Karen Kocher: “What is the Value of Barton Springs?”

Documentary media producer, Karen Kocher, will be showing excepts from Living Spring, a documentary series about the history, science, culture, and spiritual practices at Barton Springs. She will frame the screening with the discussion, “What is the value of Barton Springs?”   For the past 10 years, she has been creating media work for digital platforms and studying the ways that the digital technology is expanding the documentary genre.

Currently Ms. Kocher is developing Living Springs, a media-rich website about the culture, history, and science of Barton Springs Pool. The website will engage young adult and adult learners in an interactive exploration of Barton Springs in Austin, Texas to foster greater understanding of how the natural environment helps to define human culture. Portions of the web site will be developed into interactive exhibits at the Beverly Sheffield Education Center.

In conjunction with The Texas Environmental Center, Kocher worked as an instructional designer and associate producer on Barton Springs Interactive, a CD-ROM based documentary about the history, culture and science of Barton Springs in Austin, Texas. This CD-ROM has been distributed to schools and is also on permanent display in the SPLASH! exhibit at Barton Springs, a science exhibit that is visited by thousands of school children each year.

Ms. Kocher has been teaching documentary production and digital post-production for the Department of Radio, Television and Film at the University of Texas at Austin since 1998. She has also been invited to teach short course documentary workshops as part of the UT Austin/Portugal CoLab in Lisbon, Portugal and Porto, Portugal. In the summer of 2010, Ms. Kocher will teach a course in Video Poetry at the world-renowned Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Colorado.