Rhizome Commissions Voting

While funding for the arts is easier to come by in good times, it’s always the first thing to go during a downswing. Finding funding for the arts is a profession in and of itself, one that needs to shift away from begging governments, corporations and foundations to a model that directly engages those moved by the arts.

One such model I’m personally familiar with is the Rhizome Commissions Program. I joined Rhizome so I could support commission proposals from Edith Kollath and Diana Eng, both friends of mine from NYC Resistor. Were it not for their participation, I wouldn’t have even heard about Rhizome let alone added them to the list of organizations I’m proud to be a supporter of.

While contests like these aren’t a perfect way of picking worthy art projects, the program’s use of online approval and instant run-off voting is one strong way Rhizome helps “encourage and expand the communities around … emerging artistic practices that engage technology.”

I’m happy to report that Diana’s proposal, Fictional Jewelry and Other Wistful Adornments is one of the finalists. All of the projects themselves are worth checking out, and I expect to blog more about these artists and their work in the future. Below the fold are the links and my ranking of the finalists, with their project summaries (some of which I truncated for brevity’s sake).

1. Fictional Jewelry and Other Wistful Adornments

Fictional Jewelry and Other Wistful Adornments are pieces of a fashion fairytale, a flower broach that blooms, wilts, and dies blooming again instants later. A necklace that glows warmly to the beat of your heart. A pet ring that sits atop your finger breathing gently or moving playfully. In a time of emails, text messages, and one-click delivery food, let’s use technology to create whimsy in a world that’s still fantastic, fashion. This is a collection of jewelry that is real life fiction.

2. Automata

Automata is a counter-surveillance internet bot created to record and display the mutually-beneficial interrelationships between institutions for higher learning, the global defense industry, and world militaries. This bot acts to subvert top-down surveillance techniques by making data about the confluence of economic and violent power visible to the public at large for research, activism, and examination

3. Cross-Border Communication

Cross-Border Communication will attempt to remediate communicative efforts between Windsor and Detroit, which has historically been based solely on economic exchange, through an ongoing series of text-based projections on buildings along the Detroit River. The text will be projected from the Windsor riverfront onto Windsor buildings, but will be legible from Detroit.

4. The Work Office

The Work Office (TWO) is a multidisciplinary art project posing as an administrative bureaucracy. Informed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) of the Great Depression, TWO is a gesture to “make work” for visual and performing artists, writers, and others by giving them simple, idea-based assignments to explore, document, or improve life in New York.

5. SolarCircus

In my studio practice, I’m exploring various possibilities of retooling existing solar toys into a nomadic city with robotic characters that need just the sun to run. I will also organize several workshops and online performances—the proposed project is homage to Alexander Calder’s 1927 show with handmade wire toys in his Paris studio.

6. The Ghana Think Tank

Think tanks in so-called “developing” countries solve hyper-local problems in the United States…These think tanks then propose solutions, which we enact physically back in the United States – whether those solutions strike us as scary or silly, humiliating or brilliant.

7. Immaculate Telegraphy

Immaculate telegraphy seeks to test if electronic communication could have occurred at any point in history given the knowledge base and desire… armed with no modern tools except information from the Internet, arriving at a working battery and a telegraph switch primitively smelted out of handpicked metal ores. The resulting telegraph will be a first step towards electronic communication.

8. Catching Shadows

Our lives have been encoded and entrusted to systems that we no longer understand. Modern interfaces make life easier while obfuscating the ways in which technology truly operates. As we sell off our old digital cameras and other electronics we leave traces of ourselves within them. Through a process of digital voyeurism, I hope to explore the ways in which we have become estranged from our data – collecting fragments of lives that have been handed over to strangers willingly, yet unknowingly.

9. Natural Interaction Project

…experiences like ‘Multitouch Space Invaders’ -a reinvention of the classic where people play together and use foam balls instead of joysticks.

10. Ghosts of Adak

I wish to explore the “ghost town” of Adak, Alaska … where my 87-year old father was based as a Naval machinist in WWII. I want to document Adak as it now stands as a web-based panoramic documentary … and create a dialogue with my dad in North Canton, Ohio.

11. Measure of Discontent

Inspired by an oppressive environment of national crisis and fear, artist and designer, Michael Kontopoulos proposes a series of conceptual household tools for harnessing and visualizing unhappiness and anxiety.

12. Microtonal Wall (in 1-Bit)

1,536 small speakers blanket a wall (8 ft. by 12 ft), each emitting tones … each speaker, emitting a single, primitive 1-bit tone, becomes a microscopic voice in the total composition, which substitutes individual pitch for larger sonic masses.

13. trickle-down-town

Inspired by images of limestone sculpture eroding due to acid rain, the purpose is to create a series that deals with human presence in art and how it can take its toll … eventually, over the course of a month’s time, a large mass of each painting will be carved out leaving layers of color similar to geological layers that move through each piece.

14. Gnathonemus Petersii (tentative title)

The project centers around a fish, originally from Nigeria … [that] produces a constant electrical pulse which it uses as an aid in navigation. This pulse can be easily amplified and made audible. Essentially, I am in a band with my fish and we are working on a record and hope to play some shows soon, in the interest of generating income for a fresh water coalition in Nigeria.

15. Lit From Within

In “Lit From Within”, plants thrive on light emanating from within their own living tissue. Technological and biological merge to create a unique hybrid living system which inverts fundamental biological relationships.

16. The Collected Memories of the Mechanical Turk

…I propose to document the inner life and experiences of the Amazon’s Mechanical Turk workforce by creating tasks that explore the personal memories of these workers…

17. Solar Symphony

… a symphony of individual kinetic instruments powered by solar energy…

18. Greetings from Cleveland, Ohio

“Greetings from Cleveland, Ohio” will utilize the early photographic form of the “living photograph” to recreate a classic Cleveland postcard image using thousands of Clevelanders as “human pixels.”

19. Hit the Planet Running

I have been using state-of-the-art astronomy software to visualize the sky from [distant] planets, and construct and map out new constellations (and accompanying stories) as a courtesy to those who might colonize those distant planets.

20. Iota: an aural mapping
21. Grey
22. Here Comes the Sun
23. Antlers Wifi
24. Really Fast Syndication
25. Dialectical Software Gundam Suit