2022-428-E-Arts Commission-Bill Brown-2022-23 Arts grants

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Project/Program Summary The Cosmic Rays Film Festiv al is applying for an Orange County Artist Project Grant to prov ide stipends to the filmmakers and media artists who will participate and exhibit in the 5th edition of the festiv al. The 5th Cosmic Rays Film Festiv al will take place in Chapel Hill from March 30 - April 1, 2023. Founded by media artists Sabine Gruffat and Bill Brown, Cosmic Rays was begun in response to the lack of experimental film and media art programming av ailable to audiences in Chapel Hill and the Triangle region. The festiv al aims to foster the community of experimental media makers working in our region, and to support the larger national and international field of experimental media makers for whom there are ev er fewer v enues dedicated to cinema art and experimental modes of media production. The first Cosmic Rays festiv al took place in 2018 at the Varsity Theatre in downtown Chapel Hill. Since that time, Cosmic Rays has expanded its programming and partnered with other local non-profit v enues, including the Morehead Planetarium on the campus of UNC where we presented a program of digital v ideos commissioned for display on a planetarium dome; the Nightlight, a local project space where we hav e presented a curated liv e-cinema program for the last two years; and Arts Ev erywhere, a comprehensiv e initiativ e at UNC that collaborates with div erse partners to embed the arts into daily life. In addition to programming two nights of cinema art selected from ov er 500 submissions from around North Carolina and the world, Cosmic Rays also inv ites distinguished film programmers to curate thematic programs of work. Visiting curators hav e included Dav id Dinnell, former programmer of the Ann Arbor Film Festiv al who brought a collection of 16mm films from the Canyon Cinema archiv e that were made by feminist filmmakers; Aily Nash, experimental programmer for the New York Film Festiv al, who presented work commissioned for a planetarium; and Rachael Rakes, co-curator of the Film Society at Lincoln Center’s Art of the Real, whose program entitled “Forms Are Facts” focused on the groundbreaking experimental work of contemporary female filmmakers-of-color. The 5th edition of Cosmic Rays will also include a programming initiativ e called COSMIC RAYS DIGITAL, a curated exhibition of extended reality (XR) media art, including v irtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and interactiv e media art. Now in its second year, the goal of this initiativ e, produced in partnership with UNC’s Arts Ev erywhere and made possible by a 2022 Media Arts Grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, is to increase the scope of Cosmic Ray’s programming by celebrating artistically excellent digital media artwork that employs innov ativ e emerging technologies; and to giv e audiences in Orange County and beyond access to this rapidly growing field of media art that is conspicuously absent from our region’s cultural spaces. DocuSign Envelope ID: C2B0CB1A-DEDF-4677-9369-F9B0BF35007B