Jared Bendis: Hands Across - Saturday

Jared Bendis

(Cleveland, OH)

“Hands Across” is a continuously running interactive piece that unites Ingenuity attendees into a single chain of “hand-holding” participants, continually growing throughout the festival, allowing person-to-person interaction with tens of thousands of festival attendees without real-life encounters in the same place at the same time.

About Hands Across

Like a virtual-reality Spencer Tunick (but with fully-clothed participants), Jared Bendis creates participatory works on a local level for widespread display. His “Found in a Crowd” exhibit at Ingenuity 2007 was among the most popular and most populated interactive works. In his latest technological invention, “Hands Across,” Bendis invites participants to step inside a photo pod (a custom-designed life-sized semi-cylindrical photo booth), and have their photograph scanned from head to toe. The individual portraits are then added to a growing chain of hand-holding images, which increases throughout the festival and is displayed both locally and online. “Hands Across” engages public and virtual dialogue and interactions through its e-union of otherwise separate and unacquainted individuals.

About Jared Bendis

Jared Bendis is an award-winning artist, teacher, and photographer who is Creative Director of New Media for the Freedman Center at Case Western Reserve University.  As Creative Director, Jared weaves together cutting-edge technologies with proven, innovative pedagogical strategies to create rich multimedia experiences. As a specialist in photography, virtual reality, and computer graphics, Jared instructs courses and workshops in digital media and manages the creative and technical aspects of immersive virtual reality, 3D experiences and PDA projects, authors training materials and articles for the popular press, and presents on the use of technology in instruction.