does not pay for promotional marketing.


Proposed Use of Grant, Artists Resume / CV, Budget, and Support Material: • The Proposed Use of Grant is separated into two questions a 1000-word brief description of how the proposed work relates to your overall practice; and the relevant themes, techniques, aesthetic and cultural concerns that you plan to explore. A 500-word brief description of the work, including planned treatment of production, visuals and sound. • An Artists Resume / CV detailing your artistic experience. • Budget must reflect the entire project. The total revenues must equal the total expenses. • Support Material is an important part of the application. Grant review panel decisions are largely based on the review of examples of your previous work and/or current works in progress. Up to two separate projects may be included. Each example can be a maximum of 5 minutes. Provide a link to the video files and,
Visual representation of the killifish evolution theory
Culminating my life's research through a new creative expression; morphology, image editing resulting in video media art with great meaning. We have the database of fish photos, ready to be Morphed. We wish to create a Media Art Video on the Web that illustrates a hypothetical change in Killifish appearances.
------------1000 words: --------------------- how you will explore:

Themes:

1) Biodiversity of indigenous creek fishes- i plan to select the images which make the most impact and have the most meaning. fishes are shaped by their environment, and their appearance is closely linked with it. this morph project will emphasize those changes. morphing relates b/c of the great biodiversity of creek fish, also known as killifish. there are 16,000 species, all with highly variable characteristics. with so much data to look at, pictures, samples, descriptions, its hard to make comparisons to help draw scientific conclusions. new ways of looking at data, in this case, pictures to be morphed, can creatively visualize evolution in a way never seen before.
its important to understand these fish because they tell us about their environment, and they live in niches, often un-explored or undiscovered for thousands of years.

2) How social media affects scientific life and biology- explore this theme by creating a web-interactive media form. this video content taken from social media, then when finished shared with social media, for input, comments, feedback, discussion, and general education, hopefully gaining public insight into the cause for rare & endangered fish.

With social media, there is a dynamic between the scientific members of the killifish community, and the non-scientific members who are involved in other ways, and are just as important. For example:

on any average day, there is a collector who visits a remote region of a foreign country, say west Africa in the jungle. They travel for 8 hours in a car on bumpy unpaved roads to get to an even more remote area. they are covered in blood-sucking insects, its hot and humid. They finally stop and get to a small undisturbed creek. its a part of the world that looks like no man has ever been there. the collector nets some fish from the river. he photographs them in a clear plastic bag, sending the picture to social media groups for identification. he will continue the process, saving some fish for samples.

on social media, the pictures are then shared and discussed with hobbyist, breeders and ichthyologists. they count fin rays, scales, bands of colour in order to identify the specimen. every number of every detail matters. if there is no identification found, the fish is labelled as a new species, with a code for the area, date, and collector that found it. And all this can be done by noon that same day.

This process has been done thousands of times and these fish pictures are already sorted by name, date, location, and species.

Now the photos are curated, phylogeny can be discussed. Without the large number of photos obtained and discussed on social media, creating the taxonomy for the species might have been impossible. it sure makes it a lot easier and quicker. this speedy tactic helps not only fish curators, but also the fish themselves.
in this way, social media input helps create the Morphology project videos.

3) Extinction of fish species- this project explores Extinction as a theme through morphology videos by revealing the pace of evolution; where it slows down, or happens faster. because of the niche nature of killifish, they have this unique window into evolution.
200 million years ago shore-fish left the marine water and began to occupy the landmass of the super-continent Pangaea. Over the next 50 million years Pangaea broke up and became the modern world. The highly adaptable killifish being forced to evolve to new post-breakup environments after a few more million years, isolated populations gave rise to a myriad of colours and patterns that would rival the most colourful marine fish. In our work, we had discovered a new physical metric based on some markings that are common to nearly all fish but have been thus far overlooked, and may explain the evolutionary path at work here, that caused the rise in the number of Cyprinodon morphotypes producing a family with the greatest diversity in colours and colour patterns of any family of fish anywhere. with the use of this new findings, we hypothesize and illustrate some possible ancestors and missing links that will reduce the number of unknowns in the phylogenic trees - an important step for determining extinct, endangered, and threatened species.

Technique: Exploring a new technique of content production which includes use of a image database converted to a Morphology video format; The database being a self-written computer bioinformatics system. morphology media video format. The morphology image manipulation will be done using this curated collection of photos taken from 10 years of social media posts. we believe there will be advantages to this, including:
morphology video is relevant to my overall work because of the culmination of the very same killifish pictures I have curated, that is straightened, cropped, edited out the background from those images. by sorting these into the taxonomy, i have created the basis needed to create morphology videos. these videos will help visualise how changes happen in a way that other creative mediums can't.

its a special way of looking at evolution, which I am in a unique position to do.



Aesthetics: scientist ahve spent deacedes tryign to understand this family of fishes and either overlooke dor nto understood the red markings near the throat of these fish. these markings can be foudn in other fmaily of fish and in fact showed up long before fish had evolved from eel and wormlike creature. the anture and shape of these carmine vermiform markings, which were once straight lines indicates hwo much of a change in the head there ahas been, becusae of years of evoluton btu also provides soem semblance of a time scale we postulate it is possibel to tell where onthe evolutioanry time scale any of hese fishes are because of these markings.

thsu its an overlooked aesthetic concerning that may provide a big clue to the long term family history of these fishes which has been alluding sceitnist for over a 100 years.

in short, researchers may have spent too much tiem looking at bones and teeth, and not enough tiem understnding why the fish has those colour patterns. once this aestithc is exlpoerd in detail, it amy add a new tool to the arsenal availablt to the taxonomist.

An accurate portrayal of endangered and extinct fishes. A scientific specimen format that is easy for the layperson to understand and relate to.



Cultural Impact: Killifish are found globally and impact many cultures through trades and sales of fish and fish-tourism. Understanding these fish with Morphology videos brings the public an awareness of how evolution works, of endangered species, and of geographically diverse human cultures.

fish tourism impacts: similar to eco-tourism. 1) brings awareness of keeping clean habitats for endangered local fish. 2) educational advantages, students of all ages can do fieldwork studies. 3) furthering the science of fish taxonomy, and the global scientific community's knowledge of species.

this relates to my work as i 1) work with locals and natives through internet chat forums, sharing publications, scientific documents, graphs and literature, specimen photos. educational sharing.

The mission is to record all these fish before they go extinct. we cant save them at this point. all we can do is photograph them before they go.