Mini Grants Spring 2021

Botanical Garden Soundwalk

The Botanical Garden Soundwalk is a collection of soundscapes created by members of the UGA Student Composers Association in partnership with the UGA State Botanical Garden. Student and faculty composers engaged with Cora Keber, State Botanical Garden Director of Education, to learn about and respond to different environments within the Garden. Playback of soundscapes on the ECHOES app is prompted by the geolocation positioning of the listener within the grounds of the Garden. Visitors can craft their own interactive soundtrack by virtue of the duration and order of regions they encounter.

Project participants

Cora Keber, State Botanical Garden Director of Education
Andres Luz, Music graduate student
Bryan Wysocki, Music graduate student
Michael Flynn, Music graduate student
Daniel Karcher, Music graduate student
Samuel Hoyland, Music graduate student
Caitlin Santos, Music undergraduate student
Paul Dicicco, Music undergraduate student
Kenia Mendoza, Music undergraduate student
Emily Koh, Music faculty
Peter Van Zandt Lane, Music faculty
Thomas Hiel, Music faculty

Misery, Fantasy, Ecstasy

A project that adapts a series of three blazer jackets, exploring the related emotions of misery, fantasy, and ecstasy, into a short art film expanding upon these themes. Miranda Diaz will create the script using a collage cut-up technique with diary entries and perform with original blazers. Christee Imogen Henry will oversee cinematography, editing, and composition and performance of original music for the film. The work explores the relationship between interiority and the expression of interiority in a three-act structure. The project will filmed on location across north Georgia and on a sound stage through summer 2021.

Project participants

Christee Imogen Henry, Art undergraduate student
Miranda Diaz, Art undergraduate student

Language Learning and Community Building

The project considers how cooking classes can be used as tools for language learning and community building in Athens, Georgia. Participants will develop a curriculum to use common cooking terms and invite families to share and translate recipes in a bilingual cookbook site.

Project participants

Elizabeth Dubberly (Language and Literacy Education graduate student)
Valerie Oxford (Athens-Clarke County Schools ESOL teacher)

Mute Harmonics

Mute Harmonics is a collaborative series of two wearable, cooperative musical instruments by interdisciplinary artists Jeremy Diamond and Diana Rojas. The series serves as an investigation of sound, performance, and sculpture as intermediaries for spiritual and interpersonal experiences and a meditation on the inevitability of such intermediaries within those realms of experience. The series will consist of a string and percussion instrument; the effective use of these instruments will be reliant on a mutual obligation between performers. Most notably, playing the string instrument will require a concerted effort from both performers to maintain and adjust the tension of strings between their bodies to tune the instrument. When both performers are not engaged in the use of these instruments, they are rendered unplayable. The finished series will be performed live by students of the Center for Experimental Music and Intermedia at the University of North Texas and the University of Georgia.

Project participants

J Taran Diamond (Art graduate student)
Diana Rojas (University of North Texas graduate student)

Eschaton

Eschaton is a music video that follows the life of Daniel Felser, an aspiring energy executive, from his childhood to his old age and eventual death. His journey is juxtaposed with the macrocosmic cycles of nature, from the changing of seasons to the forming of planets and solar systems. Eschaton combines the intimate with the epic to create a haunting portrait of human greed and environmental collapse. The project will raise awareness about climate change and its dialectical interconnectedness to issues of poverty, racism, capitalism and imperialism, and direct our audience members to ways they and we can help our local communities mobilize via mutual aid, labor unions, activist organizations, and non-profits.

Project participants

Meekah Howell (Music undergraduate student)
Caleb Moss (UGA alumnus)
Jacob Dannenfelser (Journalism and Mass Communication undergraduate student)
Daniel Mathis (Journalism and Mass Communication undergraduate student)
Mike Hussey (Theatre and Film Studies faculty)