Moving Visions: Digital Public Art Work --Premieres in Arlington, VA (US)

Award-winning media artist Liz Canner is working in Arlington to create a digital public art work, Moving Visions. Eight ordinary people who are living extraordinary lives will don small video cameras (wearcams) on their heads and document life from their perspective for a day. The resulting edited video will be presented as large-scale outdoor video projections on symbolic public sites. By bringing together people from different ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds whose paths would not otherwise cross, Canner explores the meaning of freedom, community building and transformation in post 9/11 America. Moving Visions will premiere September 13, 2003 from 6: 00 to 10: 00 PM at the Netherlands Carillon neighboring the Iwo Jima Memorial during Arlington County's Coming Together: An Annual World Music Concert featuring the Kronos Quartet. On subsequent evenings, Moving Visions will be projected across Arlington County at locations including Courthouse, and an area adjacent to the Pentagon.

Drawing on the theories of Harvard Sociologist Orlando Paterson, Moving Visions juxtaposes notions of freedom from the perspective of 8 diverse individuals including Rene Rivera, a homeless day -laborer and Paul Ferguson, the highest elected official in the county. Canner's project boasts a new form of interactivity where the subject becomes the cameraperson. As the directors of the quotidian, each participant frames their life how they want. The project is as much about how each person is viewed in their community (each was nominated by their peers), as it is how they see themselves and narrate that tale. In this way, Moving Visions explores an innovative form of vision and visibility in the public sphere. The flickering video projections of Moving Visions will animate public spaces and monumentalize the everyday..

Arlington Cultural Affairs Division is proud to announce some of the extraordinary participants in Moving Visions. More than 30 community groups and nonprofits submitted wearcam participant nominations. Those individuals selected to participate include: Paul Ferguson, Arlington County Board Chair; day-laborer, Rene Rivera; local historian and lifetime Arlington resident, Kathryn Holt Springston; Northern Arlington Battalion Fire Chief, Raymond Blankenship; President, North American Council for Muslim Women (NACMW), Sharifa Al-Khateeb; and Cambodian Dance Heritage, Inc. artistic director, Madame Tes. Participant biographies will be downloadable from the web at: http://www.arlingtonarts.org under "Moving Visions".

Liz Canner, an award-winning media artist and independent filmmaker, uses cutting edge technologies to explore social issues. Her recent project, "Symphony of a City", (co-producer John Ewing), a public cyberart documentary, focused on community building and housing. In 2002, she was honored with a Rockefeller Foundation Next Generation Leadership Fellowship and a Radcliffe Institute Film/Video Fellowship at Harvard University. Canner has received more than 30 awards, honors and grants for her work. Her projects have been supported by foundations including: The National Endowment for the Arts, The Paul Robeson Fund for Independent Media, and the New England Foundation for the Arts. Her work has been broadcast on television both domestically and internationally and screened at festivals like the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center and the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. Canner has exhibited her work at numerous museums and galleries including Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the California Museum of Photography. She currently serves on the board of the Association for Independent Video and Filmmakers in New York.

Moving Visions is sponsored through the generous support of the Arlington County Cultural Affairs Division of the Department of Parks, Recreation and Community Resources, and project grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and the Virginia Commission for the Arts.