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May 21, 2010: Triple Canopy is pleased to announce the recipients of our first round of commissions, initiated with an open call for proposals on March 1. Commissions were made in the five project areas listed below (a sixth area, Immaterial Literature, was recently established), and will be published in the course of the next year. They are supported in part by a generous grant from the Brown Foundation, Inc. of Houston.

Research Work
Graham T. Beck
A Chromatic History: a survey of FS-595, the official color palette of the United States.

Anna Lundh
An investigation into a "vision of a vision": Karl-Birger Blomdahl's unfinished computer opera, inspired by Hannes Alfvén's 1966 novel The Tale of the Big Computer.

James Thomas & Meghan O'Hara
On its fortieth anniversary, revisiting NASA's Tektite project, the sci-fi-inspired underwater habitat that provided America with a fleeting vision of technologically oriented utopia.

Matt Wolf
"What happened to Jason?" An inquiry into the life of Jason Holliday, the gay black prostitute featured in Shirley Clarke's 1967 film Portrait of Jason.

Internet as Material
Alyssa Pheobus & Murad Khan
A study of the iconography of Pakistani and American passports and the precarious relationship between personal identification, citizenry, and the state.

Eve Sussman
whiteonwhite, a dual-stream thriller randomized in real time; an experimental film noir.

Thinking Through Images
Mary Walling Blackburn & Amy Huber
From Joseph O'Donnell's photographs of the wreckage of Nagasaki to Brueghel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, exploring the relationships between violence, representation, and evolving technologies of vision.

New Media Reporting Project
Claire Barliant
Revisiting Mankato, which in 1862 was the site of the largest mass execution to occur in US history, and questioning the value of manufactured memory.

New Programming
Ilana Halperin
Hand-Held Lava, a performative lecture on "volcanic field work," that mines the intersection of archaeology, geology, and visual art.

A second call for proposals will be announced in the coming months. In the meantime, we will continue to accept works in progress and proposals on equal footing, and on an ongoing basis. Some issues are defined by a particular theme, others are not; we will list upcoming themes here as they are developed. The best way to gauge whether or not your submission is appropriate is by reading the magazine and reviewing our general submission guidelines.

For proposals, please send a 300-to-500-word outline of the project, links to past work, and a CV or resumé; for works in progress, please send a selection of relevant images, texts, and other media, links to past work, and a CV or resumé. (Please do not attach large files.) Email all materials to submissions@canopycanopycanopy.com.

Triple Canopy artistic, editorial, and technical staff will help each contributor develop the best approach to realizing their projects on the Web and work closely with them as they research, conceptualize, design, and ultimately program their work over the course of the project’s production, which usually takes between three and six months. Projects are oftentimes accompanied by a modest honorarium, the amount of which reflects the scope of the work and the cost of its development.

Project areas


Research Work Research Work
Research Work was established to facilitate the creation of research projects that are produced outside academia, for a general audience; employ Internet-specific methods of presentation; and serve a public best reached by making the work available for free online.

Published projects that fit these criteria include:
Research Work Immaterial Literature
Immaterial Literature was established to facilitate the production of creative writing that engages other media (and artists), considers the particular formal qualities of the Web as a medium, and speaks to a diverse and widespread readership, in prose that is exceptional in its quality and rigor. Triple Canopy believes that recent technological developments, and consequent changes in the way literature is produced and consumed, compel writers to develop new forms for crafting their work and articulating their ideas—from critical essays that employ multimedia to prose poems and short stories that mine the potential of interactive tools—and that their work benefits greatly from such consideration. Editorial staff provide emerging and mid-career writers with exacting and attentive editorial and production assistance, from the the early phases of development to the final, published work.

Published projects that fit these criteria include:
New Commissions Internet as Material
Internet as Material was established to support emerging and mid-career artists who have never before made work specifically for the Web in the production of an online project. These projects further Triple Canopy's mission by utilizing the Internet—which is too often understood as a channel for the transfer of information—as a medium for the development of artworks that actively engage readers. By facilitating the use of the Internet as raw or appropriated material, comparable to acrylic paint or magazine clippings, these commissions also help to broaden and diversify the narrowly defined, and technically challenging, field of Internet-based art. Typically, projects are conceived in collaboration with editorial staff and employ the technical assistance of a staff Web developer. Equal attention is paid to the animating ideas of the project and the use of the Internet's particular properties to articulate those ideas technically and aesthetically. What results is not a mere presentation but an artwork that can be viewed by an audience much larger and more diverse than that enjoyed by any gallery or publisher of artist books.

Published projects that fit these criteria include:
New Commissions Thinking Through Images
Thinking Through Images was established to foster conversations about images and videos of cultural, political, and social relevance, between artists, writers, researchers, and other engaged cultural practitioners working in different fields. The program aims to facilitate close readings of popular media and fine art—from nineteenth-century paintings to Internet memes to documentation of current events—that consider these cultural products in a common context. Participants are often emerging or under-recognized artists or writers making timely work in their individual fields. The result is a primary, critical text that asks probing questions about our relationship with visual media, and that is of interest to the general public and specialists alike. Thinking Through Images enlarges fields of research and cultural practice to encompass what artists make as well as what citizens around the world consume each day.

Published projects that fit these criteria include:
New Commissions New Media Reporting Project
The New Media Reporting Project was established to provide journalists an outlet for—and provide them with the training and technical resources and expertise to realize—in-depth, critical reports executed in multiple media, with the goal of providing an immersive experience of the stories and subjects that shape our age. Under the auspices of this project area, Triple Canopy commissions writers, photographers, sound artists, and others to create works of long-form narrative journalism that utilize—and are meaningfully augmented by—all tools available to them on the Web, including audio, video, interactive graphics, social media, hyperlinks, and running conversations with readers that continue to enlarge the context of an article long after it has been published. In doing so, Triple Canopy aims to chart a new model for long-form journalism that combines the flexibility and dynamism of new media with the careful attention to reporting and analysis that characterizes the best general-interest magazines.

Published projects that fit these criteria include:
New Commissions New Programming
New Programming was established to support the development of exhibitions, panel discussions, performances, film screenings, and other public events that examine the intersection of culture, politics, and technology. It serves the general public by offering unique, low-cost educational experiences at community-based non-profit spaces in the United States and elsewhere. Additionally, it commissions curators, educators, researchers, and artists to develop work to be presented before a live audience. Presenters work closely with editorial staff, paying equal attention to the animating ideas of the project and the forms through which they're articulated, employing all available tools of communication and drawing from various disciplines and perspectives in order to reach a broad and diverse audience. In doing so, Triple Canopy generates material that is rooted in real-world encounters between its collaborators and its audience; such dialogues are then expanded to include readers around the world when they are published online.

Public programs that fit these criteria include:
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