Fellowship Creative Symposium, a few days after presenting on "The Social Web Meets the Semantic Web" at Annenberg Innovation Lab's Inaugural Conference at USC in Los Angeles.

Blogs and Bullets Conference at Stanford University

02/24/2011

Invited to roundtable discussion by US Institute for Peace, GW University, and Liberationtech at Stanford University

From Wikileaks revelations to claims of "Twitter revolutions," the role of new media in shaping global political action is one of the most discussed but least understood phenomena confronting scholars, policymakers, advocates, and the private sector. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has made "digital democracy" a cornerstone of U.S. diplomacy; grassroots organizations like Ushahidi are crowdsourcing everything from protest to disaster relief; and corporations like Cisco and Google are increasingly making news for their role in international development and commerce.

Media-Making Madness: #Arab Revolutions from the Perspective of Egyptian-American

02/21/2011

Invited as guest to write for Henry Jenkin's blog, media critic and prolofic scholar

This presentation hopes to have extended notions of how innovative methods might be applied in a Media studies or Middle East studies context. Through this VJed publication, my aim has been to demonstrate the notion of design/ art practice as transformative research.

New Release: Women & Youth of the Arab Revolutions

02/08//2011

(Suheir Hammad, Carlos Latuff, DUBSTEP reMIX)

Inspired by the actions of young, Egyptian women whose voices are weapons! Videos by Asma Mahfouz which she posted before January 25...was her video the seed?A compelling spoken word performance by Palestinian Poet Suheir Hammad mixed with original DUBSTEP/ BASS score by DJ Lucxke guides this remix. ...in awe of the women of the revolution.

#Twitter Analytics Soft Launch

02/12/2011

R-Shief is announcing a soft launch on its new Twitter Analytics today

With our robust database, we develop a variety of ANALYTICS and VISUALIZATIONS. Examples include: (1) The original interface offers a bar graph that filters tweets by language. (2) The hashmap above if an artistic rendering of all tweets on #Egypt the day Mubarak resigned. 3) An innovative mapping of words in all the tweets on #Jan25 from 01/25-02/10 that shows the semantic relationship among all the words in the corpus of data.

Security or Uncertainty? Stabilizing R-Shief Twitter Analysis during the Jasmine & Egyptian Revolutions

02/05/2011

Published in peer-reviewed critical code journal, ThoughtMesh.net

I argue that Twitter and its surprising political usages are important. Most recently in Tunisia, Egypt, and other parts of the Arab world, they have created an interplay between the application of structure and resistance that has been transformative.

Live video performance with DJ Bassam at MESA dance Party in San Diego

11/19/2010

Friday, November 19, 2010 at the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) conference

media artist, VJ Um Amel, will synch up with DJ Bassam Haddad to bring groovy images to life and make them move to the beat through live data feeds. This year DJ Bassam returns for a repeat performance; and as an extra treat, he is bringing along a guest who will remix and reassemble video clips with data feeds into a multi-screen projection. Enjoy the visual stylings of VJ Um Amel customized for the evening through a unique set of rotoscope, new wave montage, and original animations of Middle Eastern cyber landscapes and cyborgs.

"(Re)Thinking R-Shief: Implementing the Digital Form" Video Presentation

07/2010

Presented paper via Skype at World Congress for Middle East Studies conference in Barcelona

Panel at WOCMES: "Palestine/Internet: On-line Imagination, Activism and Archiving"

Yale University's Digital Humanities conference

02/19-20/2010

Participated in The Past's Digital Presence conference at Yale

Presenting paper entitled "R-Shief: Arabic for ‘Archive’ in the Cyber World” at symposium on The Past's Digital Presence: Database, Archive, and Knowledge Work in the Humanities.

New Release: Umdulation Circa 1950: A VJ Um Amel Remix

10/09/2009

VJ Um Amel Releases latest remix on Egyptian cinema, belly dancing, and the fibbonacci series

In this live performance, VJ Um Amel remixes several musicals from Egyptian cinema including Lahn el Wafa (1955) starring Abdel Halim Hafez and Chadia; Afrita Hanen (1948) starring Samia Gamal and Farid El Atrache; and Fatma (1947) by Ahmed Badrakhan.

Teaching Seminar on the Art of Collaboration

09/24/2009 - 10/29/2009

Teaching seminar in conjunction with symposium on the Art of Collaboration

Students in this class will engage in these questions through readings, seminar discussion, and direct artistic collaboration with other members of the class that will culminate in a multi-channel video installation of our collective art work(s) at the end of the course.

R-Shief Prototype at Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History

06/1/2009 - 06/24/2009

Installation in interACTIVATE show

R-Shief's Prototype is a recent installation in interACTIVATE exhibition at Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. The show includes new media works that probe the interplay of private and public space as they interrogate the borderlands, edges, and contested territories of contemporary new media art practice.

Awarded 2009 ADC Jack Shaheen Media Scholarship

06/14/2009

ADC Jack Shaheen Media Scholarship

Shereen Sakr awarded scholarship "to recognize Arab-American students who excel in Media Studies. Awards were announced and presented during ADC's Annual Convention in Washington, DC."

Publication in Parson's Journal for Information Mapping

04/20/2009

The R-Shief Initiative: Proof of Concept

Project documentation and proof of concept published in Volume 1, Issue 2 of PJIMS. R-Shief is a multilingual website that integrates open-source software in order to archive digital genres on on the Middle East and its Diaspora.

Harvard's Islamopedia Project Launch

04/20/2009

Commission by Harvard University for art direction on Islamopedia online

Lead design on Islamopediaonline.org. It is a comprehensive, web-based, interactive collection of diverse discourses on the current Islamic tradition. Commissioned by for The Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program at Harvard University.

Launching VJ Um Amel

04/09/2009

Arab, Cyborg, Mother--> Remixing by VJ Um Amel

Submitted proposal to create a The VJ Um Amel Video Blog. The blog will narrate a series dialogues between VJ Um Amel and three young, transnational, Arab women—a VJ living in France whose real name is Amele, an Egyptian computer programmer and activist living in Cape Town, and a Palestinian-American intermedia artist living locally in California.

Installation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

11/2008 - 02/2009

Produced video and co-designed website for artist's installation at the museum

Create video clip and co-design website for exhibit of Warren Sack's "Conversation Map," in the "Art of Participation Show: 1950 to Now" curated by Rudolf Frieling at the SF Museum of Modern Art.

R-Shief

11/22 - 11/25/2008

First public viewing of digital platform

Piloting live projection of R-Shief at the Middle East Studies Association conference. R-Shief is a participatory, online, Arabic/English archive artfully designed to showcase and archive digital work, radio shows, lectures, conferences, and films via automated transcriptions and semantic indexing alongside traditional, written material featuring the most exciting developments in the Middle East and in Diaspora.

Intervene! Interrupt! Rethinking Art as Social Practice

05/15/2008

A three-day conference and month long series of interventionist exhibitions at UC Santa Cruz

A series of exhibitions featuring the work of participating artists will run concurrently with the conference, hosted by: the Art department and the Sesnon Gallery at UCSC; the LAB, San Francisco; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose. Interruptions will foster exchange between scholars, innovative regional and international artists and curators, through panel presentations, performances and indoor and outdoor exhibitions.

Remix Lecture at Cornell University

04/12/2008

Presented at visual culture conference via video remix

"On Performing Arab New Media" at the Diasporic Bodies and Visual Culture: Contemporary African and African Diaspora Art Perspectives conference at Cornell University.

Post-Colonial Ninja Front Exhibit

02/01/2008

Photo montage of the Wall, Graffitti Installation

A collaborative exhibit at the Porter Galler at UC Santa Cruz. Included United States of Consciousness open mic.