SHARE PRIZE 2011 5th EDITION
Piemonte Share has announced the short list of the Share Prize, the international competition designed to discover, promote and support art in the digital age.
The Share Prize this year was focused on the theme for the 7th Share Festival, entitled Cops & Robbers.
The theme takes its inspiration from the use of appropriationism, activism and plagiarism in art, which today has turned fakes, mash ups and remixes into an avant-garde artistic stance that flirts with what customarily is the wrong side of the law. A theme that fits perfectly with the sort of ‘networking’ that, ever since its beginnings, has straddled the dialectical line between legality and illegality, between theft and giving, between openness and closure, between intellectual property and sharing, and hence between widespread participation and a position of dominance.
Six finalists for the prize were invited to take part in the 7th Share Festival to be held in Torino from 2nd to 13th November 2011, at the Regional Museum of Natural Science. Entry 5 euro – Reduced 2,5 euro – Free under 18 and over 65.
Selected Works
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Jury Statement Share Prize 2011
In view of this theme, we have shortlisted a perfect data theft, in which the artists, using specially developed software, have collected the data of over one million Facebook users.
Face-to-Facebook by Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico undermines the faith of all those people who believed Facebook was like an eternal, happy party, without realizing that their personal data are a gold mine, handed over to big business in return for a soapy social circle of enlarged/augmented proportions.
A group of prankster artists known as IOCOSE aim their toy slingshots at the work of a dissident Chinese artist exhibited at a famous London gallery. Rather than defacing the installation though, they appropriate it as their own and readapt it, eluding security staff and bewildering visitors. Who is the author now?
Other artists instead had some fun playing chess with CCTV cameras. The Swiss duo !Mediengruppe Bitnik hacked into the city’s CCTV surveillance system as an artistic exercise, initiating a game that has yet to come to an end. Who watchers the watchers has already called checkmate.
Dutch artist Geert Mul has built a device that lets users materially acquire the ability to manipulate the web’s enormous stream of information—a divine power transferred temporarily to mortals—and create new narratives from the millions of terabytes of sounds and images found on-line. The result is a divine remix.
A microscopic tardigrade, capable of surviving the vacuum of space, finds itself competing with its own avatar to capture the audience’s affection. Each depend on the other to survive, and both battle it out to establish who has more need for attention. A never-ending story between an original and its virtual copy, created by Douglas Easterly , Matt Kenyon and Tiago Rorke.
Is the media a functional system working for democracy, or against it? A device similar to an electric plug, built by Julian Oliver and Danja Vasiliev gives ordinary people the chance to have a go at manipulating news broadcast over wireless systems, and create their own propaganda from the bottom up. A step forward in media hacking.