2002



Pratap Chatterjee | Soot City: The Menace of the Black Cloud

Soot City: The Menace of the Black Cloud was a web-based, animated comic strip and game that unfolded over six episodes with the goal of bringing a progressive message to young audiences about the California energy crisis and the disastrous environmental and social impacts of the United States’ national energy policy. Solar Woman, Wind Woman, and Efficiency Man, the comic strip’s three main characters, struggled each month with topics such as pollution, governmental acquiescence, and the struggle to fight back. Soot City was showcased on an environmental web site with the intent to draw audiences on a repeat basis through changing monthly installments. After reviewing the first episode, visitors were encouraged to try their luck at outwitting the energy multinationals through an interactive web game where they could chose a character and play a game with the goal of defending the local community against the multinational corporations. No matter the strategies employed or eventual outcome, the player received an explanation and links to educational material on the issues. Soot City screened at Pusod in Berkeley and at the Mission Cultural Center in San Francisco during December

Summi Kaipa | Intercept: To Thwart, Cradle, Exchange

Intercept: To Thwart, Cradle, Exchange was a two-part creative experiment that sought to promote avant-garde Asian American writers in the public and performative sphere, with the intent to draw together a broad-based community of enthusiastic, experimental art-goers. The project aimed to support experimental literature and related genres, to foster community among Asian American artists, and to encourage artists to question constructions of identity in literature. Another primary goal of Intercept was to cultivate a youth audience and to make public literary arts available to young artists in the Bay Area. Both components of Intercept, designed as two distinct events, presented local artists in performance. The first component, held August 23, 2002, was a literary reading and performance art piece around the publication of the literary magazine interlope, at Locus 1640 Post in San Francisco’s Japantown. The second component occurred January 24 and 25, 2003 at Noh Space/Theatre of Yugen and was a production of Summi Kaipa’s play Triptych: Stories of Three South Asian Women. Triptych explored the notions of false historical lineages and badly translated identities, and presented a soap opera-like tale of an intercepted “nationhood,” appropriate to the current political landscape.



Gigi Otalvaro-Hormillosa | Cosmic Blood

Cosmic Blood, a hybridized video performance piece, explored the concept of mestizaje, a Spanish word used to describe the race mixture of Spanish and indigenous blood as a result of colonialism, from a perspective informed by history, contemporary culture and racial formation and creative, spiritual speculation about the future. This collaboration, between performance artist Gigi Otalvaro-Hormillosa and sound designer Melissa Dougherty, weaved video, sound, and performance to illustrate the contradictory aspects of mestizaje in which the genocide and rape of one race led to the creation of a new race. By redefining mestizaje to incorporate mixed race and queer identities, which take on countless forms as in the case of multicultural San Francisco, the artists painted a picture of the revolutionary potential for such subversive yet fluid identities to dismantle the binaries created by colonial constructs relating to race and gender. Theories of contact between ancient civilizations and extraterrestrials influenced their vision of a cosmic mestizaje in which the impending transformation of the world as we know it may lead to possibilities for the creation of a new existence and way of being.

Julia Segrove Jaurigui | FOO: Frequency of Occurrences

FOO: Frequency of Occurrences was a 26 minute-long digital video narrative about Altagracia (Gracie), a 17 year-old Latina, and her political coming-of-age during the summer of 2001 when she volunteers with a multicultural neighborhood coalition and works to challenge the expansion of a power plant at the base of Potrero Hill, her family’s San Francisco neighborhood. FOO presented a young woman of color as a curious, articulate individual grappling with political issues and making personal choices consistent with her changing values and belief system. Most importantly, FOO used Gracie’s emerging political consciousnessand experiences to explore how one needs to cultivate political alliances with a diverse group of people in order to achieve social change. This fictional narrative was informed by an actual environmental justice campaign waged in Potrero Hill, Julia Segrove Jaurigui’s neighborhood, against Mirant Corporation’s proposal to expand an existing power plant. FOO was widely distributed and used as a tool to raise awareness about environmental justice issues and social change.

JURORS for this year were: Justin Chin, visual artist; Arnold Kemp, visual artist and associate visual arts curator, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; Randy Nordschow, composer and sound artist; Valerie Soe, activist and public artist; Christine Pielenz and William Laven, co-directors, Potrero Nuevo Fund.

images (l to r): animation still by Bill Sievert From Soot City (2002); Cover(detail), interlope magazine (2002), (detail):Melissa Dougherty (2002)