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This post was originally published in The Guardian as “Numaish Karachi: can art installations change this violent megacity’s image?” on June 5, 2015. Karachi, a city known for intractable political conflict and as a shelter for militants from the Afghan wars, has difficulty escaping its reputation as the world’s most violent megacity. It has suffered some 13,500…

KCR appeared at Harvard’s Fogg Museum as a nine-channel interactive on April 20, 2015, and a second time in July as part of the workshop Beautiful Data, a two-week course on interactive media to help curators and archivists “develop art-historical storytelling through data visualization, interactive media, enhanced curatorial description and exhibition practice, digital publication, and data-driven,…

A screening of KCR – a visual exploration of the Karachi Circular Railway – is part of Numaish Karachi, an exhibition of over two dozen art installations at Frere Hall in central Karachi, from April 6-22. Karachi Circular Railway Video installation Filmmaker: Ivan Sigal Material: Single-channel version KCR is a multimedia installation that traces the path of…

This article was originally published in Building Peace Forum; it reflects upon the work of Global Voices support for online freedom of expression. In 2013, a group of Ethiopian bloggers and journalists created a blog to express their interest in a more open, inclusive, and democratic country. They called the blog Zone9, an ironic reference to…

This post was originally published in Foreign Policy as Karachi’s Killers, and is part of a project funded by the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting. On Sunday, June 8, militants brazenly attacked Karachi’s Jinnah International Airport, and managed to control it for several hours. By the time the Pakistani military was able to end the battle,…

Summary: a joint post with Tim Davies reflecting on our learning from a recent Berkman Center Network Stories hack-day There are hundreds of different digital tools for building online stories, and myriad ways to use them. Building stories online often requires creating alternative production and distribution paths for stories, in the context of networked, online communities. The choice of…

In June 2013, two sisters in the Chilas Vally in northern Pakistan were murdered by their step-brother, after a video of them dancing in the rain was shot on a mobile phone and circulated in their community. The killing may have been sparked by an offended sense of honor, or possibly part of a plot…

What shall we make of the flood of images and voices coursing through the Internet, and how shall we understand it? In our minds, the details of so much material overlap and overwhelm. On the Internet, we say, our attention is getting shorter, but our memory is improving. And yet, when I turn off my…

New Directions in Visual Storytelling is a graduate-level seminar that focuses on alternative production and distribution paths for documentary, visual storytelling, and photojournalism in the context of networked, online communities. It explores the effect of technological change on the aesthetics, production methods, distribution, and social impact of visual storytelling. I taught this class in the master’s…

A partial list of interviews and reviews of White Road, the book and the show: “White Road consists of a two volume set, one primarily text, the other pictures, that explores Ivan Sigal’s photographic work over a ten year period in Central Asia. The publication accompanied an exhibition of the same body of work at the Corcoran…

An exhibition of White Road opens at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. on November 3, 2012. A brief description of the exhibit: From 1998 through 2005, American photographer Ivan Sigal traveled through Central Asia, using his camera to record the unsettled lives of Eurasians in provincial towns and cities. Through nearly 100…

Printing at Steidl for the forthcoming book, White Road, available in November 2012.