2005 Recipients

Manuel Acevedo - The Video Diary is a series of chronologically edited video entries made from 2005-06. The Video Streams are segments of altered footage recorded during my commutes and vists between New Jersey and New York. The moving images depict street scenes after dark, rush hour in mass transit, anti-war protests, parades and news footage accompanied by manipulated sound tracks.

Monika Bravo - For the Longwood Digital Matrix Commission, I will develop the internet/computer equivalent of the interactive installation: No_Name: [frequency + repetition] that has been under production since last September and is due to be shown in Spain on June 2005.

Based on the Yi Jing* (the book of changes) or chinese oracle, I am developing a large scale interactive installation that consists of a series of looping image/sound that investigate the relationship between inner and outer perception. It’s a space offered for quietness and contemplation. As the viewer enters he/she will have the choice of stepping on glass circle that will trigger the oracle to spin. Glowing images are projected on a diffused screen that seem to be emanating simple colors from abstracted images that somehow reference each one of the 64 hexagrams and they are combined randomly along with either sound or silence referencing John Cage’s Williams Mix, where the composing means for determining its structure units and operation were also derived from the Yi Jing.

*Yi Jing and I Ching have the same meaning; their orthographic difference derives from two different methods of Chinese Romanization, the pinyin method and the wade gales respectively.

Gaye Chan - "There There" explores the role of backdrops within studio and travel photography. Since the beginning of photographic history, backdrops, alternately understood as both actual sites and painted (and more recently digital) ones, have profoundly shaped our ideas of power and our place in relation to it.

In "There There" we investigate these relations through photography and performance. The images are culled from a growing collection of photographs we have created since 2003. Whether 'home' or elsewhere, we have hired studio photographers to picture us in front of their most popular backdrops. Amidst this process, we photograph the photographers photographing us, and their studios.

By recording where we've been in conjunction with where studio photographers thought we'd rather be, we examine our collective refusal to see. We measure the disconnect between the 'there' of everyday life and the 'there' of hegemonic portrayals of the 'good life'.

Prema Murthy - Def. Demographics- the characteristics of a human population or part of it, especially its size, growth, density, distribution and statistics regarding birth, marriage, disease and death. A series of web animations will be created from a synthesis of virtual bodies and demographic data from the Bronx. Coordinates derived from the demographic data will be mapped onto various points of virtual bodies.

The coordinates will reflect the geographic origins of the diverse immigrant communities living in the Bronx. Over time, the body of data will serve to form, deform and animate the figures, creating a series of graphs that reflect the vitality of the Bronx as a living, breathing community undergoing constant change. This project will be viewed as a video installation at the Longwood Art Gallery and later archived on the web.

There There