DAUS Professor of Digital Communications & Media, Mechthild Schmidt Feist, spent last May/June at NYU Shanghai as an NYU GRI (Global Research Initiative) Scholar on Shanghai maps of light + shadow an interactive media and mapping project on German-Jewish refugees during the Nazi period.
On June 5, she was invited by Dr. Sakine Weikert and Dean Li to a talk at Fudan University to present the project as a work-in-progress. For the same project, she met with Professor Professor Pan Guang at the Center for Jewish Studies Shanghai (CJSS) at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. As the scope of the project grew she hopes to have a pilot project ready at the end of Fall 2019. More on her website.
Continuing to Beijing, Professor Schmidt Feist was invited to visit the work spaces and newly installed interactive/virtual reality exhibitions at the Palace Museum (Forbidden City). She spent the day with Ying Zhuang, Deputy Head of Online Digital Department and Interactive curator Wu Meng
Then on June 25, she continued to the ISEA2019 (International Symposium on Electronic Art) conference in Gwangju, South Korea to present an artist talk on her prior refugee project built from interviews with refugees on Lesbos, Greece. Involuntary Journeys – Interactive Storytelling on a Mapping Platform integrates digital imagery, blogs and Google Earth. The presentation showed the outcome of her 2018-2019 Dean's Grant.
"I migrated selected stories as an interactive path onto Google Earth, some of them with poetic textual and image overlays. The images below are compositions of expressive moments of these refugee trails."
Next spring, Professor Schmidt Feist will be on leave as a Fulbright-Nehru excellence scholar at the Srishti Institute for Art and Technology in Bangalore India. Her research, Engaged Media – Building Culturally And Locally Sensitive Environmental Awareness, will include a collaborative intensive workshop on WATER with Srishti faculty Arzu Mistry and art/design students.