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Statement of the Interactive Art Jury
The submissions to this year's Prix Ars Electronica covered a broad area: interactive installations and immersive environments, screen-based work, music projects and performance, as well as interactive systems for display of content in a museum or public setting.

Interaction - New Modes and Moods
Christiane Paul

Interactive art now has a decades-long history - not counting early artistic experiments that date back almost a century - and has recently become a more widely recognized field as art institutions worldwide have begun to pay increasing attention to this form of artistic practice. It comes as no surprise that the number of submissions to Ars Electronica's interactive art category has continuously been growing and exhibiting more diversity. Interactive art is by nature a hybrid field and this year's submissions covered a broad area, including interactive installations and immersive environments (with or without network components), screen-based work, music projects and performance, interface mechanisms that could be adopted for various purposes, as well as interactive systems for display of content in a museum or public setting.

The term "interactive" has now become almost meaningless due to its inflationary use for numerous levels of exchange. The models of interaction that form the basis of these exchanges differ widely in conceptual and technological sophistication and a competition such as Ars Electronica provides an ideal forum for taking a close look at the variety of approaches in this field. A huge portion of interactive art can be summed up under the label of reactive or responsive art where input such as the audience's movements and actions, changing light levels, temperature or sounds trigger responses from the environment. In many other works the interaction is based on enabling the audience to explore "databases" of preconfigured materials through seemingly infinite combinations. Yet another model is system interaction, where elements of software systems themselves interact with each other with varying degrees of audience input. The creation of technologized tools and "instruments" that are used and played by the audience is an area of inquiry that has consistently grown. The "re-engineering" of existing, commercial systems (such as game engines) or their inversion and subversion has also increased, although this territory arguably remains underexplored. Considering the potential of the digital medium, there are still relatively few works that create open systems by allowing users a sophisticated reconfiguration or rewriting of the system itself or by relying on networked communication processes in challenging ways.

As the number of new media programs in academic institutions multiplies, we are seeing a new wave of promising practitioners in the medium. At the same time, artists are still exploring tried-and-true methods of interaction which have been used for over a decade and aren't necessarily carried to new levels. This is not meant to say that novel ways of user interaction cannot be accomplished through existing software and technologies but we noticed a fair amount of redundancy in approaches. Going through over 350 submissions, one also becomes more aware of a certain lack of fine-tuning and sensitivity that characterizes many sensor-based or motion-tracking installations. A problematic aspect of several submissions proved to be technology that was underused. There were some CAVE projects, for example, that would have worked equally well as a projection. Immersion was treated as a "nice effect" rather than a necessity for exploring new paradigms of interaction.

Establishing criteria for judging a hybrid field such as interactive art is obviously challenging, if not impossible. In our selection process, we kept discussing and outlining certain "standards for excellence" – even if this a rather pretentious term – taking into consideration the models of interaction and issues outlined above. One of our main criteria was a strong artistic concept supported by and realized through technologies that communicate it in the most sophisticated, accomplished and appropriate way. At the same time, we acknowledged new forms of interfaces that question familiar notions of interaction, expand concepts of functionality and reveal the technology's social influences. We felt that interaction should not be explored as a mere effect but as an intervention that expands the audience's agency – allowing them to create, change and intervene with events in a meaningful way – or reflects on the aesthetic and cultural impact of technologies. The originality of an artistic concept is obviously an important standard and does not rely on technological wizardry.

With hundreds of submissions, there are never enough prizes and honorary mentions to acknowledge everything one likes. Some very promising projects had to be disregarded because they were still under development and Ars Electronica requires projects to be fully realized at the time of their submission. In selecting the honorary mentions we tried to be as inclusive as possible, considering all the different submission categories mentioned above. Among the 12 honorary mentions are three music projects and "instruments" (Block Jam, Hyperscratch and Instant City) that – in very different ways – explore possibilities of non-linear composition and of expanding the dynamic structure of music in user interaction. We also acknowledged new forms of interfaces, such as the Aegis Hyposurface and Justin Manor's Cinema Fabriqué (as artist-created DJing software). Marcel-lí Antúnez Roca's POL represents an original new model for theatrical performance; Agnes Meyer-Brandis' Coral Reef (with its extension Earth Core Laboratory and Elf Scan) puts a charming fantasy twist on low-tech augmented reality; and Iori Nakai's Streetscape condenses a site-specific experience (sounds of a city) into a minimalist, navigable map. Two of the selections address the concept of a mediated memory: while Scott Snibbe's Deep Walls creates a temporary memory of viewers' shadows, Last (by Ross Cooper & Jussi Ängeslevä) functions as a clock incorporating live video feed and constructing a record of its own history. The audience becomes the focus and subject of the artwork in Marie Sester's Access – which allows remote users to track people in public space with a robotic spotlight and acoustic beam – as well as George Legrady's Pockets Full of Memories, a cultural database and self-organizing map of the audience's personal belongings.


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16.6.2003
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