Yael Kanarek - Alumni

Since 1995, Yael Kanarek has been developing World of Awe. It is an integrated-media project that takes the form of a parallel world to questions how a personal reality is constructed. What’s a fact? What’s a belief? What’s the difference between knowing, believing, feeling or thinking? Where does our sense of self begin and end? At the core of World of Awe is The Traveler’s Journal—an original story about a search for a lost treasure. Using the ancient genre of the traveler's tale, the project draws connections between storytelling, travel, memory and technology. This personal journey visits the deserted places of memory and imagination, ranging from the lament over the absence of a lover to a comical declaration of loyalty to a floppy disk.

Selected for the Whitney Biennial 2002, Kanarek is a recipient of the Jerome Foundation Media Arts grant, the New York Foundation for the Arts 2001 Fellowship award and the Alternative Museum Digital Commission 2000. She has been an artist-in-residence at Harvestworks collaborating on Music for World of Awe with composer Yoav Gal. In 2002 she completed "Chapter 2" of "The Traveler's Journal" commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Recently, Kanarek launched "Portal," an interactive net.dance in collaboration with dance filmmaker Evann Siebens, commissioned by Turbulence.org (2003) and was R&D resident at Eyebeam (2003), collaborating with bnode architecture studio on the "mRB" project. Kanarek is represented by Bitforms gallery in New York City.

Kanarek organizes The Upgrade! which is monthly gathering of new media artists and curators in New York City hosted by Eyebeam. The Upgrade! has branches in Vancouver, Montreal and Boston.

World of Awe has been written about in the New York Times, Le Monde Interactif, Tema Celeste, Art News, Time Out, Flash Art Italy, Firma, Paper Magazine, The Industry Standard, Wired, The Journal News and ArtByte, and participated in festivals and exhibitions in Brazil, Italy, Canada, France, England, Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands, Israel, Korea and the USA.

• www.worldofawe.net
• www.treasurecrumbs.com