New Voices, New Visions Artist Entries
In 1993, perhaps the height of the CD-ROM era, I was dismayed by how most everything on offer commercially was soooo plain vanilla and wanted to find a way to encourage edgier work. Voyager teamed up with Interval Research (Paul Allen’s R&D company) to sponsor New Voices, New Visions — an international competition for new digital work. Since the whole point of the competition was to encourage artists to brek new ground we needed a way to make it clear we were looking for stuff on the edge. The solution was to announce a panel of judges who were well known for their avant garde originality like Laurie Anderson and Art Spiegelman. Wired, which was widely read a the time, gave us free ad space. We ran full page announcements for two months and got over 500 entries from from more than a dozen countries. We gave the awards out at a wonderful event at Lincoln Center. A CD-ROM with 20 of the best entries was released later that year. And then we did it again in 1996.
Video to come
Program for the 1996 awards event
Draft announcement of the first competition. [Some of the judges were aspirational at that point.]
