June 11, 2007

Please forward to interested parties:

Deep Oakland Website Launch
Monday June 11, 2007

Oakland, CA — Cities are more than the people, buildings and geographical areas that define them. They are a nexus of connections creating active, vital communities. The size and shape of these connections may be invisible, even to the residents of a given city. And the location where one thing in the city connects to another thing is often on the move. Points of connectivity may be small, short-lived, visible only on a one-block radius. Connections mutate. Yet the way a city ‘looks’ from the outside (media) can remain proportionally static with the actual generation and re-generation of communities over time, the transit and intersections of people, water, money, memory, ballots, animals, concrete, water, labor, food and information.

Affiliated with neither the tourism nor better business bureaus, Deep Oakland seeks to create a compendium of inter-linked images, text and sound that represent the complications and vitality of Oakland’s current moment.

This project is ongoing. As the website grows, we will continue to solicit and present archival and current materials from a diverse range of Oakland writers, artists, community leaders and organizations, materials that engage or investigate the city’s ecology, economics, politics, development, history and the arts.

Our hope is that Deep Oakland will both serve as a location for conversation to begin, and will extend conversations already in progress, to the point of critical mass where the interconnectivity of the activities of these disparate activists, artists and writers becomes visible and begins to positively impact the Oakland community and the world at large.

Featured work:
David Buuck’s “B.A.R.G.E Reports”
Haleh Hatami’s Layer 3, Port
Brian Teare’s “On Refuge”
MacArthur Blvd Portrait Project
Oakland Living History Program
Rebekah Werth’s Megafauna & Amazing Powers

Call for submissions:

If you have an idea for a project, content or a link that you would like to see included on the Deep Oakland website, please send us a query by email: deep.oakland@gmail.com.

We are particularly looking for:

• Work that is directly concerned with Oakland or, if a creative piece, is produced by a member or members of the Oakland community
• Work that adds to a better understanding of Oakland and its diverse communities
• Work that analyzes the social, political, economic, historic, ecological, and/or creative aspects of Oakland
• Work that records individual and group efforts to create change in Oakland communities
• Work that responds to materials already posted on the website
• Work that addresses neighborhoods or localities that are currently under-represented on the Deep Oakland website

Deep Oakland is a project of A'A' Arts (501c3), sponsored and supported by Mills College and the James Irvine Foundation.