Announcing the 2013 Mozilla Eyebeam Open(Art) Fellows

Today, Mozilla and the Eyebeam Art + Technology Center are pleased to announce the recipients of the first-ever Open(Art) Fellowships. Together, these creative technologists will be exploring the frontier of art and the open web as part of our new Open(Art) program.

Pushing the boundaries of creative code
Supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Open(Art) initiative is all about supporting projects that facilitate artistic expression and learning on the open web, using code to enable cutting-edge art, media and hardware production.

Over the next six months, the fellows will create open source tools and works that enable creative production and open participation. They’ll document their progress online, seek to grow communities of artists, developers and users around their projects, and publish their resulting code under an open license.

And the fellows are…

The 2013 Open(Art) fellows are:

Forrest Oliphant: Meemoo

Meemoo brings the power of app development to everyone. It’s an HTML5 data flow programming environment with an emphasis on realtime audio-visual manipulation. Using an intuitive visual interface that lets users connect modules together using colorful “wires,” Meemoo lets anyone remix and build their own creative apps right in the browser.

“I often see kids  playing with touch screen apps that only do what the developer designs it to do,” Forrest says. “I want to blur that line between developer and user, and allow more people to create different kinds of media.”

Toby Schachman: Pixel Shaders

Pixel Shaders is an interactive book, platform and community focused on  harnessing the graphics processor (GPU) for artistic purposes. It aims to make GPU programming accessible to artists in the same way that tools like Processing made CPU programming more accessible to digital creators.

Toby wants to get people thinking about programming in a new way. “This is one of the key areas where the artistic community can contribute to the computer science communities,” he says.

Nortd Labs (Addie Wagenknecht and Stefan Hechenberger) — Bomfu

Bomfu is a collaborative web repository for open hardware projects. It aims to increase the ease of use and quality for the “bill of materials” or “BOM,” a list of the raw materials required to build a finished product. The goal: open up new and more complex forms of open hardware creation.

“Making all  of the tools better pushes up what can be built,” says Addie and Stefan. “The better the tools are, the more complex the projects.”

These three projects will be awarded a production budget and resources to develop their work. Eyebeam will also host workshops and public events at its New York City location to support their process, and Mozilla is inviting our global community to get involved.

Get involved

• Sign up for updates. Get updates on the projects from the Open(Art) email list.
• Watch the videos. Watch Forrest Oliphant, Toby Schachman and Addie Wagenknecht and Stefan Hechenberger explain the vision and thinking behind their projects.
• Learn more. There’s more details on the Eyebeam web site.