Jen Liu, The Land At the Bottom of the Sea, 2024.
Backslash funds artists whose practices are nonlinear, unconventional, unexpected, adventurous, intense, surprising, questionable, and primed for engagement with new technologies – all symptoms of being backslash.
Backslash (\), otherwise known as whack, hack, slosh, bash, backslant, and reversed virgule – and not to be confused with forward slash (/) – is known as an escape character in computer programming, indicating that the characters after the \ should be interpreted outside the normal mode of input and output to do something special.
\Art awards a major $100k grant each year to a practicing NYC-based artist and two Cornell Tech graduates to collaborate full-time on a significant work of art that uses bleeding edge digital technology to provoke novel opportunities for their work.
Are you a student artist who pushes the limits of technology in your practice? Or an engineering student creatively hacking on the latest tech? Or otherwise working on something original and unconventional? If so, Backslash is for you, and we’re offering $500 microgrants to help fund your projects! Any current student at Cornell University may apply for a microgrant – yes, that’s undergrad, masters, and PHD students across all campuses!