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Share Prize is the prestigious prize dedicated to contemporary art declined into technology and science. The platform invites artists from around the world to submit their works for the XV edition.
This year’s jury consists of:
Bruce Sterling artistic director of Share Festival
Jasmina Tešanovic Share Prize curator
Francesca Canfora and Laura Tota Paratissima curatorial board
Paolo Cirio artist, hacktivist and cultural critic
Valentina Tanni art historian, curator and lecturer
Works submitted for the prize should follow the following theme:
“ELABORATOR” The Heart of the Artificial Intelligence”
Long ago, in the era before globalization, computers had national names. In France, computers were “ordinateurs.” In Spain, they were “ordenadores.” These machines put the world in order. In Germany they were “datenverarbeitungsanlage,” equipment for working with data. But in Italy, computers were “elaborati,” or machines to make the world elaborate.
The elaborators have won.
Computers no longer merely “compute” to solve our mathematical problems. We live in the consequences of their technical solutions. They are becoming self-educated neural nets, the most elaborate machines ever made.
Elaborators don’t pretend to rationality. They use probabilistic statistics. They can out-talk lawyers; they can automate painters. Given human commands of just a few words — the simplest human initiatives — they generate huge, gorgeous, baroque, and deeply untrustworthy constructions. The elaborators have all the might of modern cloud computation. The elaborators have the biggest, and the dirtiest, Big Data databases in the world. The biggest tech companies in the world are fighting each other with them.
Yesterday, computers computed, but tomorrow, elaborators will elaborate. Generators will generate, degenerate, and regenerate. How do we judge their value? How do we feel about this? Where are the sorrows and joys in it? What does it mean that computers are more polyvalent, more civilized, more politically and socially complex, more steeped in scraped-off databases of art-history — in summary, more Italian than they’ve ever been before?
It’s too early to know the truth — but we can make art works that can test the new situation. As we steadfastly declare at Share Festival, “Proviamo!” In Turin, we never passibly wait to be told what will happen: we will try it out, we will test it. In this world of elaborate uncertainty, let art lead the way the the heart of tomorrow.
Bruce Sterling, Direttore Artistico di Share Festival
Jasmina Tešanovic, Curatrice di Share Prize