An exhibition by students of the City Studio at Eugene Lang College, the New School & Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani, in collaboration with SPURA Matters.

The Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (SPURA) is the largest undeveloped city-owned parcel of land south of 96th Street, and it has been a contested site since it was cleared for “renewal” more than 40 years ago.

Please join us at a new exhibition by the New School’s City Studio, Exploring SPURA, which delves into the experience of living at SPURA now – the resources and restrictions – as well as the stories of today and the experience of the SPURA diaspora, displaced many years ago. The exhibition springs from the City Studio’s research in the community and hopes to continue encouraging productive conversation about the site’s future.

The question of SPURA is a timely one, as plans for its development are in discussion once more at the Community Board. Come join the conversation!

The 2010 City Studio creators of Exploring SPURA are: Sarah Charles, Jamie Florence, Leijia Hanrahan, Anke Hendriks, Lila Knisely, John Lake, Claudie Mabry, Katie Priebe, Adam Schleimer, Kaushal Shrestha, Emily Winkler-Morey and Hannah Zingre. Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani is the professor and exhibition curator.

The City Studio course of the Urban Studies department, Eugene Lang/New School explores the life of a small urban space, through archival, ethnographic, visual and participatory research. SPURA Matters is a visioning project for the SPURA site to get people talking about SPURA’s future. It is a collaboration between Good Old Lower East Side, Pratt Center for Community Development, and Place Matters/City Lore.

I just returned from the Digital Hollywood conference in Santa Monica, CA, I talked on a panel which was trying to understand how to best leverage video archives and assets for both large media companies and smaller non-profits.

I showed the PBS video platform on which I was the design lead. I discussed how the new tools we developed give PBS access to their own rich archive, and allow them to program in a new way online. These online video platforms in effect allow PBS to return to being true network producers: categorizing shows by content topics, not by the time-slots of linear TV. They are now able to create new channels of content by combining new and old shows with valuable web content for context.

Highlights from the panel

Broadcasters are now broadcasting full episodes with much success and reaching new audience instead of cannibalizing old ones.

On the panel, a member of the South Park production company shared some really interesting insights about how their viewers watch South Park online. He explained that full episodes are a big hit online, and that people watch all seasons equally, so it is not just catch-up TV.

A 12-year-old today did not watch Season 1 when it first aired, so it is now new to them. This is a phenomenon of long term video archives: a  stream of younger viewers discover content for the first time, while other viewers tune in for nostalgia.

Digital Hollywood is on multiple times a year at different locations.

Find out more at: get URL :http://www.digitalhollywood.com/

Kaushik