LACMA

LACMA Names Grants for Art + Technology

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) announced the recipients of its 2014 Art + Technology grants on Wednesday. The awards include monetary and in-kind support for projects that explore artistic applications of emerging technologies. The Art + Technology Lab at LACMA. LACMA’s Art + Technology Lab and its artist projects are made possible by Accenture, DAQRI, and NVIDIA, with additional support from Gensler, Google, and SpaceX. Professor Ken Goldberg and artist Dan Goods are participating as independent advisors. Additional support provided by the LACMA Director's Circle. A grant from the Los Angeles County Productivity Investment Fund is supporting the public lab at the museum to house the initiative. After issuing its first Request for Proposals in December 2013, the museum received over 450 submissions. The five projects selected hail from many artistic disciplines and backgrounds. They will merge their practice with emerging technologies in aerospace, astrophysics, augmented reality, robotics and more. Over the coming twelve months, LACMA’s Art + Technology Lab will host conversations with the artists and display works in progress, revealing the creative process as it happens. Taeyoon Choi and E Roon Kang, based in New York and Seoul, Korea, will develop a project titled In Search of Personalized Time. They will create devices and methods to set one's own time based on subjective perception and networked consensus. The team will also research the essence of presence and the present in relationship to contemporary technology by developing prototypes, a performance, and a workshop. Choi is co-founder of the School for Poetic Computation and directs the Making Lab, a community makerspace run by artists in South Korea. Kang operates an interdisciplinary design studio, Math Practice, and is aTED Fellow, and has been a research fellow at SENSEable City Laboratory at MIT. John Craig Freeman will draw on crowd-sourcing, augmented reality, and EEG (electroencephalography) technology in a project titled Things We Have Lost. The project will allow participants to “conjure” virtual objects by imagining them into existence using brainwave technology and augmented reality. Freeman is a founding member of the collective Manifest.AR, whose work seeks to expand the notion of public space by exploring how digital networked technology is transforming our sense of place. Annina Rüst will develop a project called…