The blues was born on Delta porches, and some of the people who played it are still here. Just across the bridge in West Memphis, Arkansas, a project called The Digital Delta: Porch to Cloud is filming living blues elders in 3D and bringing them back as holograms, playing again in a public park right where the music started.
Rendering courtesy of The Digital Delta
The project is led by Kerry Sullivan, executive director of DeltaARTS, the 54-year-old arts education nonprofit in West Memphis. She’s spent 10 years helping Delta artists make ambitious work without leaving home, and she’s joined by two creatives who know this music inside and out.
Ty Boyland, an Emmy-nominated producer and three-time Grammy mentor with more than 30 years in music, builds the soundtrack: vibrations recorded from the soil, converted to MIDI and played live alongside the elders’ holograms. Filmmaker Dante Battles leads the 3D capture, filming elder performers in the field, and co-leads a community video workshop that teaches neighbors to make work with the cameras they already own. He’s also at work on a documentary about West Memphis’ contribution to the blues.
The Digital Delta is one of the first grantees of Artists Make Technology, an $11 million initiative from the Mozilla Foundation developed with the Doris Duke Foundation. The first round drew 392 applications, and just 20 projects were funded, putting a Delta blues story on a national stage.
So next time someone says nothing good happens around here, send them this. Read more from Forbes and the Mozilla Foundation.
