2000 CREATIVE CAPITAL GRANTS.

Creative Capital announced its first round of grants to individual artists, totaling $563,700. Seventy-five artists from 1807 applicants were awarded grants from $3200 to $20,000 in support of projects in five different areas: emerging fields, media, performance, visual arts and interdisciplinary projects. Another $336,300 has been set aside for complementary renewal funding for these projects for a total commitment of $900,000. Awardees include nationally and internationally known artists as well as mid-career and younger artists.

Proposals were reviewed by program staff and outside evaluators. From the initial pool of applicants, 220 were invited to submit additional materials that were reviewed by panels comprised of five separate peer groups. The panelists for the emerging fields were Carl Goodman, Curator of Digital Media at the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York, NY; Carol Stakenas, Associate Director of Creative Time in New York, NY; and Mark Tribe, Creative Director and founder of Rhizome.org, a non-profit organization dedicated to fostering communication and community in the field of new media art. The panelists for the media grants were Dorothy Thigpen, Executive Director of Third World Newsreel in New York, NY; Ted Hope, co-founder of the New York City-based production company Good Machine; William Horrigan, Media Curator at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, OH; Marcus Hu, founder of Strand Releasing in Los Angeles; and Barton Weiss, an independent film and video producer, director, editor and educator based in Dallas. The panelists for the visual arts grants were Greg Cameron, Chief Development Officer of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; Steve Henry, Director of Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, NY; Ron Platt, Curator of Exhibitions at the Weatherspoon Art Gallery at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro; Eugenie Tsai, Senior Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art; and Irene Tsatsos, Director/Curator of Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. The panelists for the interdisciplinary grants were Barbara Courtney, Executive Director of Artists Trust in Seattle, WA; Andrea Miller Keller, independent curator in New York City; and Pepon Osorio, a multi-media installation artist based in Bronx, NY. Creative Capital Director Ruby Lerner sat on all of the panels; Ken Chu from Creative Capital sat on the emerging fields, the visual arts and the interdisciplinary panels; and Esther Robinson, also of Creative Capital, sat on the media panel.

Creative Capital was founded in January 1999 by a group of 22 business leaders, arts professionals and foundation executives to support individual artists creating innovative new work. Twenty-nine foundations and individual philanthropists have contributed more than $5 million to Creative Capital. These supporters include the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Peter Norton Family Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, the Joe and Emily Lowe Foundation, Catherine and Jeffrey Soros and Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro. Although the idea for the project originated from a concern for artists following the 1995 dissolution of the National Endowment for the Arts' funding of individuals, the Creative Capital grants function slightly differently than traditional grants: they function more along the lines of an investment model. Not only is there completion money set aside, but Creative Capital will provide the grant winners with marketing consultation in order to find audiences and further sources of funding. Each artist is also required to return a small portion of any profits derived from their projects to Creative Capital, which will reinvest the money into new grants. Finally, Creative Capital not only offers grant applications on-line but has designated a funding category for new media projects, a commitment to the field that is entirely unique.

The following selected grants are those we believe will be of interest to Afterimage readers.

Emerging Fields

Betty Beaumont, New York, NY $15,000 Decompression will be a Web site created by electronically collaging multiple stories, documentation and images of the contiguous worlds of technology; science and art to create a living laboratory in cyberspace. Decompression will document and expand Beaumont's earlier project entitled Ocean Landmark.

Natalie Bookchin, Los Angeles, CA $12,000 Natalie Bookchin will develop a high-tech freestanding computer arcade game and a concurrent on-line multi-player game entitled The Intruder, which is an experimental adaptation of a short story by Jorge Luis Borges. His story is about a love triangle with a brutal, misogynist ending. To the artist this is an analogy for basic game narratives of an invasion by an other/alien who must be eliminated to bring about resolution or closure. The Intruder is a new hybrid form of narrative that exists on the border of computer and video arcade games, cinema and literature.

Josely Carvalho, New York, NY $8000 Book of Roofs is a media/installation project that includes an interactive Web site and digital video installations. Book of Roofs began as conceptual sculptural book art It consisted of a video installation comprised of 3000 clay roof tiles arranged in repeating patterns upon which digital video images were continuously projected. The Internet is now the site of Book of Roofs as a virtual project. The structure of Book of Roofs as a digital interactive project allows a multiplicity of voices organized through a database process to construct a collective nonlinear narrative of experiences, metaphors and thoughts on dwelling. Carvalho is working with the concept that architecture is part of everybody's personal history and shelter is an extension of our body.

Maya Sara Churi, New York, NY $5000 Letters from Homeroom will be a short fiction video and Web site based on the letters high school girls write to each other during class. The narrative is drawn from the artist's own experiences with her classmates. Shot on digital video, Letters from Homeroom will be available to the audience through the Internet and will serve as the primary component of a Web site. The Web site and video will develop a community around the site where teens become involved in shaping their own entertainment. In the spring the project will combine forces with Moxie, an all-female pop/punk/folk band from New York, to create a promotional campaign reaching teens across the U.S. The two will host a series of high school viewing/listening parties to promote the site and the release of Moxie's second CD.

Patrick Clancy, Kansas City, MO $7000 The Writing Machine is an interactive text-and sound-based work for the Web that will also be exhibited as an installation. The primary content is provided by people writing personal histories into a window of the Web. These stories will then be added to a stack of pages already written by the artist briefly describing photographs from a Banff newspaper. Using a computer program converting real-time weather in Banff into an elaborate system of "eroding" and fracturing the text, the stack of papers will go through changes paralleling the natural cycles of the earth's surface--erosion, percolation, sedimentation and fracture. The project will be a real-time studio/laboratory for learning and generating new visual and spatial narratives.

Alison Cornyn and Sue Johnson, New York, NY $5000 360 Degrees will be a participatory investigation of the American criminal justice system. Over the next few years, 360 Degrees will tackle issues such as immigration, welfare reform, class bias and the workplace. Creative Capital funding will help support a year-long pilot project on the American criminal justice system. Every month a new module will be added to the series that will include first-person stories, interactive data and a forum for discussion. The project will utilize the technology of 360-degree QuickTimeVR panoramas, which place viewers in the center of a room so that the visitor can experience being in a prison cell or judge's chamber while listening to intimate portraits captured through audio diaries. Additionally, interactive data games will invite visitors to put themselves in the big picture. In one scenario, viewers type in their age, race, location (urban, suburban, rural) and income to find out their chances of becoming a victim of a c rime and of being arrested or incarcerated, and if incarcerated, for how long. Changing these variables will reveal the influence that race and economics have on statistical outcomes.

Leah Gilliam, Tivoli, NY $5000 A Web site and an accompanying CD-ROM will investigate the collisions of history and technology in the 1997 Mars Pathfinder Mission. As a Web site, Agenda for a Landscape will function as both an extrapolative archive and a visually challenging art object. Using the Sojourner Rover as its exploration vehicle, Agenda critiques the idea of "cyber-space" as the free play of identities with little or no relationship to the real world. The project will explore the ways in which the Web creates an audience and fosters communities. Examining the Pathfinder mission from this perspective, the project provides a unique source of information, serving to gather viewpoints, provoke discussion and invite interaction

Jessica Irish, Los Angeles, CA $5000 Inflat-o-scape.com will be an experimental, multi-faceted "view" of an urban information zone: a merging of architectural structures, information technologies and inflatable forms. Visually, the project functions much like an interactive cityscape. It grows out of a focus on the commonplace structures of billboards, roofs and inflatable signs that are a portrait of the disjuncture between the physical world and the increasingly invisible stream of digital information that defines a media-saturated environment. The project is a question or a premise rather than a statement or product. Inflat-o-scape.com is to be a fabricated "space" creating a new "landscape" that is part fiction, part history, part failure and part theoretical database.

Prema Murthy, Brooklyn, NY $7000 The artist will collect stories from women who work within high-tech industries in three locations in South Asia (India, Thailand and the Philippines) about how that work has affected their lives. Mythological stories specific to each of these regions will also be collected. The "real" and "mythological" will then be remixed on the Web site utilizing streaming media technology, Javascript, Flash and hypertext narrative. Bindi.net will feature three Internet TV "channels;' each representing a different location.

John Simon Jr., New York, NY $12,000 Inspired by the writing of Paul Klee, Simon will create a new software artwork for display on a large LCD panel, Color Balance--How much does color weigh? The software will be based on similarities between the patterns of city life and networked data. Positioned as an artwork open to both the reconfiguration of the programmer and the manipulations of the viewer, Color Balance is a system for expanding the possibilities of color. Simon plans to expand his research in electronics and industrial design to produce a mass-marketable handheld electronic artwork.

Ray Thomas, Loudonville, NY $5000 rtmark is a multi-media project that began as a funding system for creative subversion and blacklisted cultural production. It has now evolved into a publicity engine and nexus wherein creative opposition to dominant commercial and informational structures is discussed and developed. The core of the rtmark system is a database on the Web (www.rtmark.com) that lists ideas, workers and capital. People come to the Web site and submit ideas for cultural projects. The project descriptions are given a code and listed like a stock on a financial market. People who read the list of projects can then offer financial support for the projects. This is described as an "investment" for which the financier expects no capital return but rather a "cultural dividend." Like a combination of temp agency, matchmaker and bank, rtmark is a clearinghouse for ideas, information and capital.

Helen Thorington, Staten Island, NY $5000 Adrift will be an evolving on-line performance event, originating from multiple locations: the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, CalArts in Los Angeles and an as yet to be determined location in New York City. The performance will be made available simultaneously to audiences in the three locations and on the Internet. Adrift is a multi-perceptual experience and centers around a harbor and journey. It is the work of a core group of artists: Helen Thorington (text and sound), Marak Walczak (X-3D), Jesse Gilbert (sound) and Martin Wattenberg. The artists and their computers stream information back and forth in real time, creating an interplay between their environments and the various geographies, scales and narratives represented in the work.

Media

Peggy Ahwesh, New York, NY $7500 The Star Eaters is a 70-minute narrative shot on video. The story of The Star Eaters merges the enigma of the night sky, its intoxication and desire, with the exhaustion and emotional decay of the boardwalk in Atlantic City. The film is told from the point of view of a woman adrift in the gambling joints and fake glamour of Atlantic City and her relationships with various hustlers, the ocean, her ex-lovers and the burden of her own memory. The themes of the film are gambling, risk taking, transgression and the quest for meaning, all in relationship to women on the edge.

Craig Baldwin, San Francisco, CA $5000 Spectres of the Spectrum is a 16mm feature film that addresses the issues of "personal creative agency" in the face of corporate media conglomeration and globalization, through a "Found-Footage Fable" form. Several histories of communication technology, invention and exploitation (Ben Franklin, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Philo Farnsworth, David Sarnoff, Bill Gates, et.al.) are conveyed through interviews with artists/activists/academics. The fantasy itself is "drawn out" of archival TV kinescopes, wondrously haunted artifacts of mid-century media archeology. By re-animating these naive science films with an energizing range of narrative, documentary and experimental "probes," a sort of motion picture Frankenstein's Monster will rise with a will of its own across an intensely textured heath of critical reading and genre parody.

Roddy Bogawa, New York, NY $7500 I Was Born, but... is a 16mm color experimental narrative film about the abstract notion of assimilation in our culture. It will address the inherent contradictions of those born into the "melting pot" culture of America. Starting with the Japanese director Ozu's film title as an evocative preface to a film about assimilation, the project will also explore many of the themes to which Ozu dedicated his life's work--tradition and change, the shifting of family structures and the impact of history and memory on the present. The structure of I Was Born, but... will reflect these contradictions through narrative elements embedded within the documentary scenes with the Korean American rock band SEAM (made up of two Korean Americans and two Caucasians), collections of filmed portraits of Asians and Asian Americans and collections of voices (poetry, letters, historical material).

Portia Cobb, Milwaukee, WI $10,000 Yonges Island is a short experimental documentary that will be presented in a series of video tapestries that can be projected. The project will explore current issues concerning ownership and disenfranchisement of inherited land by African Americans in the South. The filmmaker's family faces the dilemma of losing land that was earned by the labor of their great grandmother in 1894. The project will be designed for presentation in outdoor spaces in the areas where the research is focused: Yonges Island, Edisto and Charleston, South Carolina.

Adam Cohen, Brooklyn, NY $6000 Adam Cohen started shooting his Super 8-to-video project, City Poem 3, in 1989. City Poem 3 is a personal documentation of 42nd Street. The result of 10 years of shooting follows 42nd Street from a spontaneous, democratic meeting ground that was beautiful, sometimes terrifying and often desperate--to its current state of suburbanized sameness. The film is about disappearance and about what remains, a personal look at the intertwined processes of history, memory and oblivion.

Jem Cohen, NewYork, NY $10,000

Chain is a narrative feature film built from a base of documentary footage. For five years filmmaker Cohen has been shooting at sites including Los Angeles, New Jersey, South Carolina, Berlin, eastern Europe and Rotterdam, documenting new landscapes that share a strange, indeterminate quality. Using the landscape itself as a major "character" or subtext, it will serve as mortar for a series of linked stories: a blackout finds a man and woman stuck in a skyscraper, a runaway lives under a giant highway overpass, a traveler shares memories of a California earthquake with a young stranger. The film will carefully intersperse scenes with actors among existing footage, constructing simple stories out of real world materials.

Todd Downing, New York, NY $6000

Jeffrey's Hollywood Screen Trick is an amalgamation of gay film titles that have been released over the past few years (Jeffrey, Billy's First Hollywood Screen Kiss and Trick). The short, which is co-scripted with David Briggs, is a stop-motion animated film critiquing these romantic comedies. It stars the Billy and Carlos dolls (the gay version of Barbie and her friend of color) as well as the Tori Spelling doll (the real Tori stars in Trick), none of whom can avoid being drenched in blood.

Sandi BuBowski, New York, NY $5000

Trembling Before G-d is a feature-length documentary about Hasidic and Orthodox Jews who come out as gays and lesbians--and in some cases as HIV+--and the ways in which they negotiate their sexuality and identity in religious communities. It also portrays those who must abandon their intertwined worlds of family and faith. Shot in Israel, Brooklyn, London, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami and the Catskills, using English, Hebrew and Yiddish, it is a project with global implications.

Jeanne Finley and John H. Muse, Brooklyn, NY $5000

Based on a piece Finley created for This American Life, "Loss Prevention" is an installation that will explore the losses that two shoplifters--Debra, 19, and Irene, 79--produce, suffer and prevent through their acts of thievery. Their stories, combined with multiple interactive video projections and sound, will create a subtle meditation on youth and old age, boredom and pleasure, accident and intention, property and ownership, authority and subterfuge. Lush images of intimacy, weather and Florida landscapes will be situated within spatially evocative video projections. These visuals, combined with the narratives and audio, will create an arena for critique, pathos, mystery and empathy.

Barbara Hammer, New York, NY $10,000

Resisting Paradise is a 16mm experimental documentary that juxtaposes a filmic reinterpretation of French painting with a soundtrack made up of interviews with three surviving French resistance fighters. Issues of artistic identity, the pleasure of looking and political responsibility result from an exploration of disjunctive image and sound. By inserting the filmmaker's own specificity, French painting is remade with a gendered eye while incorporating forgotten historical memory. Resisting Paradise continues Hammer's exploration of film emulsion, her creative use of picture and sound and her longtime commitment to making neglected history visible.

Jon Jolles, Baltimore, MD $3200

Levels is a short 16mm film about a man who travels the country leveling tables. It is also about obsession and dignity and the human need for order in a chaotic world. No one speaks in the film.

Lewis Klahr, Los Angeles, CA $5000

The Diptherians will be a feature-length fantasy shot on 16mm. The film will be collage animation that straddles experimental and narrative film (which Klahr calls elliptical narrative) in which one feels the propulsion of a story but the specifics are largely smudged. Diptherians are mythic beings who live among ordinary mortals as a jaded, libertine bohemian subculture pursuing their own needs and intrigues. Klahr is working from a series of photographs taken in 1998 with a cast that includes Willem Dafoe, Henry Stram and Kate Valk.

Chris Munch, Los Angeles, CA $5000

Backward Looks, Far Corners is a narrative film about a remarkable woman, her family and her past lovers as she approaches death in her fifties. Chiefly, it depicts her relationship with her aimless photographer son and her longing to know her lawyer daughter, whom she gave up for adoption at birth. Falling outside the boundaries of traditional narrative film, Backward Looks, Far Corners utilizes a lyrical style appropriate to a story of reflection and reckoning. It takes place in a number of cities (New York, San Francisco, Daytona Beach, Boston, Lancaster, PA) over a number of years. Shooting began two years ago and the film is now being edited.

Spencer Nakasako, San Francisco, CA $5000

In Front of My Face is created and told from the viewpoint of young Southeast Asian Americans who were caught in a particular moment of world history. They are a singular generation, bom in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. They saw what they saw, then fled to a new country that was little more prepared for them than they were for it. The last of a transitional refugee generation born in Southeast Asia, they have younger American-born sisters and brothers and are now beginning to raise American children of their own. Their earliest childhood memories and the cultural tradition of their parents link them to a home of the past, but it is in the U.S. that they face their future.

Diane Nerwen, Brooklyn, NY $6500

An untitled experimental videotape will explore Jewish American attitudes toward Germany. This work will explore how an individual's personal memory or understanding of the Holocaust is bound by memory that has been socially produced and mediated. It will weave together a variety of narrative and structural methods to talk about perceptions and representation of anti-Semitism, racism, ethnicity, cultural identity and the Holocaust.

Joanna Priestley, Portland, OR $5000

Rapture of the Deep is an experimental, abstract, animated film shot on 35mm. This film intends to extend the limits of avant-garde and abstract animation and to pioneer new techniques of creating animation. The film contains three layers of abstract artwork: sculpture (top level); frosted/clear/etched/beveled glass shapes (middle level) and animated pastel; and watercolor painting (bottom level). All of the artwork will be shot on a multi-plane animation stand, creating depth, variety and the ability to move all the components separately. The abstract shapes will be organic, voluptuous and reminiscent of tide pool creatures from another galaxy.

Scott Saunders, New York, NY $7500

The Technical Writer is a dramatic feature-length digital video project that tells the story of Nicholas Jessup, a writer of computer manuals who openly declares himself to be "post-sexual." When a neighbor's wife lays siege to his celibacy, Nick must decide if he is willing to have sex with the wife of another man, and more importantly, if he wants to risk having an intimate relationship at all. This film will look at the emotional disconnect in contemporary society, examining how technology is often used to seal ourselves off from the world of the living.

Philip Solomon, Broomfield, CO $5000

Night of the Meek is part of a feature-length series of films entitled "The Twilight Psalms." This short (15-20 minute) 16mm sound film is an expressionistic cinematic interpretation of the famous Jewish legend of The Golem. The figure of The Golem (a predecessor of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein's monster) will be used to symbolize the embodied resistance of people against genocide. Night of the Meek will also explore the origins of the Holocaust by using actual Nazi footage taken during Kristalnacht (The Night of Broken Glass). The result will be an evocative, painterly film using treated found material in an attempt to create a poetic rendering of a people under siege.

T. Kim-Trang Tran, Los Angeles, CA $8000

"The Blindness Series" consists of eight experimental videos investigating metaphorical and physical blindness. Conceived in 1991, the series creates a non-linear structure wherein the filmmaker examines six topics related to blindness: cosmetic surgery, sexuality, surveillance, hysterical blindness, word blindness and actual blindness. Two additional tapes, the introduction and the epilogue, complete the series. To date, five out of eight tapes have been completed. The remaining three tapes in the series will investigate language and its connection to perceptual blindness, particularly through the condition of Alexia. Amaurosis will be a documentary video about Nguyen Duc Dat, a blind classical guitarist living in the community of Little Saigon in Orange County, CA. Dat was taken in by a classical music teacher who was also blind and who taught him to read both Braille and music.

Ela Troyano, New York, NY $7500

La Lupe is a feature-length film based on the work of the internationally-known pop singer La Lupe, a black, Cuban-born stage diva who rose to fame with the onset of the Cuban revolution in 1960. La Lupe is legendary for emotional performances in which she would beat herself, tearing her hair out in agony over failed love affairs. La Lupe will attempt to demystify, pay homage to and subvert her love songs as popular social constructs of love and passion, analyzing their effect on the female psyche. The film will be shot in New York and Mexico City.

Visual Arts

Conrad Bakker, Grand Rapids, MI $5000

Bakker will create a four-color mail-order catalog featuring everyday objects that the artist has meticulously carved and painted. Bakker creates life size representations of common objects (rolls of tape, a typewriter) and places them in "reallife" situations such as yard sales or art institutions. This process is part of a larger investigation of the nature of objects and their function.

Erika Blumenfeld, Santa Fe, NM $5000

"Light Leaks" is a photographic installation tracking sunlight. It will record the daylight present on the summer solstice (June 21) on Polaroid film with no camera. Beginning at midnight, Blumenfeld will expose new film for 10 seconds every minute for 24 hours. The documentation is the first of a set of four, which will include the winter solstice and the two equinoxes, creating a physical manifestation of the amount of light received and its embodied geometry.

Tony Cokes, Providence, RI $5000

"X Billboard Project," a year-long series of billboards, subway station lightbox ads and posters for subway cars, buses and bus shelters will examine the figure and cultural legacy of Malcom X. The works will deconstruct Malcolm X's place as a commodified folk hero in the urban landscape. Public presentations, a Web site and a video will be organized around the project as methods of further reaching the community and discussing the project's goals.

Chris Doyle, Brooklyn, NY $10,000

Leap is a video projection onto the facade of Two Columbus Circle of 420 New Yorkers from all five boroughs. For a week in April, beginning at dusk, a continuous stream of New Yorkers will be projected one at a time on the base of the building and then appear to leap up across the height of the facade, slipping into the sky. The Metropolitan Transit Authority will post 3500 car cards and station posters with work and images gathered during the videotaping sessions. The car cards will function not only as advertising for the April event, but also as a parallel and related piece.

Martha Jackson-Jarvis, Washington, DC $8000

Using the materials and forms of early vernacular African American architecture in the South, Jackson-Jarvis will construct a garden environment combining forged iron and terra cotta structures, tabby and mosaic walls, copper badges, photographic images (from the Penn Papers and the Museum of Confederacy in Richmond) fused onto sheets of aluminum, along with functional plants. Each aspect of the garden, entitled The Garden Wall, to be installed in Virginia will be directly tied to historical research.

Wendy Jacob, Cambridge, MA $20,000

Jacob has created the Squeeze Chair: a large overstuffed chair with fat tear-drop shaped arms that inflate, holding the sitter in a firm squeeze or hug. Inspired by conversations with Temple Grandin, a well-known animal scientist who is also autistic, the artist conceived of and designed the chair as a kind of simulated embrace. By mechanically applying an even pressure over the body, the squeeze chair creates a calming effect without the terror and over-stimulation of human touch. Although the chair has been shown in art contexts, much of the attention it has attracted has been from the autism community. The artist has a growing list of parents of autistic children who want to own one, and of professionals in the field who are willing to field test the chair in treatment centers.

Shannon Kennedy, Minneapolis, MN $10,000

For "Building Project" Kennedy will use the gastroscope, normally used to film the human digestive tract, to enter the interior spaces of buildings (e.g., ducts, pipes, walls and electrical wiring units) revealing the invisible worlds they make up. She intends to document specific sites including museums, not-for-profit spaces and an office building with a lobby, and to show the edited footage as part of an installation in the actual spaces shot. Creative Capital's funding is for the upgrade and purchase of equipment.

Zoe Leonard, New York, NY $8000

For an untitled 3000-image photography archive begun in 1998, Leonard has been documenting the small, businesses rapidly disappearing in. New York City and other large cities and how their store windows and signs reveal our time. When completed, the images will be shown as a grid organized roughly by subject. Integral to the project is the instant availability of affordable digital prints of the images, encouraging viewers to choose, criticize and own the work.

Alex Rivera, New York, NY $10,000

Tijuana 2000 can best be described as a "digital mural." Designed and conceived as a public art project, it is an update of the Mexican mural movement for the information age. Where the Mexican muralists used pencil and paint, Tijuana 2000 uses the digital video camera and Adobe After Effects. Where the muralists focused on rural Mexico and the plight of campesino, Tijuana 2000 studies the exploding urban space and transitional economy of twenty-first century Tijuana. Tijuana 2000 will take three forms: an installation, a linear "documentary" and a Web site. All three will use digital video to produce seven startling, moving "murals" that will tell emblematic stories from the southern side of the U.S./Mexico border. The "murals" will include stories about families separated by "recent immigration reform" laws, Tijuana artisans being shut down by Disney and workers being frisked as they leave the high-tech maquiladoras of Tijuana.

Sue Schaffner and Carrie Moyer, New York, NY $8000

Dyke Action Machine Productions (DAM!) presents Gynadome: A Separate Paradise, an advertisement and a Web site. The Web site, DAM! FAQ: Dyke Action Machine! Answers Frequently Asked Questions About Lesbians, uses "FAQ" (Frequently Asked Questions) to subvert existing anti-gay hate sites. DAM!'s site will use the latest broad-band technologies to stream videos of Gynadome such as Where the Women are Women, The Men Have Been Put Out to Pasture and And Computers Are Just Big Paperweights. DAM!'s project will also include a 24 x 26-foot stretch vinyl mural, sited for one month on a building in downtown Manhattan. The advertisement for Gynadome: A Separate Paradise will invite viewers to a Web site-www.dykeactionmachine.com--to watch in "real time" as women of the "future" reject the technocracy, go back to the land and leam to love their Mother (Earth, that is).

Mary Ellen Strom, New York, NY $10,000

Girls & is a multi-media project designed by Strom in conjunction with the Youth Art Connect and the Boys & Girls Clubs in Atlanta. Ten teenage girls participated in process-oriented workshops with the content evolving out of the girls' personal experiences. Strom then organized a collaborative team of workshop participants and artists to create a combination of sculpture, video and performance that formed an environment to share the girls' experiences with an audience. The next stop in the project is to produce public art, taking this information out of art venues like the High Museum in Atlanta and into sites like the Board of Education and Family Court.