Today we’d like to introduce you to Marc Scarpa.
At age 10, Marc became deeply interested in the internet and was an early adopter of computing technology. He spent countless hours online to hone his craft as a phone Phreaker. Major influences in this underground landscape included Legion of Doom member King Blotto of Blottoland, Phiber Optik, Bill from New York, Captain Crunch, Woz and broadcast video hacker Captain Midnight. His first computer exposure was to a TRS-80 Model II with a 300-baud modem at his elementary school in Bedford, New York. His mother subsequently purchased an Atari 400, then an Atari 800 computer with modem, cassette drive and color printer for his use at home. Scarpa continued learning on the TRS-80 at school along with the IBM PC 5150 and Commodore 64 computers respectively, learning to program in BASIC.
Around the same time, he received a VHS Camcorder for his birthday and ironically later purchased an inferior quality Pixelvision 2000 from the money he earned shooting football practices at his local school with the VHS Camcorder. This marked the beginning of his foray into using mixed media to tell stories and shoot live events.
He went on to receive his B.F.A. at the School of Visual Arts where he gravitated to the history, semiotics and sociology of cinema and learned to use super 8mm, 16mm Bolex, ARRI and emerging digital camera systems such as Sony Hi-8.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Like most mavericks, Scarpa’s career path has been fraught with challenges. Most notably the need for technology to catch up with the vision. Several projects have been plagued with achievability doubt and speculation by critics, customers and participants alike. Early on online streaming was challenged by bandwidth constraints and overall web adoption. Simple tasks today such as streaming from a mobile phone and publishing to Facebook were pioneered by his team dating back to 1996 where you would need to multi-channel bond 6 cell phones together in order to have enough capacity to send a signal out and publish to the web.
Please tell us about Simplynew.
His works are noted for their use of social media, streaming video, music-photo-video sharing, conversation, data visualization, tags and links whose value and power derives from the active participation of many people in real time in which the boundaries between audiences and creators become blurred and often invisible.
Scarpa is a firm advocate that the term “audience” is obsolete in the new world of participatory media and that “audience” or “viewer” should be renamed “participant”. As a Director, he views his role as providing context to the flow of contributions by the participants and to creatively connect online and onsite groups to stimulate conversation and engagement around a particular live event or program. Milestone projects include the Tibetan Freedom Concerts, Woodstock 99, Grammy Live! and politically driven programs such as Townhall with President Bill Clinton. Scarpa’s current venture Simplynew, incorporates his natural talent for producing participatory content with a focus on the creation of 24/7 real time (media) networks.
Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
As a boy, his parents would often take him to movie theaters. It was at this stage in his life that he developed a passion for cinema and storytelling. Enamored of science fiction epics in his adolescence, at least two films of the genre, Star Wars and 2001: A Space Odyssey, appear to have had a deep and lasting impact on his cinematic psyche. Scarpa also developed an admiration for improvisation and a realistic cinéma vérité style through the works of John Cassavetes, direct cinema aesthetic via D.A. Pennebakerand Les Blank and juxtaposition in narrative influenced by Mel Brooksand comedian Albert Brooks’ portrayal of reality television program An American Family in his film Real Life.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.simplynew.com
- Phone: 3235529909
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: @marcscarpa
- Facebook: marcscarpa
- Twitter: @marcscarpa
Image Credit:
Simplynew
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