FORA.tv Speaker - Abram Stern

Abram Stern (aka aphid) is a net.artist and garden pest. His artwork primarily engages aesthetics of participation, blurring the line between author/creator and viewer/consumer. Stern has a BFA in Digital Media from San Francisco Art Institute and a MFA in Digital Arts/New Media from UC Santa Cruz. Metavid, an archive of US congressional floor proceeding video, began as the collaborative MFA thesis project of its principal participants Abram Stern and Michael Dale. Metavid appropriates C-SPAN's re-transmission of government-produced video and uses closed captions to enable timed text searches. Video is provided at two sizes, encoded in a DRM-free open source video codec. All video, associated metadata, and the project's source code are made freely available to the public.