in Santa Monica
The Cultural+Planning Group, works with leading arts and cultural organizations, philanthropic foundations and government agencies to strengthen arts and cultural communities and economies.The Creative Work Fund is a grantmaking program for San Francisco Bay Area artists that bring artists and nonprofit organizations together for collaborations on new works. The program says it celebrates the role of artists as problem solvers and the making of art as a profound contribution to intellectual inquiry and to the strengthening of communities. Important and also very ambitious goals, for which they have had a profound history of success with some very distinguished participants.
The Creative Work Fund has awarded 186 grants since 1994 within the artistic categories of literary arts, media arts, performing arts, traditional arts and the visual arts. Some of the city's great artists, poets and writers have been past recipients of the fund's grants; Genny Lim, David Meltzer, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Eric Kupers, Michelle Tea, to name just barely a few. Nonprofits collaborating with artists have included San Francisco Cameraworks, The Media Alliance, The African American Coalition for Health Improvement and Empowerment, Brava! for Women in the Arts, Intersection for the Arts, and almost all of the rest of the city's major arts and cultural non profit organizations. The Creative Work Fund was started in response to years of declining support for the arts by the Columbia Foundation, the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund, Miriam and Peter Haas Fund, and Walter and Elise Haas Fund, awarding more than $6 million in grants since its inception. Grant Applications and more information can be found here.
Of course you know all about dj's, but how about vj's or vj/dj's? Have you seen one perform music and live multimedia magic at a club or an experimental video venue? Here's a great video of both the work and the interactive multimedia performance of Darko Milićević's performance, SUSPECT. Milićević's pulsating sounds mixed with a woman's erotic moaning looping over and over timed with the visuals pulls you into the pieceand as always, left me searching for some deeper meaning. Maybe it was there, maybe it wasn't. Darko moves back and forth controlling however many devices at once to keep the frenetic pace going. You would have to ask the artists; but I'm not sure a lot of club VJ's are aspiring to create works of high art. Their primary focus, rather, is to relax and entertain the club patrons and perhaps hand them over to a DJ to keep the dancing and the night going. I didn't see a message in this video. If you do, let me know. But I also haven't seen SUSPECT as a whole, and Darko could take issue with that. - Mark
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