LOS ANGELES, CA.- The Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced the recipients of its 2022 Art + Technology grants. The grant awards include monetary and in-kind support for projects that engage emerging technologies. LACMA issued the 2022 Request for Proposals in December 2021, and the museum received over 6OO submissions. The grant recipients selected for 2022 will explore the materialization of microscopic imaging technology, the distributive properties of mycelium networks, artificial intelligence, and relationships between diverse fields of research and the inquiries of contemporary artists.
LACMA’s Art + Technology Lab and its artist projects benefit from the experience and expertise of an advisory board composed of leading innovators across a variety of technological industries, who help drive the conversation around how museums will engage new technologies. Advisory board members include Hyundai, Snap Inc., SpaceX, and Google, as well as individual artists and technologists.
The Lab is part of The Hyundai Project: Art + Technology at LACMA, a joint initiative exploring the convergence of art and technology. Hyundai Motor has been supporting LACMA since 2015 on a variety of projects, including acquisitions, exhibitions, scholarship initiatives, and programming.
“We are delighted that our 2022 request for proposals got such a wonderful response, and excited to see how artists are continuing to experiment and innovate with emerging technologies,” said Joel Ferree, program director of the Art + Technology Lab. “This year’s grant recipients exemplify the risk-taking creativity that the Lab seeks to support and amplify.”
2022 Art + Technology Lab Grant recipients:
Kelly Akashi will employ new microscopic imaging technology such as X-ray lasers and microCT scanning to record data that will be processed into sculptural forms. Trained in photography, Akashi will expand sculpture’s relationship to this technology and experiment with new methods for materializing the information she fathers by using hardware such as Desktop Metal 3D printers to achieve new, intricate metal sculptures. Akashi’s project is called Fissures.
Nancy Baker Cahill will examine the equitable distributive properties of mycelium networks, comparing them to current distributive technologies. Focusing on blockchains, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and the idea of a Web3 internet, the artist will look for how these technologies could be adapted to strategies of mutual aid and reparation. Cahill’s project is called Substrate.
Lauren Lee McCarthy will develop a performance that will unfold in participants' cars, with an Al voice assistant providing geolocative and narrative direction. Talking place in Los Angeles, the work will explore themes of navigated risk assessment, control, and shifting boundaries. McCarthy’s project is called Drive-Thru.
Daniel R. Small will create and direct an episodic documentary series based on diverse sets of research from a wide range of experts in fields such as philosophy, zoology, astrophysics, planetary science, robotics, and artificial intelligence, among other fields. The aim of the series is to locate these research groupings as being in direct conversation with the inquiries of contemporary artists and the ways that the term “artist” has become a catch-all for generating ideas in fields such as philosophy, archaeology, cultural anthropology, law, biology, technology, and various other disciplines. Through analyzing case studies involving the evolution of humans, the natural world, and the amplification of technologies, the series will form an epistemology of the present that models generative bodies of evidence. Small’s project is titled Techne.
The Art + Technology Lab’s 2022 artist projects were evaluated on various criteria, including artistic merit; opportunities for public engagement; and the suggested forms of data, methods, and/or models that might be of interest to other artists.
