"Collaboration and Agency: Need_X_Change as community interface"
Sharon Daniel
Film and Digital Media, UC/Santa Cruz
I will talk about interface and activism - or interfaces as contexts for collaborative authorship in public art. Need_X_Change is designed to help the staff and clients of Casa Segura, an HIV prevention and needle exchange clinic in my neighborhood in Oakland, attain social and political "voice", through communication with their local community and participation in the global information culture. I will present this project as a demonstration of the way an interface can serve social actitivism. I will also present some database and interface building tools I am developing and a bit of historical background on the project. There is a full description on my site at http://arts.ucsc.edu/sdaniel/need/.