Neil Sieling

Mr. Sieling has been a media arts curator, television producer, media systems architect, and activist since 1978. He was the Executive Producer of ALIVE-TV (formerly ALIVE FROM OFF CENTER), the experimental arts/television showcase on PBS. He is currently a consultant for several organizations in the areas of designing larger media delivery systems and creating new production prototypes for a number of platforms. The organizations include: The Independent Television Service (ITVS); The Open Society Institute (affiliated with The Soros Foundations Network); the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the POV series on PBS. He helped launch and program WorldLink TV ( http://www.worldlinkTV.com/), a new public channel in America on the DBS platform. WorldLink TV launched in 1999, and Sieling continues to license programming for the channel. He was the Executive Producer for the digitally animated documentary works "Figures of Speech" (http://www.itvs.org/figuresofspeech/) and two other short films by Bob Sabiston and Tommy Pallotta (Co-Creators of the film "Waking Life") that aired on PBS in 2000. The works have won awards at the ResFest digital film festivals in New York and Tokyo as well as Ars Electronica in Austria, and were selected for INPUT 2001. He was the co-convener and Artistic Director of the Digital Independence Conference in San Francisco in January, 2001 and will have the same roles for the subsequent Digital Independence sessions scheduled for 2003. He consulted on the creation of a "Virtual POV" project with the POV series on PBS, and is producing a series of shorts for the Center for Rural Strategies ( http://www.ruralstrategies.org/ ) intended for television and the Internet. He recently completed a significant research project with the Creativity and Culture branch of The Rockefeller Foundation related to their past and future awards in the Digital Arts and is now working on a feasibility study connected to the effort of understanding new creative practices in the performing and media arts in the 21st Century. He was a founding member of the WebCabal (a.k.a. Link Tank), served on the Executive Council of the organization, and was the project manager for the Augmented Social Network white paper that was commissioned by the Link Tank.