Artists without Boundaries

boundary: an often imaginary line separating one thing from another

[A PROSPECTUS]

artists without boundaries artandartistswithoutboundaries.com artistswithoutboundaries.org artistsacrossborders.com artacrossborders.org a global art initiative

building bridges across artistic, geographic, cultural and political divides.

boundary: an often imaginary line separating one thing from another

artists without boundaries A GLOBAL ART INITIATIVE

Our goal is to facilitate artistic collaboration and creation through innovative and groundbreaking use of the internet and digital technologies and in the process build bridges across artistic, geographic, cultural and political divides.

A Global Online Arts Collaborative We will apply the social networking technology of the kind used by such internet sites as myspace and facebook to create a 24/7 global online collaborative community of select, motivated, and international artists from various disciplines and expertise.

We will create an online space where members of the collaborative can interact with each other via text, voice and video-/teleconferencing, in discussion groups, forums and the like, and share their work using cutting edge technology.

A Global Arts Festival The highlight and showcase of our activities will be a triannual themed collaborative arts festival/conference with full online and onsite access and participation.

The Festival will be a global event, simultaneous and synchronized, live, online and streamed from “Festival Central”—a designated host country/venue —and, as well, from satellite venues around the world. Through the use of the internet, video-conferencing, streaming video/audio and other technologies, there will be full access and full participation in all events—including seminars, exhibitions, lectures, master classes and demonstrations.

A Global Advocacy Enabling the creation of great art is our primary function,. We also see ourselves uniquely placed to deal with a number of other important cultural and political issues.

Artists Without Boundaries will stimulate the growth of cross-cultural understanding by bringing selected artists from diverse cultures together in an ongoing conversation.

While we are blessed to live in a culture where freedom of expression is cherished, we recognize that difficult and often life-threatening challenges exist for artists who live and work in societies where limits are set on artistic expression by cultural inhibition or political repression.

We will identify, support and advocate for such artists.

Collaboration bridges ARTISTIC BOUNDARIES “To explore, practice, and further develop a wide range of interdisciplinary creativity and research within the arts and between the arts, humanities, and sciences.”

INTERDISCIPLINARY PROGRAM IN COLLABORATIVE ARTS/UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA

The notion of interdisciplinary artistic collaboration is not new.

In the performing arts— opera, ballet, theater—the idea of a total artform combining music, movement, written and spoken word, images and design has been an ideal since the 19th century. Film, today’s most ubiquitous artform, is the ultimate collaborative venture combining text, visuals, sound, music, design and art direction. Among contemporary artists from all disciplines and in all media there is a growing excitement and interest in collaborative arts and in the creation of vital new forms and genres.

AWB will be a creative think tank for collaborative artists and artworks. particularly those which go beyond the obvious —video &=m usic & computer graphics.

We will encourage invention. We expect the unexpected such as collaborations between traditional media—painting, sculpture—and new digital media.

technology bridges GEOGRAPHIC BOUNDARIES “Through the use of telecommunications and high performance technologies, the Institute reaches out across the campus, state, nation, and the world...”

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA/DIGITAL WORLDS INSTITUTE (USA)

Collaboration requires communication.

For most of human history the ability of artists to work together was inhibited by geography.

In the last century, the telephone, affordable high speed travel, and wireless communication began to erase the barrier of distance. Today, mass access to low-cost communication and information technologies, highspeed transmission of data over the internet, digital video and audio, computer-aided graphics, animation, and editing software opens the door to exciting collaborations between artists 1000s of miles apart.

AWB will be an advocate for, and—with our plans to fund “Legacy Arts and Media Centers” which will provide of enabling technologies and facilities for the creation of collaborative art. AWB shall partner with arts and technologgy groups such as MIT Media Lab, CalArts, Florida Digital Worlds Institute in this endeavor.

conversation bridges CULTURAL BOUNDARIES “Western art history has failed terribly in the record of its relationship to non-European cultures and has a definite tendency to mistranslate, misinterpret and denigrate art that has come from Asia, Africa the Middle East and South America.”

While the arts may be considered a universal language, cultural differences, dichotomies and misunderstandings still exist.

AWB will bring artists from diverse cultures together in a synergistic conversation about cultural issues as well as issues of inspiration, recognition and earning a living that are common to all artists, serving to stimulate the growth of a common vernacular.

exposure bridges POLITICAL BOUNDARIES “A Jalousie (“jealousy” in French) is a window that one can see through but not be seen; barriers that allow us to observe the world without being invited to the table.”

URBAN JEALOUSIE/THE 1ST INTERNATIONAL ROAMING BIENNIAL OF TEHRAN

Difficult and often life-threatening challenges exist for artists who live and work in societies where limits are set on artistic expression by cultural inhibition or political repression.

AWB will identify, support and advocate for such artists. Monetary Rescue Awards shall be given at the discretion of the board. We will shine the spotlight of public attention upon those countries which demonstrate a lack of tolerance for free expression.We will reward those countries which make strides towards expanding such vistas for their artist/citizens.

artists without boundaries will be:

AN ONLINE ARTS COLLABORATIVE A VIRTUAL THINK TANK A DIGITAL ATELIER A GLOBAL ARTS FESTIVAL

A Global Online Arts Collaborative Our goal is to facilitate artistic collaboration and creation through innovative and groundbreaking use of the internet and digital technologies.

Imagine the possibilities if the social networking technology of the kind used by such internet sites as myspace and facebook were to be applied to a select, motivated, and international group of artists.

We envision nothing less than the creation of a 24/7 global online collaborative community—a community of artists from various disciplines and expertise, including individual artists as well as established groups, who will interact and create together over the internet using cutting edge technology, dedicated servers, shared software and the like.

the Virtual Think Tank The Digital Atelier The members of the collaborative, The members of the collaborative will have access to a special section of will form online sub-collaboratives. our website. Here, all members of the These collaboratives will be diverse: collaborative will have posted their including members from at least two profiles into a searchable database— different disciplines, two different geopersonal and professional interests, graphical areas, and both genders. geographic location, sex, samples or These collaboratives will be able to links to samples of their work). setup a sub-site of their own with Members of the collaborative will use access limited as they choose. In this this database to find other members virtual space, with the use of shared with common interests, facilitating online software, dedicated online file discussion, brainstorming and other storage and other technologies, they interactions via text, voice and video- will not only conceptualize collabora/teleconferencing, discussions groups, tive project(s)/ event(s)/artwork(s) forums, etc. but will be able to work on them over the net. The collaboratives can seek input from a group of mentor/coaches as well as the larger community.

A Global Arts Festival The highlight and showcase of our activities will be a triannual themed collaborative arts festival/conference with full online and onsite access and participation.

The Festival will be a global event, simultaneous and synchronized, live, online and streamed from Festival Central—a designated host country/venue —and, as well, from Satellite Venues. Through the use of the internet, video-conferencing, streaming video/audio and other technologies, there will be full access and full participation in all events—including seminars, exhibitions, lectures, master classes and demonstrations related to our core missions, all of this falling under a conceptual umbrella: the event theme.

For our first festival, we plan for Festival Central to be at the existing venue of one of our network Partners—e.g. The University of Minnesota or The Florida Digital World Institute. In subsequent years, the festival shall be hosted in different countries with existing facilities, or, hopefully, in “legacy=medi a centers” funded through our program.

Central to the festival will be a masterworks salon where the works funded by the collaborative shall be presented.

We shall also present notable out-of-network works.

[proposed theme festival]

artists without boundaries presents

hooking up the first global festival and celebration of collaborative art bridging the boundaries of realtime and virtualtime simultaneous and synchronized events live and online from five continents with dance, music, theater, photography visual arts, spoken & written word, film, video and more.

live and streamed online from [festival central]

the university of new orleans new orleans, louisiana, usa [satellite venues] centre soleil d'afrique bamako, mali platform garanti contemporary art center istanbul, turkey national arts festival grahamstown, south africa pinacoteca do estado de são paulo sao paulo, brazil center for contemporary art prague, the czech republic five arts centre kuala lumpur, malaysia in partnership with the arts network of asia and the collaborative arts program of the university of minnesota / sponsored by the ford foundation and apple computer / technology enabled by the florida digital worlds institute / access and full participation for all events available onsite and online and for the hearing and visually impaired

[proposed schedule of events]

Overture

COLLABORATIONS WITH MY SELVES

debut of a new piece written and performed by anna deavere smith, aaawb spokesperson and co-founder

Masterworks salon

a series of events, exhibits, concerts, performances throughout the festival presenting the works financed by aaawb

Beyond our boundary

NOTEWORTHY WORKS FROM BEYOND THE COLLABORATIVE hands across the ocean:the lost chord

real-time global performing arts collaboration with partners representing Australia, Korea, Latin America, England and the USA working together to create a multidimensional perspective on world music. dancing beyond boundaries

an unprecedented distance collaboration The choreographer, dancers, animation artists, musicians, computer scientists, engineers and producers all in different cities in North and South America. drumma drumma

a simultaneous and synchronous performance event with musicians and engineers located at four North American Universities

Global panel discussion

ISLAM AND THE ARTS, THE ARTIST AND ISLAM moderated by nobelist orhan pamuk with award-winning Muslim comedian Shazia Mirza, playwright Yussef El Guindi [BACK OF THE THROAT], novelist Shahrnush Parsipur [TUBA AND THE MEANING OF THE NIGHT], filmmaker nader talebzadeh [JESUS, THE SPIRIT OF GOD], british painter vaseem mohammed, Juveria Aleem, director of the US Muslim film series and singer/songwriter cat stevens

Closing concert and dance HOOKING UP SUFI:

Rock and whirl with Junoon—inventors of Sufi rock and one of Pakistan and South Asia’s most popular Rock bands—and djs from four continents as they hook up in cyberspace, providing the soundtrack for a global night of dancing

University without boundaries

LECTURES, SEMINARS, MASTERCLASSES

New collaborative technologies EXHIBITIONS AND DEMONSTRATIONS

Choosing the members of the collaborative An applications committee shall determine eligibility requirements to join the collaborative. Various means of identifying prospective applicants shall be used including personal contacts, nominations from university and arts groups, response to posts on the internet and targeted advertising in pertinent publications and journals.

Applicants must demonstrate talent, expertise, commitment as well as technical(IT) skills and access to a computer with a broadband internet connection. As our program grows we envision being able to fund such access for individual artists, groups and regional centers who have financial need. All applicants shall submit an application online, including but not limited to: biography, vitae, essays, “digital portfolio”, references, etc.

The Language Boundary While we subscribe to and encourage the ideal of multilingual collaboration, we believe that in the beginning, at the least, that sheer logistics requires a “lingua franca”. Thus, we shall require applicants to demonstrate oral skills in english via phone/netphone interview.

Size of the collaborative and term of fellowship The initial number of members of the collaborative shall be determined in part by the response to our program, the number and quality of applicants, availability of adequate mentoring and oversight, and the amount of data our technology is capable of handling.

The three year sequence The first year of their fellowship will be a year of discussion, brainstorming, interaction, and ultimately “pairing off ” into sub-collaboratives. In the second year, these sub-collaboratives shall focus on the creation of their proposal. The third year shall be devoted to bringing these works to life. After their three-year term, the “alumni” shall be asked to serve a fourth year as mentors. They will continue to participate in the collaboratives but will not be eligible for funding,

Funded projects The sub-collaboratives will post proposals for projects on the site. These in-depth proposals will require a description of the work, production schedule, allocation of responsibilities and function, plans for promotion, a detailed budget, etc. In short, a real world grant proposal. These proposals shall receive feedback from the entire community.

Proposals shall be eligible for consideration for in-house funding as an Aaawb masterwork project as well as being be posted on a section of the site dedicated to public microfunding.

Microfunding A section of our website will dedicated to a type of small-ticket arts sponsorship/patronage similar to microfunding sites such as Kiva.org. This system will allow the sub-collaboratives to seek and receive small “investments” for their projects. In this section, site visitors will be able to browse project proposals from the collaborative members. For example, a dance/video collaboration might seek $400 to rent a performance hall, a music/theater collaboration $650 to purchase video editing software. Site visitors will be able become an “CyberAngel” by pledging an amount in increments as little as $25 USD. The investment will not be due until and unless the proposal reaches a commitment for full-funding.

Professional Development With our partners we shall produce a series of online lectures, discussions, seminars and master classes for the benefit of the collaborative. The subject matter of these may be broad, technical or very craft specific. These may be available live online, streamed online, downloadable as quicktime movies and podcasts. The public may pay a fee to receive access to audit this program.

Grants, stipends and other monetary awards.

We are committed to funding of a number of exceptional collaborations as well as helping to fund regional art & media Legacy centers. We will explore the desirability of and nature of the circumstances under which other monetary awards—Rescue Awards, expenses (such as the cost of broadband access), travel to and from the festival, equipment —shall be given.

The public website The public area of our website will present news, listings, educational and other information, links to the the biographies of the fellows and their projects.

They will be able to view exhibits, “concerts” and other events online. From time to time be able to participate in collaborative projects devised for visitors to our site.

Site Generated Public Collaborations We shall encourage the public to experience the making of collaborative art by inviting them from time to time to visit our website and particpate in specialprojects.

This is a description of such project: NOH TOO ALIKE An Experiment in Probability Poetry.

1. Take a digital photograph of a sentence or fragment of a sentence that you come upon in the real world.

2. Using the presized template you may download from this page, create a jpeg of your photograph of this sentence.

3. Upload this jpeg to our site from 12:01 am to 11:59 pm on––––––––.

4. Subsequently, visitors to the site will be able choose the number of lines of a poem (or other parameters) and software on our servers will be able to randomly select from these sentences and create a poem presented as a visual collage.

5. Visitors may print a copy of this poem.

6. There will never be any two alike.

[appendix]

prospective regional and network partners

network partners Florida Digital Worlds Institute The Collaborative Arts program of the University of Minnesota MIT Media Lab California School of the Arts regional partners Africa Exchange ANA, Arts Network of ASIA Festival Panafricain Cu Cinema et de la Television de Ouagadougou Ouagoudougou, Burkina Fasa StandardBank National Arts Festival Gramstown, South Africa Festival of the Dhow Countries Zanzibar, Tanzania PANAFEST Cape Coast, Elmina and Accra, Ghana Kusanganisa Festival London, United Kingdom National Black Arts Festival Atlanta, GA Moroccan Artists' C ollective " La Source du Lion" Persian Gulf Environmental Art Festival

[REPRINTED FROM GAINSVILLE PRESS]

Live dance performance uses cyberspace An important feature of this opportunity for struggling artists is its economic efficiency, according to Quay."”W e can connect artists from around the world and they don’t have to get on an airplane,”" he said.

On the second floor of University of Florida's hist oric Norman Hall gym, dancers and engineers combined forces to put on live performances Wednesday afternoon.

But two-thirds of the act was not in Gainesville.

UF's C ollege of Fine Arts, the New World School of the Arts and the Case Western Reserve University's M ather Dance Center danced on a shared stage in cyberspace from Gainesville, Miami and Cleveland.

UF's Digit al Worlds Institute hosted two live Netcasts which brought dancers face-to-face on screen, and thanks to the institute's t echnological capabilities, the result was a multifaceted synchronized show of artistic talent.

An audience of mostly administrative staff and a freshman dance class watched the performers just feet away appear on wall-sized projections with added music, psychedeli images and other special video montage effects.

Choreographer Kelly Drummond Cawthon described the project as d " ancing beyond boundaries."

"D ance is the perfect language to test this technology," said Cawthon, who teaches UF student members of the Florida M.O.D. (Modern Original Dance) Project, a professional training company of contemporary dancers.

The performance titled “In Common SPACE”" w as a collaborative effort of UF's C ollege of Fine Arts, the department of theater and dance and the Digital Worlds Institute.

It manifested from the original concept of remotely broadcasting an absent employee at a business meeting, according to Andy Quay, associate director of the Digital Worlds Institute.

“I really enjoy being able to take my technology skills and apply them to the arts,”"Qu ay said.

Through this combination of fields, the audience can feel more connected by both seeing and feeling the performance.

Preparation for the production, which has been dubbed r" ea l-time distribution collaboration," t ook about three weeks and four or five rehearsals, Cawthon said. ”" W e can just really work together outside of our own boxes,” Cawthon said.

The different schools first rehearsed within their dance companies, then combined the choreography with the others in cyberspace. Two of the UF dancers also worked with “remote choreographers.

But the broadcast rehearsals were also a difficult idea to swallow. One dancer from Cleveland admitted, I" had t o look at a screen," w hile constantly reminding himself, t" his is still live."

Cawthon, who taught and danced professionally for about 20 years, said the possibilities of this medium, which reaches beyond television and the Internet, led her to become a professor in UF's School of Theatre and Dance in 1999.

“The Digital Worlds Institute’s research is recognized internationally, a" nd yet Gainesville doesn’t know we're here,"” C awthon said.

The institute holds claim to innovative high-speed Internet and broadcast tools.

The NetroNome and NOME (NetroNome Online Media Experience) systems are part of what made Wednesday's performa nce possible.

Among other things, the tools enabled the delays in sound and motion caused by transmission over the Internet to match up and result in synchronization. More information about the engineers' w ork can be found at www.digital worlds.ufl.edu.

And this world is only at its infancy.

"A s the technology becomes less expensive, we're going to see much more of it," Qu ay said.

An important feature of this opportunity for struggling artists is its economic efficiency, according to Quay. ”" W e can connect artists from around the world and they don’t have to get on an airplane,”" he said.

Yet the artists can physically interact, despite the fact that they may be on opposite sides of the world.

In one case, a UF dancer visiting New York immediately recognized another dancer because she had performed with her in cyberspace, according to Cawthon. ”" It’ s making the world a little smaller,”" C awthon said.

The next collaborative project of the Florida M.O.D. Project and Digital Worlds Institute will be a campuswide broadcast of a political performance called “Vote.”

It will take place in the Black Box of Constans Theatre.

Until then, this new world of multimedia is sure to grow.

T " his is t he language of our time," C awthon said.

Glossary Staff Executive Director/Advocate—Fundraiser/Grant Writer.

Communications Director/Writer Director of Technology/Webmaster Artists’ Liaison Partners’ Liaison Festival Coordinator Technical Liaison Internet & Print Designer.

Founding Partners Board of Directors Advisory Committee Regional Partners

Representative regional and cultural arts and technology groups who aid in the selection process and help to implement the program in their regions.

Network Sites

Regional network of existing performance venues and technology centers.

Mentors

Volunteer professionals from various disciplines who guide the participating artists.

Fellows

Artists whose collaborative ventures are funded.

Associates

Artists who have been selected to join the collaborative.