who are you?
Seth Indigo Carnes, an artist based in New York City, originally from northern California.

how did you get involved with MELD?
I’ve known Corinne for several years now.  She told me about MELD during the starting phase, asking if I’d like to be a mentor artist for the organization.  I respect her work and passion, also the goals of Meld so it was an instant yes.

what kind of artwork do you make?
Much of my work for the past four years involve the idea of mutable text, language that remains alive in the hands of those who touch it and can make it their own.   I look to engage society and flip the traditional role of art as something to be viewed by an audience to a living experience that invites participation and immersion.

what are you working on now?
I just launched a Kickstarter campaign to help fund a new direction for this work; it’s a visual poetry application for iPhone called iheart poetics.

The app will allow people to create and share interactive visual poems I call “poetics” that merge text and imagery as one.  I am so excited about this idea, especially in the area of merging poetic texts and photographic imagery.  I think it will enable a vast array of creative work where people build and share collaborative works together.

So far I am making poetics by hand to explore the possibilities and to help visualize what will be possible using the app.  I post these to a Tumblr site that also automatically puts them up as links to @iheartpoetics on Twitter.

can you show some examples of these poetics?
Sure, here are a few I created this past week.  One example comes from Occupy Wall Street march in my neighborhood and another two from a summer trip to Denmark (first image shown above).

how can people help support the project?
The first thing is to check the Kickstarter project page to learn more about iheart poetics.  If it looks good, there are these Rewards levels people can pledge to support the project, many featuring artwork related to this body of work.

If that’s a stretch, a huge help is to spread the word about the project: write about it, email friends, post to Facebook, Twitter and other social media.  This will really help propel the project from dream to reality.

To see more of Seth’s work, visit his website: http://sic.ph/