The Nonprofit Eyebeam Is Handing Out Tens of Thousands of Dollars to Artists to Develop New Tools to Fight Digital Inequality

It may not be the kind of open call to artists you would expect
in the midst of a health crisis.

But an ambitious project by Eyebeam, the 22-year-old New
York-based nonprofit that promotes art on the forefront of
technological innovation, is all about tasking artists with imaging
new forms of equitable digital engagement.

Through the project,
titled Rapid Response a for a
Better Digital Future,
Eyebeam is asking artists to design “new ways of interacting
through the internet,” according to a prompt. Among the proposals
that will be considered are those that make the internet more
accessible; ones that develop artificial and natural
intelligence solutions; and others that help artists develop new
and essential skills.

The initiative will unfold in
two phases. In the first, the organization will hand out 27 $5,000
grants to artists who apply through the open call, which closes on
May 30. In phase two, those artists will be invited to apply for
one of five additional $25,000 grants to turn their ideas into
reality. 

The initiative came together in March, after Eyebeam was forced
to cancel its longstanding residency program, which has more
than 500
alumni, including Jill Magid, Cory Arcangel, and Torkwase Dyson.

“I threw my hands in the air and
said, ‘I don’t know what a residency means right
now. I don’t know what
a program that’s predicated on people coming together in space will
look like in the future,’” Roderick Schrock, Eyebeam’s executive
director, tells Artnet News.

As the organization batted around new initiatives to replace the
program, artist Hito Steyerl,
who serves as one of the nonprofit’s advisors, observed that many of the
suggestions being made had to do with surveillance capitalism,
a term coined by theorist Shoshana Zuboff to describe an era in
which big data has supplanted oil as the world’s most
prized currency.

“That’s the thing that our
organization needs to prioritize and turn the heat up on, because
it’s foundational to a lot of the inequities and issues that the
other suggestions were addressing,” Schrock says.

So Eyebeam put the money
earmarked for its residency towards the Rapid Response initiative, and two philanthropic bodies—the
Henry Luce Foundation and the Mellon Foundation—chipped in another
$300,000, effectively doubling the program’s
budget. 

The open call went live April
21. Since then, Eyebeam has already received more applications than
it ever gets for its residency program—and it expects many more submissions to come
in.

“If there was ever a time to
create a protected space outside the economies of art and
technology,” Schrock says, “this is the moment to do
that.”

The post The Nonprofit Eyebeam Is Handing Out Tens of
Thousands of Dollars to Artists to Develop New Tools to Fight
Digital Inequality appeared first on artnet News.