SUMMARY
(This summary might be useful to people that are not familiarized with the project. For the ones that already know it, you can go straight to the Artists for the second month edition)
As a reshaping of The Floor Is Too High project under the new guidelines set by Creatives DAO, we would like to propose an artistic research grant pilot program aiming to contribute to the future of Creatives DAO organization by engaging with worlds outside of NEAR by selecting outside-community research projects that produce high level art in the VR artistic domain.
Our goal is to bring new people into the community, three artists per month, characterized by a deep relation with VR content production not only from an artistic perspective, but also from an institutional and commercial perspective. We hope that after three iterations some of these artists might become new members of the VR-DAO council, bringing artistic and technical knowledge that could be useful for the whole community.
Each month should bring different aesthetic and technical perspectives, inline with the conceptual ground already set in the previous curatorial work, representing different territories and relation with the world.
Strategy
For this, we have resumed our curatorial research aiming for a kind of artist not only characterized by the consistency and maturity of their artwork and VR exploration in an early stage of their career, but also by the institutional and professional relations that such artists might have shaped through their career in their own ecosystems. We aim for artists in an early stage of their career that still depend on side or freelance work to subsist, giving them a chance to dedicate more time and effort to their own artistic research for a month period, an not to artist that are already in a stage of their careers that allows them to be selfsufficientish exclusively by means of their art production.
We intend to fund three artists each month, trying to bring together a group that already might have a relationship. We hope this strategy might help them to accelerate their artistic process, since as artists are always different individuals with different perspectives and technical relations and knowledge, they might support each other filling the gaps of technical specificity, potentially producing stronger works in shorter time spans. We as curator will encourage them to share their process and collaborate with one another.
During this period we would ask them to share substantial (in terms of quantity and aesthetical strength) content reflecting the research process, which will be the main material for VR-DAO social media reactivation. We will not demand any artistic production as a mandatory outcome of the grant, but we will inform as well as possible about the possibilities artists have to display and trade their works through the platforms at our disposal, hoping to provoke the use of these technologies. Since we believe it is the interest of professional artists to participate in art trading systems in a decentralized organization.
PROPOSED ARTISTS FOR SECOND MONTH’s EDITION
Clarification: The second month’s edition should have happened in August, but because of the delay in the monthly request transfer the project as a whole was delayed a whole month.
Clelio de Paula (1987, Rio de Janeiro), is a visual artist, developer and experience designer. He works with the relationship of time and memories using three-dimensional scanning methods, photogrammetry and point cloud. His works are virtual dioramas, which mix elements of the digitized real world and are experienced through augmented and virtual reality.
He was a finalist for the international Lumen Prize in the Virtual Reality category and exhibited his works using Augmented, Mixed and Virtual Reality in Europe and Brazil: Tate Modern (London), Horniman Museum & Gardens in London, Museum of Tomorrow, Casa França Brasil, Festival Multiplicidade and Oi Future.
Robin Rutenberg (b. 1987, US) is a berlin-based mixed media sound artist with an emphasis on experiential sound, experimental composition, performance, text, and VR. Their storytelling practice is steeped in ruminations on gender, family, and kinship and asks how [missed]communication and [mis]understanding within our own bodies, other bodies, objects, and environment inform these relations. They are deeply interested in the affective power of using one’s voice, speaking with the body, and being witnessed as generative acts of healing and connection. Robin holds a MA in Sound Studies and Sonic Arts from Universität der Künste Berlin.
Valentina Berthelon (b. 1977 in Santiago de Chile) is a media artist based in Berlin. She works in the intersection between visual arts, music and technology. Valentina Berthelon began her Art studies in 1996 in the University of Chile and in 1998 she moved to México City and specialized in Multimedia Art at the National Art Center of Mexico. In 1996 she returned to Chile and worked as Art Director for advertising and also as a Producer in the Contemporary Art Museum of Chile. Since 2012, she lives in Berlin and currently she is doing the Master “Kunst und Media“ in the University of Arts of Berlin, UDK.
Her audiovisual pieces aim to talk about a circular time, a time that is not linear, but it’s a collage, an assembly of stories, facts, theories and comments, a time that reflect about the networked nature of the Universe. Hybridity is a very important aspect of her work and she uses a lot of found footage and media from different sources. The fact that images and sounds are taken out of context creates displacement but as a parallel process hundreds of new connections are born. Music also plays a fundamental role in her work, because it’s a medium that allows us to communicate beyond a verbal way, reaching aspects of human nature that are more abstract and profound. Her aim is to create pieces that are able to show the complexity of the world as an always changing interconnected system and to use technology to discover and reveal our humanity.
Requested Value
We would like to fund each artist with 750 USD, an amount we estimate might be enough to cover close to half living costs.
For the continuity of the curatorial and production endeavors, which include the production activities of the first and second iteration* (communication, coordination and support of the funded artists) and the curatorial activities for the third iteration (research, selection, contact, support with NEAR platforms) we consider 1600 USD.
Total request: 3850$
Now that there is an overlap of 2 groups of artists the load work will be higher, which explains the different value from the first iteration.