When: 30 August - 30 Septembre 2012
Where: OK im OÖ Kulturquartier, Linz, Austria
Link: CYBERARTS EXHIBITION
The Prix Ars Electronica is the world’s highest endowed competition in the digital arts. Prizes are awarded in seven categories.
The OK “Offenes Kulturhaus” in the Upper Austrian Culture Quarter produces and presents new currents and trends in contemporary art, which always also reflect social developments. For years, the CyberArts Prix Ars Electronica exhibition has been an important part of the ambitious program of changing thematic exhibitions and solo presentations. Exciting developments in media art become evident, particularly in the cooperation with the Ars Electronica Festival. Since 1998 the OK has been the venue for presenting the winners of the Prix Ars Electronica, the international competition for digital art. Expert juries have selected the most interesting works and awarded Golden Nicas, Awards of Distinction and Honorary Mentions in seven categories.
Current trends are always reflected in the choice of jury members and in the selection for the CyberArts exhibition. They show that media art is a hotbed of critical inquiry into social and technological changes or work on actively designing our environment: do it yourself, agitation and self-initiative are the keywords here. Art is a social counter-hotbed and example of civil engagement.
ART PROJECTS
HONORARY MENTION DIGITAL MUSICS & SOUND ART
Anke Eckardt /DE
BETWEEN | YOU | AND | ME
Physically modeling sound like a sculpture is the basic idea that inspired Anke Eckardt (DE). Between | You | And | Me is a wall of sound and light, where breaching the light membranes filled with fog unleashes sounds of broken glass.
www.ankeeckardt.org
HONORARY MENTION HYBRID ART
Jun Fujiki /JP
Game Border
Game Border is a challenging game, in which players move through the history of video games. The player’s goal is not to successively reach higher and higher levels, but to skip through the “borders” between each of the worlds on the monitors lines up next to one another. It imparts the feeling of jumping from one game device to another and thus overcoming the boundaries of both hardware and perception.
www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Lv0xVPHQlec
HONORARY MENTION DIGITAL MUSICS & SOUND ART
Tom Verbruggen /NL
Crackle-canvas SEQ5
Crackle-canvas SEQ5 is what Tom Verbruggen (NL) calls a picture that produces sound. Each of his canvas-tableaux consists of a circuit board, loudspeakers, controller knobs, switches, wooden frames and a projection screen, and has a tonal character all its own. It can also be linked through a cable to other images and react to them. Tom Verbruggen will demonstrate what can be found in the Crackle-canvas in a performance (OK NIGHT 2.9., 11 pm), but the audience can also test it themselves.
http://toktek.org/Site/Crackle-canvas_1.html
HONORARY MENTION INTERACTIVE ART
Nova Jiang /NZ
Ideogenetic Machine
Visitors to this interactive installation become comic strip characters. An algorithm transforms a photographic portrait of the user into a stick figure. With the help of facial recognition software, empty speech bubbles are automatically applied. In accordance with a series of rules derived from the compositional decisions of a human cartoonist, the software generates stories with images by the artist. The success of Ideogenetic Machine is dependent upon the creative contribution of the audience. They are encouraged to perform in front of the camera and to complete the story by filling in the blank speech bubbles. Users can e-mail the finished comics as a PDF.
www.novajiang.com/installations/ideogenetic-machine
GOLDEN NICA HYBRID ART
Joe Davis /US with support of Tara Gianoulis, Ido Bachelet
bacterial radio
This year’s Golden Nica in the category “Hybrid Art” goes to Joe Davis, artist and researcher at the Department of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, for his outstanding technical, poetic, and epistemologically grounded project: bacterial Radio. With this prize, the jury also honors this pioneer—whom the younger generation sees as the “éminence grise“ of biotechnological art forms—for his work over the past several decades. Through the central themes of his both humorous and cognitively challenging conceptual art, he has brought together such varied fields as, e.g., molecular biology, bioinformatics, laser technology, astronautics and telecommunication. bacterial Radio may be seen as a retro-futuristic manifesto. It is related to Davis’ earlier projects, which attempted to establish communication with extraterrestrial life via microorganisms. The exhibition shows a cross-section of Davis’ work, including numerous older works, some of which have only now been fully appreciated, such as Microvenos, Audiomicroscope, but also current projects, such as the pioneering construction means Polytractor, and a fascinating television portrait of the artist. bacterial Radio was initially produced with the support of Tara Gianoulis and Ido Bachelet at Harvard Medical School in Boston.
www.joedavis.co.uk
HONORARY MENTION HYBRID ART
Prue Lang /AU
UN RESEAU TRANSLUCIDE
This 100% energy-independent stage play substantially rethinks conventional forms of theatrical production. Smart costumes make it possible to harvest, as it were, the energy generated by the dancers during the performance. To do so, the production employs devices to convert the kinetic energy of the dancers’ movements into electricity to run the sound system. The lighting is fed with current directly from a bicycle powered by the dancers themselves.
www.pruelang.com
HONORARY MENTION HYBRID ART
Amor Munoz /MX
MAQUILA REGION 4
Maquila Región 4 (MR4) documents a mobile factory that migrates through Mexico’s most impoverished regions, hiring laborers at the US minimum wage ($7/hour as compared to 60 cents, the going rate south of the border). In MR4, they embroider electronic circuits with conductive thread and apply a code to it. When it’s decoded—for example, with a smartphone—a website detailing the production history pops up. It contains the worker’s name, the location and date of production, and how long it took.
www.amormunoz.net
HONORARY MENTION HYBRID ART
Golan Levin /US, Shawn Sims /US
The Free Universal Construction Kit
Free Universal Construction Kit is a grassroots project that offers an assortment of adapters that make it possible to build stuff by combining pieces from 10 well-know construction kits (Lego, Fischertechnik, etc.) It’s thus an intentional provocation of toy manufacturers with their insistence on rights of use. The pieces can be downloaded free of charge from various internet file-sharing sites in the form of 3D models and produced at home using equipment like the Makerbot open-source 3D printer. The project can be seen as a humorous description of hacking the system and is an excellent example of media design at the same time.
http://fffff.at/free-universal-constrution-kit
HONORARY MENTION HYBRID ART
Adam Brown /US
Scientific Associate: Kazem Kashefi
The Great Work of the Metal Lover
Microorganisms solve the ancient dream of the alchemists and the classic problem of transmutation by producing crystalline 24-carat gold. This occurs by exposing them to high concentrations of toxic gold chloride in a bioreactor with reduced atmosphere (of carbon dioxide and hydrogen). This causes them to develop a biofilm that resembles the medieval Philosopher’s Stone in color. When the biofilm is heated up to the melting point of gold, tiny deposits of gold form. Here, instead of chemistry, biotechnology with unicellular organisms is used to produce the metal and the object of desire of scientific endeavors.
http://adamwbrown.net/projects-2/the-great-work-of-the-metal-lover/
HONORARY MENTION HYBRID ART
Jalila Essaïdi /NL
2.6g 329m/s
The specifications 2.6g 329m/s refer to the weight and speed of a smallcaliber slug that a bullet-proof vest has to be able to withstand. Since organically produced spider silk is stronger than steel, bullets should bounce off of it too—provided it’s been woven correctly. Jalila Essaïdi (NL) artistically stages the questions of security and invulnerability and subjects this idea to trial by fire with a fabric that’s a blend of spider silk and human skin yielded by transgenic goats.
http://jalilaessaidi.com/2-6g-329ms/
HONORARY MENTION HYBRID ART
Peta Clancy /AU, Helen Pynor /AU
The Body is a Big Place
The Body is a Big Place is a large-scale work of bioart that employs video projections, a perfusion apparatus that provides blood to a heart while it’s outside the body, and an acoustically active water landscape to investigate the process of organ transplantation as well as transition in the grey area between life and death. These themes are addressed in the complex project with a performance with pigs’ hearts that have been kept alive and in cooperation with the Melbourne transplantation community (recipients and donors of organs in a water landscape).
www.thebodyisabigplace.com
HONORARY MENTION HYBRID ART
ArtScienceBangalore /IN
Searching for the Ubiquitous Genetically Engineered Machine
In the field of synthetic biology, organic building blocks are used as abstractions or models for the production of standardized, functional living parts. Searching for the Ubiquitous Genetically Engineered Machine demonstrates a potential alternative application of organic building blocks—testing biodiversity in soil samples. Searching for the Ubiquitous Genetically Engineered Machine is a simple analysis tool for farmers, one with which they should be able to trace the presence of genetically-engineered organisms in the soil they are working.
http://artscienceblr.org
HONORARY MENTION ANERKENNUNG HYBRID ART
Protei /UK
Protei
Protei, a fleet of sail-powered drones designed to fight pollution of the seas, is currently under construction. The production alliance’s mission is to develop an affordable opensource vehicle that can sail semi-autonomously against the wind and capture oil slicks being driven by the wind. It’s meant to be hurricane-proof, self-righting, inflatable, indestructible, low-priced and easy to set up so it can be deployed quickly in case of a crisis. The sailpowered drone hanging from the ceiling of the OK hall one floor above can be navigated across the crisis spots of the world.