Conferences

Just got a letter of rejection, saying that basically it was too late and the one sub-division that was still considering projects felt that Virtual Meditation was too far outside its specific range of interests. Still, Scott Senften, the director of the emerging technologies division of SIGGRAPH, urged us to submit this to the 2003 conference.

An application has been submitted and acknowledged by the organizers, and we've since sent a packet of materials and a video that should help the judges understand what exactly our experience is. Ars Electronica, unlike SIGGRAPH, actually has a category of "winners" projects that were judged worthy of a cash award to continue their work. The winners find out their state at the end of May; the rest of the projects accepted by the conference are notified in late July.

Magazines

Gamasutra is the online magazine wing of the Independent Game Developers Association, which is front-lined by some of the biggest names in the game industry. The IGDA publishes Game Developer magazine, and also is the organization behind the huge Game Developers Conference, most recently in San Jose. Gamasutra publishes post-mortems of various projects, games, and ideas, evaluating their failure/success and what that means for the industry as a whole.

Virtual Mediation stands a very good chance of getting published in American Theater, especially considering its Humana Festival opening. We're sending out our article soon.

Entertainment Design is a magazine that it almost ubiquitous amongst the "techie" population of theater. Designers of all kinds, plus regional theater directors, read through its pages. We'll be sending our article here as well. 

Grants

The Sloan foundation has an outstanding promise to the school of drama pledging money to help them develop new ways or using/portraying science in theater. Obviously we'd like to be the venue that receives a chunk of that cash, even though we're slightly removed from the School of Drama proper. A small introduction has been written, but not sent.

Same story as Sloan, except a little less in the way of actual promising. Still, they show a strong interest in venues like ours. A grant proposal draft is written, but again, nothing has been sent as of yet.