#eyebeam

“There is a hunger for the generative thinking that artists can supply,” said Roderick Schrock, the executive director of Eyebeam. “I think that interest comes from a general breakdown in trust for our world leaders.”

With $300,000 raised from the Henry Luce Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Eyebeam is providing significant resources to its artist cohort tasked with responding to “a time of crisis and systemic collapse” during the coronavirus pandemic. Each artist will receive $5,000 to develop their projects and a select number will receive an additional $25,000 in October.

Funded proposals include Maxwell Mutanda’s visualization of the mobile data gap in sub-Saharan Africa, where access to the internet is often expensive; Roopa Vasudevan’s field guide for artists looking to subvert surveillance technology; and Kyle McDonald’s critique of the controversial practice of predictive policing through machine learning.

Scene from Episode 6 as the episode comes closer to it's climax as the two face the Lord of the Dream in a battle for survival!

I love it when demonic overlords are pitted against beings that are considered higher than they are, that sense of insignificance is often shown in demon girl related works when the human/demon faces off against the overlord/big bad. This is just essentially just taking that and turning it up to eleven,

The Lord of the Dream is one of those things in which one cannot fully understand it’s existence (much like how dreams aren’t bound by rules), a being both alive and dead, it is formless but yet can assume form within the dream.

I interviewed Idris Brewster and Glenn Cantave ahead of their 2019 residency at @eyebeamnyc. It was a good conversation:

Idris Brewster: Yeah, so we originally started by wanting to put monuments and statues (digital statues) of positive, powerful black and indigenous figures at Columbus Circle to represent something away from the terror of Christopher Columbus. We thought that idea could actually be applied not only to Columbus Circle, but all around the city. And so we thought about creating a prototype for one neighborhood, and we thought about starting with Harlem. We would create a guided AR tour where people would be able to take out the app, go out to 125th Street and Lenox and see a picture of something related to Harlem and the history of that block, personified in a 3D-model that, best case scenario, is interactable with the user. We think if we can perfect Harlem, or one point, that’s something that could be scaled not only to New York City, but to a lot of different places.

Glenn Cantave: Representation truly matters. We’re taught from a very young age that we’re nobody because our history has been altered and erased in a lot of different ways. And so the value of using augmented reality in public spaces is that we can put up a lot of digital statues for cheap. That’s the first thing. The second thing is that we don’t need permission to do so. We can just do it. We don’t have to wait for anyone. And the third thing is that the statues can be fundraising mechanisms for good. Meaning, if we’re putting this statue, lets say of Colin Kaepernick, in a public space, the user can click on Colin Kaepernick. It can lead to a landing page where they can donate to the ‘Know Your Rights’ campaign—as one example.

Kenyatta Cheese: That makes me think about the idea of access. There’s an interesting thing here in terms of the access on a policy level. These stories aren’t in textbooks that sit in schools now because the folks who do have the access, who have the funds and who have the time to organize, are the folks who have already benefited from supremacy. Because they have the access that they have, they’re able to use it to defend the benefits they get from supremacy.

Eyebeam Bookclub with Joanne McNeil and Dorothy R. Santos

Image description: Gray book cover with geometric block shapes of different colors. The text on the cover reads Lurking How a Person Became a User Joanne McNeil.

Event date and time: Friday, May 22, 2020 from 11:00 AM – 12:00 pm PST / 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM EDT

REGISTER HERE

For this afternoon Open Hours, Eyebeam welcomes Eyebeam Alum and writer, Joanne McNeilin conversation with artist, writer,…