Digital video collaboration wins prestigious award
“Final Wisdom I,” a digital video collaboration between Ball State art professor John Fillwalk and three internationally renowned artists, has won a prestigious international award.
The artwork was honored with the inaugural Drunken Boat PanLiterary Award for Video. The winning entry can be viewed at www.drunkenboat.com/db8/index.html by selecting “John Fillwalk” under the “Video” section. Drunken Boat, an international online journal for the arts, obtained its unusual moniker from an Arthur Rimbaud poem of the same name, said Fillwalk, director of Ball State’s Institute for Digital Intermedia Arts and Animation (IDIAA).
“Unusual names aside, this is a great honor for the work we are doing here at Ball State,” he said. “Being able to collaborate with world-class interdisciplinary artists to create works that garner international attention is one of the goals of our immersive learning institute.”
This international showcase features more than 125 contributors, including a radio play by Mark Rudman and Martha Plimpton and archival material from Raymond Queneau and Marcel Duchamp. The judges for the PanLiterary awards were Sabina Murray, PEN/Faulkner Award winner; DJ Spooky, conceptual artist and musician; Annie Finch, poet, translator and librettist; Alexandra Tolstoy, Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society; Talan Memmott, trace/Alt-X New Media Award winner; and David Hall, video art pioneer and TV interventionist.
Fillwalk created the piece with art critic and poet Donald Kuspit, whose poem inspired the work; intermedia artist Hans Breder, distinguished professor emeritus of art from the University of Iowa; and C.C. Brown, a New York composer.
Breder is known as a pioneer of intermedia art and has experimented with many art forms including painting, sculpture, video, drawing, installation art, performance art, photography and electro-acoustic technologies. Kuspit, an internationally renowned art critic and professor of art history and philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, writes for several journals and has written many books.
Fillwalk hopes to extend these kinds of collaborative opportunities to the students participating in the IDIAA, which has been established to put Ball State at the forefront of the research and creation of innovative digital art.
IDIAA is one of four immersive learning institutes established by a $20 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. The institute’s centerpiece is a digital studio that immerses students in the production of intermedia art and 3-D animation and allows them to collaborate with artists and industry professionals.
“Collaborating with high-profile, internationally renowned artists and industry partners will, no doubt, serve as a recruitment and retention tool in establishing the institute as a vibrant artistic center for the university,” Fillwalk said.
