In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

Wemo Media Unveils Global Art Entertainment Experience: theBlu.com

Academy Award Winners, Top-Tier Universities and Digital Creators From All Around the Globe Join Wemo Media's mission to Create the World’s Largest Art and Entertainment Project

LOS ANGELES, CA - October 18, 2011 – Wemo Media (http://www.wemomedia.com), collaborating with digital industry leaders, including Avatar Academy Award winning animation director Andy Jones and MIT Media Lab director Joichi Ito, announced today the launch of their “Maker Media” platform, which enables artists and developers around the world to peer-produce globally shared media.

Wemo Media's first project, theBlu (http://theblu.com), bringing the Ocean to life on the web, is a global mission to create art and entertainment on a scale that was not possible before the Internet. Using the Maker Media Platform, theBlu engages people from around the world to create and experience shared art in real time online.

“I’ve always thought it would be cool to create a simulation of the ocean with all the vast variety of species, but every time I would consider it, I’d realize that it was just too ambitious,” said Oscar-winning Visual Effects Supervisor and lead member of theBlu, Kevin Mack. “But theBlu makes this possible because you have thousands of artists from all over the world collaborating.”

theBlu promises to marry the Web’s billions of points of interaction with the Ocean’s millions of diverse elements in a nexus where the Web is, itself, a new medium for artistic expression. Imagine hundreds of thousands of aquatic species in tens of thousands of underwater habitats – all beautiful works of art created by artists and developers all over the world, swimming across the Web via phones, tablets and computers from Los Angeles to London, Madrid to Mumbai and Sao Paulo to Seoul.

Wemo Media Leadership Team member and Academy Award Winner Louie Psihoyos, Director of The Cove states, “One of the biggest problems that the oceans face is that people don't see what's going on in the Ocean. This project is a way for people to put their heads under the water without getting wet, a terrific way for people to not only see the Ocean but actually create it.”

theBlu is the first of many such Maker Media titles that Wemo Media will be releasing through its groundbreaking Maker Media Platform. This disruptive media creation platform welcomes all types of creatives – artists, software engineers, animators, composers – to collaborate from all over the world. Currently in private beta, the Maker Media Platform has already been embraced by top-tier universities around the world, including MIT, USC and CMU, whose students are some of the first “Makers” on the innovative platform.

Director of the MIT Media Lab, Joichi Ito, and advisor to Wemo Media said, “My life, and now even more so with the MIT Media Lab, has been about pulling together things that aren’t normally together. The really interesting thing about theBlu is how it brings together the biology, the activism of conservation, the beauty and the artistic elements as well as the grassroots, participatory maker media movement. I'm very excited about the possibilities ahead.”

Makers in theBlu select the species and habitats they want to create, and submit their art on the Maker Platform for curation. Makers showcase their art to a global audience while they connect with a community of peers, receive direct feedback from world-class digital makers, like Kevin Mack and Andy Jones, and get paid for their contributions based on the popularity of their creations.

“We’re just getting started. TheBlu is in private beta and we invite you to join early and become a seminal part of this global collaborative art and entertainment movement,” said Founder and CEO Neville Spiteri. “We are passionate about the enabling power of the social web, we are moved by creations that strike global chords, like Nirvana’s “Nevermind” album and Google Earth, and we are inspired by the great storytellers of our time, like James Cameron and John Lasseter. theBlu represents a new art form where the canvas is the web and the topic and the inspiration is nature, the Ocean; an amazing combination of ‘code + data = art’, with everybody contributing from all over the world, together, on the web.”