Jill Miller & Asma Kazmi Receive C/Change Grant
C/Change is building the future of online cultural exchange. Five projects were selected for the Creative R&D Lab’s second cohort. Each team will develop interactive prototypes that address one of the program’s focus areas — feminist technologies, digital democracy, and planetary futures — to create virtual experiences, tools, and platforms that promote online cultural exchange.
Jill Miller, Asma Kazmi, and Kathy Wang presented their project Missing Objects Library and were selected for the Creative R&D Lab’s second cohort which invited interdisciplinary teams and individuals around the globe to submit concepts for interactive prototypes that articulate a vision for the future of online cross-cultural exchange. Accepted applicants receive approximately $17,500 to develop a high-fidelity platform, tool, or experience over the course of 7 months. Members of the Creative R&D Lab Cohort will also have the opportunity to expand their skill sets and join a community of design futurists through regular virtual workshops and events.
Missing Object Library (MOL) is a curated, web-based repository of handmade 3D objects that are designed with an intersectional, feminist lens. MOL offers an alternative to commercial, status-quo storefronts that provide digital assets for game design and special effects. Objects sold in these spaces are typically devoid of provenance, and they continually reinscribe false notions of neutrality while privileging a white, cis, heteronormative dominance. In contrast, MOL is an open platform with downloadable models that accurately represent the world we inhabit. MOL disrupts historical gatekeeping performed by “neutral” marketplaces by offering 3D-modeled objects that span a wide range of identities, abilities, and affinities. In addition to critiquing existing 3D model storefronts, MOL builds community by offering an economic system of reciprocity, where technological representations of things are exchanged to produce meaningful relations and effects.