ARVR Women And Allies Launches Futurist in Residence Program to Increase Multi-Cultural Leadership
Driving diversity, equity and inclusion in tech
November 16, 2018
Today ARVR women announces their Futurist in Residence program. By putting out of reach AR headsets into the hands of Women of Color, the initiative aims to promote their authority, visibility, and leadership in immersive art, design, and technology.
Four Futurists in Residence will each receive an honorarium and have access to state-of-the-art augmented reality headsets: Magic Leap One and, Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 in 2019, so they can explore augmented reality’s impact on their artistic work and the near future. The four Futurists will also be special guest moderators for ARVR Women’s Facebook group posting updates on their work and industry insights.
Investing in Tomorrow grants provide funding for forward‐looking projects that hold promise for re‐imagining the Bay Area region’s arts field in ways that advance intergenerational and multicultural leadership, inclusion and equity, and new sustainability models.
ARVR Women’s Futurists in Residence is one of five Bay Area projects, out of 49 applicants, that received the maximum grant amount of $8,000 from the 2018 Investing in Tomorrow program.
CCI’s Grants Program Director Laura Poppiti noted, “We are excited to be supporting important projects that are both about making visible culturally specific voices and shaping the trajectory of the arts sector. We wanted to validate often overlooked communities and ideas, and this group of grantees reflects that the future of the arts is in terrific hands.”
The four Futurists in Residence are:
A.M. Darke is a conceptual artist, game designer, and activist designing games for social impact. She created the award-winning card game Objectif, which explores the intersection of race, gender, and standards of beauty. In 2016 she became an Oculus Launch Pad fellow. As an artist-in-residence at Laboratory in Spokane, Washington, she curated Building Code: Developing Mixed Use Space in Virtual Reality. She is also a co-founder of Voidlab, a feminist art + tech collective. Darke holds a B.A. in Design (’13) and an M.F.A. in Media Arts (’15), both from UCLA.
Clorama Dorvilias pioneered VR for accessible bias training at the University of the Arts London, while researching technological solutions for reducing social bias in the tech workplace for her MA Thesis. In the summer of 2015, she created the first VR debiasing game for the Oculus DK2 and has created numerous anti-bias VR experiences for the London Neuropsychology Clinic, University College of London and Hyphen-Labs. In 2017, she was a selected winner for Oculus Launch Pad. She launched the start-up Debias VR specializing in delivering research driven debiasing protocols for institutions, leveraging immersive VR training.
Charity Everette is the Founder and Creative Technologist at Go Back Fetch It, a groundbreaking episodic AR project that explores themes of humanity, evolution of art, technology, and storytelling. Charity was a part of the Oculus Launchpad inaugural cohort. She is in the IDEA New Rochelle Artist in Residency program and works with the Harvard Semitic Museum to use AR to tell the stories of Ancient Bas reliefs. She’s spoken at numerous conferences including, AR in Action at the MIT Media Lab, and ArtTechPsyche IV at Harvard. Charity recently presented her work at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston.
Kristina “Namastina” Williams is a digital media artist specializing in melaninated film and photography. Her work is focused on the intersections of marginalized beauty, trauma, justice, and the human condition. Drawing upon over a decade as an educator serving youth in urban school districts, Kristina produces content that reflects the authentic and often taboo realities she’s witnessed of persons of color, specifically Black people, through the capture of social movements, cultural influencers, and reflections of society. Kristina’s distinct production style is designed to tinker with the emotional response of her viewers through digital manipulation of sight and sound. She is a 2018–19 YBCA Fellow.
Futurist in Residence Project Director, Siciliana Trevino said, “Receiving the Investing in Tomorrow Grant From the Center for Cultural Innovation with support from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation is an honor for our grassroots community. The funding empowers ARVR Women to “pass the mic” and provide four thought-provoking artists with cutting-edge creative tools to advance their leadership. It allows us to share the tech with our broader community and to initiate more meaningful and relevant conversations about our role and responsibility in shaping the future.
“We’re here to provide access to underrepresented creators so that their voices will become part of this new medium.” Iva Leon, Co-Founder, ARVR Women.
About ARVR Women and Allies is a group for women in the immersive tech industry that supports community connection, education and professional growth. ARVR Women’s mission is to uplift women of all varieties and skill sets and help them navigate the next wave of computing by connecting them to resources, opportunities and inspiration. Our online network has over 6,000 members across social media and hosts industry events including its quirky, casual morning meetup, Breakfast Fight Club. For more information, please visit www.arvrwomen.com
About the Center for Cultural Innovation (CCI) The Center for Cultural Innovation was founded in 2001 as a California 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Its mission is to promote knowledge‐sharing, networking, and financial independence for individual artists and creative entrepreneurs by providing business training, grants, and incubating innovative projects that create new program knowledge, tools, and practices for artists in the field. For more information, please visit www.cciarts.org.
About Kenneth Rainin Foundation Kenneth Rainin Foundation is a private family foundation dedicated to enhancing quality of life by championing and sustaining the arts, promoting early childhood literacy, and supporting research to cure chronic disease. Collaboration and innovation are at the heart of all of its programs. The Foundation is guided by their commitment to change through inquiry, creativity and compassion. For more information, please visit www.krfoundation.org.