2022 Knight New Work South Florida

Knight New Work 2022 was launched as a call for proposals that will provide up to $500,000 to support South Florida-area artists of all genres who use technology in their practice to create, disseminate and enhance the way art is experienced. The 2022 Knight New Work winners are: 

Meet the 2022 Knight New Work recipients

Roxana Barba

In my Center, a Cyborg Seed
Inspired by Donna Haraway’s essay A Manifesto for Cyborgs and Shelley Jackson’s hypertext story Patchwork Girl, the interactive performance, written and directed by Roxana Barba in collaboration with programmer Rodrigo Arcaya, projectionist Freddy Jouwayd, experimental sound artist Carlos Dominiguez and dancer Lize Lotte Pitlo immerses audiences in a sci-fi myth around the rebirth of a cyborg, a hybrid between machine and organism. In my center, a cyborg seed will be presented in co-production with FUNDarte at Miami-Dade County Theater On Stage Blackbox.

Jennifer Clay

Eyes of the Skin
Jennifer creates elaborate, sewn textile sculptures that invite us to consider serious concerns, playfully. Her new work, Eyes Of The Skin, is a video game that uses textiles and stop motion animation to explore issues surrounding anxiety and depression and the concept of being “lost in the woods”. Players will find their way out of the woods when making consistent "healthy choices" to advocate for themselves, empowering people and giving them tools to more easily talk about mental illness. The final form is an immersive installation at Locust Projects where the textile sculptures will be shown in concert with the projected video game, which can also be downloaded to reach its target audience of vulnerable youth.

Cynthia Cruz

Ai Ai and I, Pt. 1
Cynthia began experimenting with the artificial intelligences during Covid quarantine, developing a series of surreal digital collages and animated GIFS. As part of this process she asks one AI spiritual questions; from the responses the second AI interprets these words into images. With the current state of the world from climate change, pandemics to gun violence it’s hard not to question our existence and our purpose here on earth. Can artificial intelligence help us answer the hard questions we cannot explain? The work will be developed as an immersive installation that can be experienced in person and online as part of a solo exhibition at [NAME] Publications.

Madeline Gannon

Open Source Toolkit for Creative Robotics
Dr. Madeline Gannon, also known as "The Robot Whisperer", works with robots in unconventional ways. She will develop three interactive installations that explore the creative potential of robotics to be premiered as a solo exhibition at Florida International University Miami Beach Urban Studios (FIU MBUS) gallery. Through the development of this work, a series of open source, easy-to-use software tools will be released that bridge the technical divide between robotics and analog mediums, expanding access to the larger arts community.

Miami Museum of Contemporary Art of the African Diaspora 

The Way I See the World
Miami Museum of Contemporary Art of the African Diaspora (MoCAAD) is commissioning new work by the artist Marielle Plaisir, a French-Caribbean multimedia artist based in South Florida who examines social domination, colonialism, race, and class in relation to African American and Caribbean experiences. Plaisir uses up to twenty layers in the creation of her images, which for the first time in this new work will be animated and manipulated through the use of extended reality. The interactive installation includes a historical virtual tour and a short process film by Michael Anderson with the purpose of creating a dialogue between Overtown and Coral Gables, in collaboration with the Coral Gables Museum.

MUD Foundation (Rodolfo Peraza)

Media Under Dystopia 4.0 WASD
MUD Foundation is an artist-run nonprofit organization that has been working at the intersection of arts and technology since 2017. The Media Under Dystopia (MUD) exhibition series critically considers our digital environment and culture with artworks created by visual artists using the internet and technology as a creative medium. MUD 4.0 will include the work of Alba Triana (Colombia), Yucef Mehri (Venezuela), Leo Castaneda (Colombia), Rodolfo Peraza (Cuba), Filio Galvez, Ernesto Oroza, Ariel Baron-Robbins, (US) and Vuk Ćosić (Slovenia). The exhibition will be displayed at the MUD Foundation in collaboration with Craig Robbins Collection and uses both physical and virtual spaces to present the works.