Share Prize

The aim of the Share Prize is to discover, promote and support the digital arts. The competition is open to artists that use digital technology as a language of creative expression, in all shapes and formats.
The cultural aim of the Share Prize is to make participation in the Share Festival open and accessible to all artists.

An international panel of judges consisting of Jurij Krpan (Ljubljana), Andy Cameron (London), Fulvio Gianaria (Turin), and Bruce Sterling (Austin/Turin) assessed the submissions. After a very interesting meeting and a professional, in-depth analysis of all the works, it is with great pleasure that we announce the six incredible artists who have been short-listed for the Share Prize 2010.

JURY STATEMENT

Jurij Krpan (artistic director Kapelica Gallery, Ljubjana) – president
Andy Cameron (Interactive Creative Director, Wieden + Kennedy, London)
Bruce Sterling (writer and journalist, Austin)
Fulvio Gianaria (president Fondazione Arte CRT, Torino)

Established in 2007, the Share Prize is widely known in the world of  digital arts.  In 2010,  two hundred and seventy artists sent in entries to Share Prize from all over the world.

It was the Jury’s duty to examine these entries and select just six works for Share Festival’s, six ambitious attacks on the electronic limits of artistic possibility.  With judges from four countries, the selection process itself was a lively set of synergetic maneuvers as unique as the festival itself.

The Share topic of “Smart Mistakes” reflects an emergent world generated by social networks, synchronicities, strange disasters and happy accidents.  Only Share Festival would bring Torino a musical DJ set performed by a living bed of ants.

Fragility, entropy and the junk aesthetic reflects a global lifestyle of breakdowns and make-dos, embodied by the Electrical Theater, which is made of repurposed household objects and zombie machinery.

Web cinema shows its unique strengths with a crowd-sourced digital remake of Djiga Vertov’s classic “Man with a movie camera”.   Every shot of this seminal silent film is to be re-shot and displayed by Internet volunteers — especially the Turinese, whose Cinema Museum has become a world center for studies in cinema.

A gentler, more personal kind of interaction is represented by a responsive, towering ripple of misty light in the ambient architectural spaces of Torino’s Museum of Natural Science.

Amid the airless vitrines of stuffed animals is a glowing, whirling, breath-propelled installation of digital particles, with the breathing artist herself performing in darkness.

Our sixth fortunate mistake is a shambling, anonymous performer who will roam Turin while remaining unseen by video surveillance.   The power of network society manifests itself through complex effects, devoid of obvious causality.

These six artworks are haunted rather than intentional, generative as well as expressive.
By making “Smart Mistakes,” artists can break walls, break windows, and break new ground,  achieving unforeseeable effects impossible without asserting the universal right of both humans and machines to fail in the best way possible.

THE SHORTLIST

Kuai Auson (EC), 0h!m1gas (2008)
0h!m1gas is a biomimetic stridulation environment, based on the activity of an ant colony under video and audio surveillance, transforming the ants into DJs and creating a sound-reactive space which reveals the connection between scratching, as an aesthetical expression created by human culture, and the stridulation phenomena produced by ants as a communication mechanism.
http://kuaishen.tv/0hm1gas/

Perry Bard (CDN), Man with a Movie Camera (2007)
Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake is a participatory video shot by people around the world who are invited to record images interpreting the original script of Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, and upload them to http://dziga.perrybard.net, where software developed specifically for this project archives, sequences and streams the submissions as a film.
http://dziga.perrybard.net


Sonia Cillari (IT), As an artist, I need to rest (2009)
The artist is lying still on the floor of the exhibition space, exhaling through a very long cable, which departs from inside her left nostril and ends at the centre of the main screen, suspended from the floor. A digital creature which she calls ‘feather’ is entirely generated by her exhaling into the suspended screen. During the performance, Sonia Cillari exhales 14,000 digital elements and brings the digital feather into more than 6 different states of beings, from ‘addition’ to ‘resistance’ patterns of life.
http://www.soniacillari.net/AaA-IntR_dedicated.htm

Ernesto Klar (IT/VE/USA), Luzes relacionais (2009-10)
Luzes relacionais” (Relational Lights) is an interactive audiovisual installation that explores our relationship with the expressional-organic character of space. The installation uses light, sound, haze, and a custom-software system to create a morphing, three-dimensional light-space in which spectators actively participate, manipulating it with their presence and movements. “Luzes relacionais” is pays homage to the work and aesthetic inquiry of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark.
http://klaresque.org/?p=63

knowbotic research (CH), macghillie_ just a void (2009-10)
In the public performance project MacGhillie, urban sites are visited by a figure, clad in a camouflage suit, who shows neither the traits of an individual, or even of a person. The so-called Ghillie Suit was originally invented in the 19th century for hunting and was later also used during the First World War (bis heute). Its camouflage anonymizes and neutralises of the person who wears it in public. The figure oscillates between the hyperpresence of a mask and visual redundancy.
http://krcf.org/krcf.org/?p=249

Teatrino Elettrico (IT), DC12V (2009)
DC12V is a board-game version of elektrolivecircus. Sounds are generated using analogue instruments only, recordings of movements, percussion, friction and the electromagnetic fields of various everyday machines. Small in converted into big, futile into necessary, objects into personages, the board into a location. A desktop tragedy in one act for self-propelled machines.
http://www.teatrinoelettrico.org/works/dc12v.html