s w i f t s  &  s l o w s: a quarterly of crisscrossings

Hot Stains
Tom Zatar Kay & Shalom Gorewitz

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Quotations: The American Prospect on Global Freshwater Crisis.  Music: Zatars – Doors.

Open Hot stains’ areas are one term given where water reserves are disappearing. A hot stain is a region of the world where safe drinking water has been depleted. The term may have been coined by Goldman Environmental Prize winning hydrologist Michal Kravcik. The biggest reason for a hot stain to develop is population pressure. As the population grows, water demand increases.

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Multi-media artist Tom Zatar Kay studied at Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) with the Godfather of video art Nam June Paik.   He’s worked with many renowned video artists such as Bill Viola, John Sanborn and others. Was one of the first Video DJ spinning custom made contemporary Video Art music. The  videos were using two different video artists intermixed to the beat of the music – First shown at Hurrah the first video nightclub in New York City. He produced the only performance art video with Jean-Michel Basquiat. His band ZATARS is widely recongnized as a leader in electronic dance music EDM and Space Music.  His paintings have won the prestigious People Choice Award at the Woodstock Artist Association and he has published over 25 art related books – prose and poetry.

At 16, he started a solar energy company and the inventor of 4 U.S. patents. Since 1994, Mr. Kay has published articles, testified before the U.S. Congress and made numerous appearances in the media regarding energy topics. His lifetime commitment is to the advancement of renewable energy to help humanity by developing the world’s most efficient electric technology. He is the Founder of the 28 year old website Ecomall.com one of the oldest environmental sites on the internet and Cybergod.com
Tom Zatar Kay’s website →

Visual artist Shalom Gorewitz was among the first generation of artists who used early video technology as an expressive medium. Since the late 1960s, he has created videos that “transform recorded reality through an expressionistic manipulation of images and sound”. His artworks often “confront the political conflicts, personal losses, and spiritual rituals of contemporary life.

His videos have been exhibited and screened at festivals, galleries and museums worldwide. His work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe, Germany; Itau Cultural Center, São Paulo, Brazil; Kowasaki Museum, Tokyo; the Library of the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia; The New York Public Library; and the Getty Museum Video Art Archive, Los Angeles.

Gorewitz was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Video and Audio in 1989 and has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Asian Cultural Foundation, and Arts America. He has received two Fulbright Senior Specialist fellowships to conduct research and teach at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana where he is also an adjunct professor in Visual Arts and Animation. Gorewitz has been a professor of Video and New Media at Ramapo College of New Jersey since 1981. Website →