BAVC Media announces Tom Comitta as Fall 2015 Artist-In-Residence
San Francisco, CA — Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC Media) is pleased to announce that Tom Comitta will be the Fall 2015 Resident for BAVC Media’s inaugural Artist-in-Residence (AIR) program, made possible in part through the generosity of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
The AIR program will give Comitta access to BAVC Media’s state-of-the-art technical facilities and in-house expertise, along with the opportunity to produce work in collaboration with BAVC Media programs. Comitta plans to develop new video works to accompany future live performances of an in-progress Sci-Fi musical through multimedia writing workshops open to the BAVC Media community and course work in motion graphics and video post-production.
Comitta is a writer, performer and multimedia artist living in Oakland. From 2011-12 Comitta composed and conducted nine operas with The San Francisco Guerrilla Opera Company, a roving ensemble that gave voice to texts in numerous sites around the Bay Area including the Civic Center BART station and the Berkeley Art Museum. In 2012, he staged National Novel Writing Night Month (NaNoWriNiMo), a futurist improvement on the write-a-novel-in-a-month contest in which he published novels written in a night. Comitta has exhibited at LUMA Foundation, Zürich, Reed College, Portland and Robert Berman/E6, San Francisco. Recent books include ◯ (Ugly Ducking Presse), SENT (Invisible Venue), and First Thought Worst Thought: Collected Books 2011-2014 (Gauss PDF), with two poems in The New Concrete (Hayward Publishing, UK), an anthology surveying the "rise of concrete poetry in the digital age."
“The AIR program continues BAVC Media’s commitment to being a resource for Bay Area artists, who have been and remain an integral part of BAVC Media’s community since our founding nearly four decades ago," says BAVC Media Executive Director, Carol Varney. "I am excited that BAVC Media will be a resource for Tom in his creative process."
"I'm very excited and honored to work with BAVC Media and the larger BAVC Media community to bring this project to life," says Comitta.
Comitta was selected by a panel made up of BAVC Media staff, visual artists and arts professionals, including: Susie Cagle, independent journalist, cartoonist and BAVC Media's Fall 2015 Artist-in-Residence; Glen Helfand, writer, critic, curator and Associate Professor of Fine Arts at California College of the Arts and adjunct professor at Mills College; Genevieve Quick, artist and arts writer; Dorothy Santos, writer, editor and curator; and Matt Sussman, BAVC Media Public Programs Manager.
The primary aims of the Residency are to provide Bay Area artists with the space and resources to work with media that may include video, audio, web or other interactive media/coding or design/development software, and access to new creative opportunities through facilitated collaboration with BAVC Media programs. Residents may apply BAVC Media’s resources toward a project already underway or to a newly proposed project and will have opportunities for exhibition and public programs connected to their Residency work.
Each Residency period is three months long, with three Residencies annually. The remaining upcoming Residency session is Spring 2016 (Feb 1 – April 31, 2016). In addition to giving a public Artist’s Talk at the end of their respective residency period, all three AIRs will participate in a final group exhibition, scheduled for June 2016 in San Francisco.
For information on Tom Comitta please visit: http://tomcomitta.com/. For more information on BAVC Media’s AIR program please visit: www.bavc.org/residency.
About BAVC Media
Founded in 1976, Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC Media)'s mission is to inspire social change by empowering media makers to develop and share diverse stories through art, education and technology.
