One of the main purposes of Baltimore Innovation Week 2016 presented by 14 West is to give everyone the opportunity to participate in showing off Baltimore’s technology community.
Plus, we heard you loud and clear at the Help Plan BIW event back in June — that you guys wanted to see more STEAM represented during the week.
We answered the call for more tech-art mashups with a modest microgrant program to fund creative installations as a part of our Innovation Celebration and Baltimore Innovation Awards ceremony at MICA’s Brown Center on Sept. 30. (We announced the call for applications back in August.)
Today we’re proud to announce this year’s #BIW16 microgrant recipients, along with brief descriptions to give you an idea of what they’re using the funding for.

Grand Prize Winner

• Ada Pinkston

Pinkston will begin the first phase of her project, LandMarked, at Baltimore Innovation Week. LandMarked is an exploration of the architectural objects that we call monuments. This project is about unearthing stories that are unheard about landmarks, monuments and the spaces that are publicly and privately declared sacred. For this project, this is the underlying question: What would a monument for the people look like? 
Pinkston will host a space for conversations with city residents about the relationship that physical structures have to slavery and other historical narratives. These conversations will occur inside a specially made LandMarked conversation booth in the MICA building during the Innovation Celebration. 
Each conversation will be documented with video and audio recordings. All documentation from the event will be part of the LandMarked project website and later used for a soundtrack that will accompany a “choreo-poem” that will be performed at the city’s confederate monuments.

Runner Up

• Jeffrey L. Gangwisch

Gangwisch’s work focuses on public interaction as an essential input to an aesthetic algorithm, managing a conversation between the organic observer and the digital subject. He experiments with alternative methods of documenting, informing and manipulating an ostensibly objective reality.
The Creature series, currently in development, uses face- and body-recognition to generate procedural interactions between the public and digital pseudo-organisms. Gangwisch will use his surroundings to manipulate images of Innovation Awards guests on the the wall of the MICA building in this interactive installation. Get ready for your close up!

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And just because we don’t want anyone to miss these awesome installations due to the cost of a ticket, we’ve decided to raffle off a pair to some real STEAM fans!
There are two ways to win:

• You could spread the word about Baltimore Innovation Week on your various social media platforms and tag us using @binnovationweek and the hashtag #BIW16. Use this form to prove you did it!
• You can sign up for Technical.ly Baltimore’s daily newsletter, which provides instant news about what is going on in the tech community in Baltimore. In the code field, write: “Innovation Awards.” If you’re already signed up for the Baltimore newsletter, sign up for our national newsletter here and enter the same code.

Make sure to browse through all of the 50+ events scheduled for the week while you’re building out your personalized schedule on the Baltimore Innovation Awards website.