|
About the Guggenheim Fellowship Program: http://www.gf.org
http://www.guggenheim.org
For Immediate Release:
ELECTRONIC CAFE INTERNATIONAL Founders Santa Monica, CA, USA: Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, Founders and Co-Directors of Electronic Cafe International (ECI), have each been awarded a 1999 Guggenheim Fellowship. The Fellowships were awarded individually in recognition of their respective contributions to the arts. The Electronic Cafe International was founded in 1984, and has been a resident at the 18th Street Arts Complex in Santa Monica, California for the last ten years -- ECI is an internationally recognized, and award winning laboratory for telecollaborative arts and sciences. "We are truly honored to be among those selected for this prestigious award, and plan to use the release time it will afford us to chart our participation in the next millennium", responded Galloway and Rabinowitz to the announcement. Guggenheim Fellowships are appointed on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment. Fellows include writers, painters, sculptors, photographers, filmmakers, choreographers, physical and biological scientists, social scientists, and scholars in the humanities. For the 1999 Fellowships, 179 artists, scholars, and scientists were selected from nearly 2800 applicants for awards totaling $6,062,000. Decisions are based on recommendations from hundreds of expert advisors and are approved by the Guggenheim Foundation's Board of Trustees. The Guggenheim Fellowships will enable Galloway & Rabinowitz to focus full time on the ECI Archiving Project, which will preserve and make accessible the collection of their work, covering 25-years of interactive telecollaborative art projects. Assisted by a Planning Grant from the Getty Foundation, the project will document Galloway & Rabinowitz' seminal works, as well as chronicle hundreds of creative telecollaborations with artists and affiliated venues around the world. When complete, the ECI Archive will be a digital catalogue of multiple media types, published via a relational database available to arts institutions, scholars, artists, and students over the World Wide Web. "The archives cover an important transition in multi-site telecommunications, and telecollaborative art, spanning the analog age, and crossing the digital divide," says Rabinowitz, "integrating the best attributes of both while celebrating the increasing human desire to convene in, co-create in, and participate in defining a new social space free of siginificant historic and geographic restraints." Adds Galloway, "The novel art forms revealed by networking people through multimedia technologies -- and even the role of participants in completing the work -- challenges the ability to create a hybrid language for distinguishing between the ever expanding nuances experienced by global collaborators and participants in transmedia environments. These Fellowships will help us address these challenges." About the Artists
http://www.ecafe.com The artists are internationally recognized as having created a distinguished body of work, spanning a variety of sub-genres indicative of the convergence of telecollaboration and aesthetic inquiry. Their credits include many of the early, seminal projects in the genre of telecommunications art and are now considered classics.
Contact:
tele: 310-828-8732
|