The Artistic Director, Bruce Sterling, announce the eleventh edition of Share Prize curated by Jasmina Tešanovic, the Italian exhibition of electronic art, digital art and new media,organized by Share Festival.

FRANKENSTEIN, IL MODERNO PROMETEO
Two hundred years ago this year, “Frankenstein” was first published. The author kept herself anonymous, so that no one would guess that she was a radical teenage feminist who had run off to Italy. Victor Frankenstein is a bright Swiss college student with a private lab. Victor secretly hacks dead bodies and builds a giant. One dark night, Victor “infuses the spark of being” into his superhuman creation.

But “Frankenstein’s Monster” never gets a name. He does have a mother — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley — but he has never had any legal identity, not for two hundred years. Illegal, unethical, penniless and not even human, he’s the ultimate clandestine refugee. This Nameless One has no family, no friends and no legal papers. He’s a citizen of nowhere, lurching off the design table into a troubled, fragmented world of epic Greek mythic passions and torch-and-pitchfork mob riots. The Nameless One wanders the globe. He listens and learns by spying on people. Often he does free favors, and even works hard for no pay. Yet despite all these conveniences, people never trust the Monster. He exists; he grows ever bolder, stronger and more capable; but he can never really be one of us. When he “friends” people, the alien becomes even less human. He becomes a troll; he rants, rages, demands a female soul-mate, and plots cruel reprisals on innocent brides. Those who know him best are the ones who dread him worst.

Must the Modern Prometheus suffer for his gift of fire?

Must he be chased down with torches by an angry and panicking user-base?

Will Silicon Valley ever have a Hollywood happy ending?

SHARE FESTIVAL XIII is about the many powerful entities mankind has built, that are active among us, huge, strong, unloved, scary, mythic and Romantically tragic. They are alive! — but we are the children of Mary Shelley, and of Byron’s daughter Ada Lovelace. What about them — and what about us?

Jasmina Tešanovic

The Share Prize XI edition jury, meant to evaluate the artistic responses to the genuinely “monstrous” aspects of technology is composed by
Régine Debatty, writer, blogger, curator and founder of we-make-money-not-art.com
Laura Milani, President of Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino
Gianluca ‘Jazza’ Guerra, Communication Director of ‘Trieste Science+Fiction Festival’
Jasmina Tesanovic, creator of the “IoWT” and curator of Share Prize Xi edition
Bruce Sterling, Share Festival Art Director