Originally from Italy, Cecilia Galiena is a San Francisco-based artist with a background in psychology and journalism whose projects combine traditional knowledge, creative thinking, and on-the-ground problem-solving in order to advance social change. Her Fellowship proposal is focused on establishing an online hub that connects social practice artists, social justice NGOs, cultural institutions, and arts and social justice funders and includes a database of past and present social practice projects. Her initial concentration will be on Intellectual Property Rights and Indigenous People and how they are seeking to make intellectual property serve a function beyond that of the appropriation of value.
Galiena co-created and ran one of the first international and multidisciplinary artist-in-residence programs in Italy, http://www.civitella.org/. Her main focus as an artist has been on language 360 degrees (coherent cultural knowledge, including speech, visual, relational, environmental, and textual) and she has worked and filmed early protagonists of botanical activism and social practice in Italy. Galiena's goal is to explore where the North lost sight of the South in the process of developing globally and how traditional knowledge can be part of and anchor this planet’s race to the unknown.
Innovation Challenge
Enabling and accelerating socially engaged artistic practice is of crucial importance. How can artists, funders, and social justice NGOs use online tools to come together to activate social practice projects focused on social change and collect thoughtful responses to pressing global concerns?
Cecilia Galiena Project for ZERO1 Fellowship/x
Cecilia Galiena's newly developed web platform Adaptnet connects social practice artists, scholars, social justice NGOs, cultural institutions, and arts and social justice funders. Detailed information on the aforementioned people and agencies along with easy cross-referencing is combined in an elaborate multi-tiered database to bring about relevant opportunities for collaboration.
Social practice artists remain at the center of this on-line community, while the platform functions as a bridge between diverse intellectual environments, traditional knowledge, and disruptive thinking. Combine the means of financial support and a network of additional expertise within the same realms, and the platform would equally serve as a tool for assessing the value of social projects, producing valid arguments to undertake the project and facilitate buy-in from stakeholders as well as additional funding.
Daniela Steinsapir is an artist from Chile whose recent research focuses on the design of interactive educational tools, and in studying how new technologies are improving family communication by empowering seniors and children. Her work takes a variety of different forms—from user interface design to interactive video installation, to electro-mechanical sculptures—each of which incorporates different found objects and technologies. Her approach is informed by her studies at the Learning, Design, and Technology Master’s Program at Stanford University. Daniela’s Fellowship proposal is focused on developing new approaches for cross-generational collaborative communication platforms.
Steinsapir will be looking at developing new approaches for cross-generational collaborative communication platforms touching, family communication, storytelling & creative expression. Steinsapir, is an artist, user experience designer/researcher, educator, and technologist. Her recent Stanford studies have been focused on the design of interactive educational tools, and in researching how new technologies are improving family communication, by empowering seniors and children. For many years Daniela has been using design thinking, which emphasizes, need finding, ideation, rapid prototyping, and user testing to create meaningful user-centered design projects. She has been active in the tech community as a user experience designer/researcher/strategy for multiple iOS. Steinsapir believes mobile technologies can be instrumental in bridging the gaps among the generations by connecting geographically separated families through an emotional mind-stimulating collaborative practice, that is mutually beneficial for both parties.
Innovation Challenge
Throughout human history, the sharing of stories has served to entertain, teach customs, and establish cultural and familial identity. How can mobile apps enhance connective experiences, such as storytelling, across generations?
Daniela Steinsapir's Project description for ZERO1 Fellowship/x
Daniela is an artist from Chile currently based in San Francisco. During the past year, she immersed herself at the Adobe Creative Technology Lab and developed a new messaging app, SparkChat. Her research brought to light that young people desire a new creative communication tool because the current standard texting and social media formats are not personal enough; whereas teens are eager for a more personal, customizable, creative, and emotional experience to stand out and stay connected. SparkChat addresses this need.
With the user as its central component, SparkChat uses custom technology to extract relevant data input from the fragmented stories of our lives - as already stored on our personal phones, social networking sites, cloud applications, etc. - to spark the quality and emotional value of our existing daily conversations. Through topic detection, mood detection, and message carts, the new app suggests message feeds based on social context, preferences, and emotional timbre. The personal is re-introduced to interpersonal interaction, for example, by replacing standard emoticons with one's own facial expressions to serve in the exact same function. Another example is the pop up of content-relevant, popular, and/or trending imagery to potentially illustrate shared experiences from the past, instantly creating increased connection in the present. The result is a new way of messaging communication and a patent application is underway.
Paula Levine is a Canadian-American artist whose work uses locative and mobile media to bridge global and local. Her current work uses locative media, maps, and the web to collapse the safety of distance and visualize the impact of distant geopolitical events in local terms. Her work examines the space between information and experience by using networks, public spaces, and mobile tools to build cross-cultural and geopolitical intimacy. Her proposed Fellowship project will address how locative, mobile technologies and wireless networks diminish distances between the impact of political trauma, dislocation, or upheaval in one location, and other areas untouched by these distant events.
Levine's current work uses locative media, maps, and the web to collapse the safety of distance and visualize the impact of distant geopolitical events on local ground, translating the impact in local terms. Presented as a series Shadows from another place engages questions of politics, place, borders, boundaries investigating the daily experiences of the local, as networks extend our experiences of place beyond our physical lived borders. San Francisco- Baghdad overlays the first night of the U.S. invasion on San Francisco, mirroring each bomb and missile site, and TheWall-TheWorld transposes a 15-mile segment of the wall in the West Bank upon any city of choice allowing the viewer to explore the wall in both locations, simultaneously in Google Earth.
Her writings on locative media and the expanding cartographic imagination have been presented at conferences at ISEA, ZERO1, MIT, and the University of Wisconsin's Conney Conference for Jewish Studies. Recent work has shown at ISEA, Interactive Futures, 09, Vancouver, British Columbia where she was also a keynote speaker. Paula Levine is an advisor on Wi: Journal of Mobile Media published by Hexagram, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. Her essay On Common Ground: Here as There will be published in the Spring, 2013 in Digital Storytelling and Mobile Media: Narrative Practices with Locative Technologies edited by Jason Farman (Routledge). She is a Professor of Art at San Francisco State University, teaching in the area of Conceptual Information Arts. Her work has been shown in transnational venues including the SF Museum of Modern Art, NY Museum of Modern Art, the Canadian National Gallery, New York's Lincoln Center, and the Getty Center. She been awarded residencies from The Banff Centre for the Arts, the Experimental Television Center, and the Djerassi Foundation, and has been the recipient of many awards and grants including the Canadian Council for the Arts, Art Matters, CanWest Global Award, the Western Regional Media Arts Award Fellowship and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art SECA (Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art).
Innovation Challenge
Public policy is increasingly ill-equipped to manage a society with the kind of boundless creativity that technology like the Internet enables. The ways that people innovate, distribute, and engage information are increasingly online, which demand a new perspective on the issues, challenges, fears and opportunities represented by online creativity and the technology that empowers it.
Project for ZERO1 Fellowship/x
Have you ever wondered about the trajectory of your data stream when you e-mail, browse a website or carry out another on-line activity? That’s part of what Canadian-American artist Paula Levine researched over the past year. With a focus on the more widely available open public wireless systems, Paula’s project City-to-City visualizes network traffic in the form of a topographic map, illustrating in color and sound the real-time trajectory of an individual’s internet inquiry from the point of entry to its final destination, from city to city en route.
Questions arise around the value and necessity of empathy as a common good in our current interconnected world. At the core, however, are challenges and opportunities to imagine new platforms for community building based on ideas of global citizenship in which the individual recognizes his and her role as an inherent element of the bridge between local and global, and the responsibilities suggested by this notion.
ANTIVJ
ANTIVJ is a visual label initiated by a group of European artists fascinated by the use of projected/emitted light and its influence on perception. ANTIVJ artists have been recognized as leaders in their field, developing a very personal approach to video mapping projection, and being invited to create work all around the world. By developing their own tools they can create content that would not be possible otherwise, and also face technical problems when industry standards software do not provide a solution. Their practice as artists and technologists range from architectural projection to installation, performance, and interactive design. Working at the intersection of lighting/art, architecture, design, performance, and software development they have created temporary and permanent large scale immersive site-specific work and experiences for France's Centre Pompidou Metz, Wroclaw's Unesco listed Hala Stulecia dome, La Havana's plaza Vieja, South Korea's futuristic city Songdo and the Old Port of Montreal.
About: Simon Geilfus of ANTIVJ
Simon Geilfus was born in 1985 in Brussels where he currently lives. As a designer, artist, and coder most of Simon's work lies today at the intersection of art and code. Starting a web design career at the time when Processing was released and the Flash Hackers Community exploded, Simon quickly got drawn in creative coding, computational design, and generative graphics. Designing tools and new approaches for graphic and motion design has become one of his major interests. He enjoys creating graphics and visual abstractions as much as creating the software and systems to generate them.
Simon has presented his work and down lectures at festivals around the globe including Mutek in Montreal and Mexico, TodaysArt The Hague, Share Conference in Belgrade, CmODA+OneDotZero in Beijing, French Institute of Tokyo's Digital Art Festival, Web Flash Festival at Centre Pompidou, Futuresonic Manchester, L.E.V Festival in Gijon, Itau Cultural in San Paulo, Scopitone Festival in Nantes. Simon also lectured for three years at Brussels' Superior National School of Visual Arts, La Cambre, and occasional lecturer at Graphic Research School of Brussels, ERG. He regularly teaches the Art of creative coding at cultural events and festivals around Europe.
ANTIVJ Project for ZERO1 Fellowship/x
Imagine strolling around downtown San Jose after regular business hours. As the sun goes down, the empty walls of the city slowly lighten up. Mysterious life forms glide along the surface of the wall across the street. Around the corner, another bare building surface, and another intriguing display of light. ANTIVJ is a group of European artists who could easily be considered the artistic rock stars in the world of large-scale projections that combine light and sound to transform urban architecture. Adding to their line of numerous international projects, ranging from South Korea to Mexico, from Tokyo to Montreal, and most recently the Centre Pompidou in Metz (France), lead artist Simon Geilfus and ANTIVJ producer Nicolas Boritch have currently descended upon San Jose.
Simon’s project proposes an illuminated navigation system that would take shape as a city-wide web of large-scale projections on downtown building facades that lure the commuter, the pedestrian, the random flaneur, through San Jose’s city streets. The projections themselves are conceived as a collaborative urban game, with an invitation to the audience to participate in the creation of the ever-evolving visuals through their mobile device. San Jose’s downtown urban environment is being repositioned as a place of open exchange and community building between those already familiar and those about to become familiar with the city’s inner core. This project is the way-finding component of the Illuminating Downtown Project from the San Jose Public Art Program. It is additionally supported by KDDI Group and residency support from the Montalvo Arts Center.
