Lawrence Malstaf (BE)
Courtesy Galerie Fortlaan 17 – Gent (BE)
http://www.fortlaan17.com/eng/artists/malstaf

Golden Nica Interactive Art
Installation

Styrofoam beads are blown around in a big transparent PVC cylinder by five powerful fans. Visitors can take a seat on the armchair in the middle of the whirlpool or observe from the outside one at a time. On the chair, in the eye of the storm, it is calm and safe. Spectacular at first sight, this installation turns out to mesmerize like a kind of meditation machine. One can follow the seemingly cyclical patterns, focus on the different layers of 3D pixels or listen to its waterfall sound. One could call it a training device, challenging the visitor to stay centered and to find peace in a fast-changing environment. After a while the space seems to expand and one’s sense of time becomes confused.

Osman Khan, Kim Beck (US)
www.osmankhan.com / www.idealcities.com

Award of Distinction Interactive Art
Documentation

“When laughter trips at the threshold of the divine” explores and subverts the public use of a public space, exploring architectural folly through the simplest of interactive concepts, the switch, as represented by the door. With equal nods to Minimalism’s aesthetics and mega-consumerisms spectacle, the project places a fully functioning automatic sliding door in the middle of a public park, offering the everyday as a folly for play, re-experience and reflection on neutered thresholds.

Jens Wunderling (DE)
http://www.defaulttopublic.net / http://www.sport4minus.de

Award of Distinction Interactive Art
Documentation

“default to public” is a project dealing with the discrepancy between people’s feeling of privacy on the web and the physical world. It consists of an ongoing series of objects and interventions linking the physical world to the online world in unexpected and narrative ways to create awareness for self-exposure.
The three core elements of “default to public” (Status panel, Tweetleak, and Tweetscreen) cause irritating moments that neither condemn nor approve of the self-exposure; they are as neutral as Twitter itself is, yet they make strong statements regarding the perception of private and public on the web and are intended to create reflection and communication on that topic. In times of rapid change concerning communication behavior, media access and competence, the project “default to public” aims to raise awareness of the possible effects on our lives and our privacy.

All three objects follow a simple yet powerful principle: information from the Twitter network (standing for information on the web) is displayed in another public environment, the documentation of this process is fed back into the digital public sphere and the authors of the information are notified that it has been “leaked”. Two public spheres are temporarily linked, creating repercussions of communication in the digital public sphere, which seems to be regarded as less public than the physical world, although it has a far wider reach than classical media, plus it never expires or is written over.

Status panel, a classic awareness-design piece, enhances the functionality of a well-known interface. Tweetleak, a monolithic anthracite-colored pole, which is placed in a public place, collects tweets from nearby and “materializes” them. The collected fragments from people’s lives on the web leave the digital public space on adhesive paper strips.

Tweetscreen is a networked projection/installation in public space, displaying “tweets” that have been written near its own physical location on a large projection screen, transferring them to a medium, widely received as “public”.

Benjamin Maus, Julius von Bismarck (DE)fz
http://www.allesblinkt.com / http://www.juliusvonbismarck.com

Honorary Mention Interactive Art
Installation

“Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus” is a method and device revealing the relations between inventions by crawling through millions of patents and their references.
Patents are manifested thoughts or goals of the inventor, thus reflecting the mindset society had at a certain point in time. Much like scientific papers, patent documents contain references to so-called “prior art”—thus pointing to the principles the invention is based on.
There are about 25 million references for the over 7.5 million patents issued.

Because patents contain references, it is possible to find a path from one patent to another. This principle corresponds to the “six degrees of separation theory” (or small world phenomenon), according to which any person in the world is connected to any other person by a surprisingly short chain of acquaintanceships.

Applied to patents, the approximate level of separation is about seven nodes.
The machine’s mechanism reproduces the patents and their relations in a never-ending stream of semantically connected drawings. Surprising connections between seemingly unrelated objects and ideas emerge.

Jens Brand (DE)
http://www.jensbrand.com/

Honorary Mention Interactive Art
Installation

An “acoustic camera” visualizes a static image of a red donkey produced by a sound wave pattern.

The wave pattern only exists as long as the waves can unfold uninterruptedly within the empty exhibition space. It can be observed on a monitor / screen outside. As soon as the audience enters the exhibition space, the wave pattern naturally changes. Entering the sound space causes the image to dissolve.

The “Red Psi Donkey” deals with an unreachable reality that only occurs in the moments of the absence of an audience. The interactivity in the immediate reality lies beyond human senses. The layer of perception is dislocated. The observation of the interactivity denies participation.

Yuri Suzuki (JP)
http://www.yurisuzuki.com

Honorary Mention Interactive Art
Installation

“The Physical Value of Sound” consists of series of products that allow people to realize the physicality of music.
“Recently, the media that surround us have changed from analog to digital—for instance, photography, film and music.
These days, most sounds are recorded only digitally. I feel uneasy about digitalization of music because I wonder if it will survive to the next generation. Digitally-based music media is just ‘data’; in other words, ‘virtual.’ When objects lose physicality, they become virtual.

I strongly believe that the record is still the latest and the finest media in analog recording technology. If you think of Edison’s gramophone record, it is clear that records can survive and can be listened to hundreds of years later.

The record is the only commonly available, playable media that is physical, and in this project I used this diminished format as the raw material.
I hope the experience of this project will provoke people’s interest in this physical music media.” (Yuri Suzuki)

Andreas Muxel (AT)
http://www.andreasmuxel.com / http://connect.andreasmuxel.com

Honorary Mention Interactive Art
Installation & Documentation

Thirteen oscillating spheres of steel are connected to a matrix by rubber bands. A bar with a magnet at either end controls the behavior of each of the system elements. Once a sphere is connected to the bar, it is oscillated by a motor until the bar detaches and makes a new connection to another sphere.

Each module has its own simple program logic and there is no main program controlling the system from the outside. No randomness or chaos needs to be simulated, because the constantly rebuilt physical structure of the sculpture becomes its own analog program for non-linear behavior. So the system produces complex behavior even though its structure and rules are simple.

!Mediengruppe Bitnik (CH) and Sven König (DE)
www.bitnik.org / www.opera-calling.com/description

Honorary Mention Interactive Art
Documentation

“Opera Calling” was an artistic intervention into the cultural system of the Zurich Opera. Audio-bugs placed within the auditorium of the local opera house gave the outside public access to the performance on stage. The performances were retransmitted to the public not through broadcasting but by telephoning people in Zurich individually.

From March to June 2007, !Mediengruppe Bitnik hid audio-bugs in the auditorium, transmitting the performances of the Zurich Opera to randomly selected telephone land-lines in the city of Zurich. In the proper style of a home-delivery service, the inhabitants of Zurich were able to listen to the on-going opera performances for as long as they wanted through a live connection with the audio-bug signal. During the project a total of 90 hours of live opera performance were delivered to 4,363 households.

Throughout the duration of *Opera Calling* a visual representation of the telephone machine was exhibited at the Cabaret Voltaire, birthplace of Dada, in Zurich.
Following Bell’s original intention for the application of the telephone, “Opera Calling” makes use of the telephone as a broadcasting medium. Bell promoted the purpose of the telephone primarily as a central source for the transmission of music, news and Sunday sermons to a paying network of wired-up subscribers.

Daniel Sauter, Fabian Winkler (DE/US)
http://daniel-sauter.com/ / http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~fwinkler

Honorary Mention Interactive Art
Installation

“In the Line of Sight” uses 100 computer-controlled tactical flashlights to project low-resolution video footage of suspicious human motion. Each flashlight shines a light spot on the wall. All the flashlights combined create a ten-by-ten matrix representation of the source footage, featured on a video monitor in an adjacent part of the gallery.

The flashlight matrix projects images that are difficult to decipher, deliberately vague, making the audience wonder what exactly the person is doing. The projections reference the elusiveness of visual representation in the context of tactical images, surveillance images and viral media. The work is strongly influenced by a technologically determined discourse on a range of security issues, including deciphering human motion at virtual border fences or determining suspicious behavior based on helical motion signatures in human gait.

Connected through a strand of 100 cables, a heavy-duty control box serves as the pedestal for a video monitor featuring a professional dancer in an ongoing sequence of human motion studies culled from a movie database. The performer deliberately interrogates the relationship between suspicious and asymmetrical movement patterns analyzed in real-time by computer-vision software. Significant features and body movements are visually highlighted with markers.

Smith & Wesson, the brand of the flashlights chosen for this installation, is best known for its firearms. Conceptually, this fact references the violent dimension of light, from searchlights in WW2 to tracer ammunition and propaganda architectures made of light. By walking between the light source and the projected images, the role of the visitors changes from observer to subject—with 100 flashlights pointed at them. Looking at the flashlights directly, the visitors perceive the inherent power and dynamics of the exploded images, continuously moving in wavelike patterns across the five-meter-wide flashlight sculpture.

Helgard Haug, Daniel Wetzel, Stefan Kaegi (DE)
http://www.rimini-protokoll.de/website/de/project_2766.html

Honorary Mention Interactive Art
Documentation

Imagine you are buying a ticket at the box office for an individual show on a specific day. You are led to an apartment somewhere close by, where a person on a phone strikes up a conversation with you. The voice belongs to a call-center agent from Calcutta, India… A story is about to develop and you realize that the call-center agent and you and your city are the very first protagonists of the plot. “Call Cutta” is a new form of dialog that turns up the other side of the globalization coin and whispers its message back into the ear of the end-user.

Collaboration: Sebastian Brünger, Almut Rembges
Digital Interface Design: Florian Fischer
Physical Interface Design: Georg Werner
Production Management: Heidrun Schlegel / Kathrin Veser
Assistant Directors India: Almut Rembges, Philipp Widmann, Maria Ochs, Martin Baierlein
Production Management India: Madhusree Mukherjee
Worlds premiere: April 2nd 2008 in Berlin, Mannheim, Zurich

Production: Rimini Apparat

In collaboration with the Callcenter Descon Limited in Kalkutta. (http://www.desconsoft.com). Coproduction Baltic Circle Helsinki and Helsinki Festival; Camp X Kopenhagen; HAU Berlin; Kunstenfestivaldesarts Brussels; Nationaltheater Mannheim; Schauspielhaus Zürich; 104 Centquatre Paris. Supported by the European Cultural Foundation and Regierender Bürgermeister von Berlin – Senatskanzlei – Kulturelle Angelegenheiten.

Golan Levin with Lawrence Hayhurst, Steven Benders and Fannie White (US)
http://www.flong.com/projects/snout/

Honorary Mention Interactive Art
Documentation

The interactive installation “Double-Taker (Snout)” deals in a whimsical manner with the themes of trans-species eye contact, gestural choreography, subjecthood and autonomous surveillance. The project consists of an eight-foot-long (2.5m) industrial robot arm, costumed to resemble an enormous inchworm or elephant’s trunk, which responds in unexpected ways to the presence and movements of people in its vicinity. Sited on a low roof above an entrance and governed by a real-time machine-vision algorithm, “Double-Taker (Snout)” orients a supersized googly-eye towards passers-by, tracking their bodies and suggesting an intelligent awareness of their activities. The goal of this kinetic system is to perform convincing “double-takes” at its visitors, in which the sculpture appears to be continually surprised by the presence of its own viewers—communicating, without words, that there is something uniquely surprising about each of us.

“Double-Taker (Snout)” was commissioned by Robot250, an initiative of the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute. The project was enabled through critical support from the CMU Collaborative Machining Center, the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts (PCA), George Moving & Storage Inc. and the ABB Mechatronics and Robotic Automation Research Group. Additional support for this project came from the Creative Capital Foundation, from the Berkman Faculty Development Fund at Carnegie Mellon University and from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

Eduardo Kac (US)
with his scientific partners Neil Olszewski, Department of Plant Biology and Neil Anderson, Department of Horticultural Science, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN
http://www.ekac.org

Golden Nica Hybrid Art
Installation

The central work is a plantimal, a new life-form that is not found in nature. The “edunia” is a genetically engineered flower that is a hybrid of the artist and a petunia. The edunia expresses the artist’s DNA in its red veins (through the production of a protein by a gene).

“The new flower is a petunia strain that I invented and produced through molecular biology. The edunia has red veins on light pink petals and a gene of mine is expressed in every cell of its red veins, i.e., my gene produces a protein only in the veins. The gene was isolated and sequenced from my blood. The pink background of the petals, against which the red veins are seen, is evocative of my own pinkish-white skin tone. The result of this molecular manipulation is a bloom that creates the living image of human blood rushing through the veins of a flower.

The gene I selected is responsible for the identification of foreign bodies. In this work, this is precisely what identifies and rejects the other that I integrate into the other, thus creating a new kind of self that is partially flower and partially human.

My IgG DNA is integrated into the chromosome of the edunia. This means that whenever the edunia is propagated through seeds my gene is present in the new flowers.

“Natural History of the Enigma” is a reflection on the contiguity of life between different species. It uses the redness of blood and the redness of the plant’s veins as a marker of our shared heritage in the wider spectrum of life. By combining human and plant DNA in a new flower in a visually dramatic way (red expression of human DNA in the flower veins), I demonstrate the contiguity of life between different species.

This work seeks to instill a sense of wonder in the public about this most amazing phenomenon we call “life”. The general public may have no difficulty in considering how close we truly are to apes and other non-human animals, particularly those with which it is possible to communicate directly, such as cats and dogs. However, the thought that we are also close to other life forms, including flora, will strike most people as surprising.

Eduardo Kac

Steve Lambert (US) member of Because We Want It
http://nytimes-se.com/

Award of Distinction Hybrid Art
Installation and documentation

On November 12, 2008, one week after the election of Barack Obama, a special edition of “The New York Times” hit the streets announcing the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a maximum wage, a new national public transit system and 14 more pages of “all the news we hope to print.” The paper was distributed throughout New York City as well as Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, other cities around the country, and on the website nytimes-se.com.

The project was a collaborative effort nine months in the making written by over 30 writers and distributed by hundreds of volunteers. When people were presented by this reality—it was literally put it into their hands in the form of the national paper of record—their critical faculties kicked into gear. Sadly, after seven years of ongoing war, truly imagining what peace could feel like is more difficult than one expects. The possibility of peace strikes one more powerfully because the paper makes the theoretical ideas and possibilities something one is actually holding in one’s hand, studying, and experiencing for a moment.

Inventor Dean Kamen once said that science already has solutions to all the world’s problems. There are incredibly informative studies buried in research journals and amazing but little known books that lay out step by step policies to solve global warming. Indeed, for many of the world’s problems, solutions do already exist. What we lack is vision and an articulated demand from an overwhelming majority of people. What the “NYT Special Edition” did was to explain this type of material in everyday language and as if it had already happened. A policy paper that was accessible, and, as Bill Moyers described it, “presented in a way that people would actually want to read.”

The response to the paper was overwhelmingly positive, reaching newspapers, magazines and television stations around the world. Readers seemed to understand that the paper, dated nine months in the future, was a vision; a plan for what was possible. A plan that doesn’t rely on powerful hero politicians to save the public, but a plan detailing the rewards of everyday people organizing together and pressuring, working, and demanding a more just world.

Supported by: Support from Eyebeam, Cultures of Resistance, The Electronic Frontier Foundation, CODEPINK, Wooster Collective, and others.

David Haines (UK), Joyce Hinterding (AU)
http://www.sunvalleyresearch.net

Award of Distinction Hybrid Art
Installation

“Earthstar” is an exploration of electromagnetic and vibrational energy and employs the rigorous methodologies and tools of science, but its overall effect is a poetically charged experience that ultimately emphasizes the sun’s elemental and mythic qualities.

Exploring arcane energies and hidden frequencies, the installation comprises three elements: A formal dynamic space is established between the singular and spectacular footage of the solar chromo-sphere captured by the artists using a hydrogen-alpha telescope. Sitting in opposition to this are two luminous refrigeration units containing virtual aroma compositions of synthesized molecules that represent states of ozone. Building a bridge between these two elements is a resonating and receiving system of VLF (Very Low Frequency) antennae tuned to the radio bursts emitted by the sun and fed through an amplifier to provide a real-time, immersive soundtrack.

A super atmosphere is established in the installation, by way of imaginative representations of the sun and the solar winds, and via synthetic aroma molecules that smell ozonic. Ozone has a smell. It is what we smell before a thunderstorm. It’s the smell of electricity due to burning ions. But the excess of ionized air is also the smell of a fresh sea breeze near the ocean. These accords of synthesized molecules created by the artists explore and develop recent research that postulates that smell like hearing and seeing is defined by being able to discern the frequencies of molecular spin as smell.

The custom-built antennae sculptures act like radio-astronomy antennae. These hand-wound antenna constrained by audio filters resonate to the section of the electromagnetic spectrum known as the VLF (3 KHz to 30 KHz). VLF is the Very Low Frequency range of the spectrum and is dominated by solar noise and the effects of the solar winds on our atmosphere. This frequency range translates directly into audio through basic audio inputs so that we are able literally to listen to the sympathetic activity in the wire object.

Support by Marco Macon, IASKA (International Art Space, Kellerberrin, WA) and the C3 West project in the early development of this work.

Eric Gunther, Justin Manor, John Rothenberg (US) / Sosolimited
http://sosolimited.com

Honorary Mention Hybrid Art
Documentation

“’ReConstitution’ was a live audiovisual remix of the 2008 United States Presidential debates. There were three performances in three cities, each coinciding with the live broadcast of the debates.

We designed software that allowed us to sample and analyze the video, audio and closed captioned text of the television signal. Through a series of visual and sonic transformations we reconstituted the material, revealed linguistic patterns, exposed content and structures, and fundamentally altered the way in which the debates were watched.

The transformed broadcast was projected onto a movie screen for a seated audience. Over 1500 people attended our three performances in Boston, New York and Washington DC.

The legibility of the underlying debates were maintained throughout the performance—we didn’t want the audience to miss a word of it.

Eric Gunther, Justin Manor, John Rothenberg

Philip Gamblen, Guy Ben-Ary, Peter Gee, Dr. Nathan Scott & Brett Murray in collaboration with Dr. Steve Potter Lab (Dr. Steve Potter, Douglas Swehla & Stephen Bobic) (AU/USA)
http://www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/silentbarrage

Honorary Mention Hybrid Art
Documentation

Seven years of research have gone into “Silent Barrage,” a project that spans an arc between artistic installation space and basic scientific research. Its subject is the essential nature of thought, of free will and neuronal dysfunction. Visitors move about within the brain of a biomechanical organism that reacts to their presence. This organism consists of a micro-network of tens of thousands of neurons and 60 electrodes in a petri dish. Each region of the petri dish corresponds to one of the pole robots in the installation space. The movements of installation visitors, captured by cameras and position sensors, stimulate the micro-network, whose reactions on the macro-level are implemented by the robots. The upshot of this is an intensive alternating series of actions and reactions between human beings and neurons. The resulting markings are a representation of the organism’s neuronal activity and can be read as “memory.”

The reactions constitute uncontrolled outbursts of nerve tissue activity that is typical of epilepsy and nerve cell cultures. The nerve cells have been wrenched out of their context—the brain of which they used to be a part—and are being cultivated in an artificial environment in which they attempt to make connections with the cells around them. The barrage of activity is a symptom. Can the pairing of the cells and the installation visitors help establish “meaningful” connections that will quell the barrage? Scientists hope this installation will help them to better understand how to reduce activity in the petri dish, which would, in turn, benefit the treatment of epilepsy.

Sota Ichikawa(JP), Max Rheiner (CH ), Ákos Maróy (HU) ,Kaoru Kobata (JP), Satoru Higa (JP), Hajime  Narukawa  (JP), / doubleNegatives Architecture
http://doubleNegatives.jp / http://corpora.hu / http://corpora.ycam.jp/

Honorary Mention Hybrid Art
Installation

“Corpora in Si(gh)te” is a installation based on real-time processing of environmental data. A number of sensors are set up forming a mesh network throughout the target area in order to collect and distribute real-time environmental information such as temperature, brightness, loudness, humidity, wind direction and wind speed.

This sensor network can be seen as the nervous system of the virtual structure. The data collected from these sources is processed by software and translated into autonomous nodes which we call “super eyes.” These “super eyes” are the seeds for the virtual architecture of “Corpora” representing a cellular, distributed network of nodes that react through real-time processing, growing and subsiding like an organism. Each “super eye” collects environmental data from the closest sensor and makes local decisions independently of a central architect.

The “super eyes” inadvertently give rise to an architectural structure, both surrounding the exhibition building and neighborhoods. This “information architecture” of “super eyes” has its own spatial perception to make itself transform into various forms by relying on the “super eyes” spatial notation concept. The fluid character of this architecture occurs as a living form. Visitors can observe this process by augmented reality technology through cameras located at the target site.

Supported by YCAM—Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media
Műcsarnok; Kunsthalle Budapest, Hungary; CHB—Collegium Hungaricum Berlin; Transmediale.09

The project “Corpora” is formed by a collective of artists, known together as double Negatives Architecture (dNA). The dNA collective was founded in 1998 by Sota Ichikawa. The members are based in Japan, Switzerland, and Hungary, but regroup as a collective for the planning and design of every project. The main members of “Corpora” are Sota Ichikawa, Max Rheiner, Ákos Maróy and Kaoru Kobata.

robotlab (Matthias Gommel, Martina Haitz, Jan Zappe (DE))
www.robotlab.de

Honorary Mention Hybrid Art
Installation

The installation “Bios [Bible]” consists of an industrial robot that writes down the Bible on rolls of paper.
The machine draws the calligraphic lines with high precision. Like a monk in the scriptorium it creates the text step by step.
Starting with the Old Testament and the books of Moses, “Bios [Bible]” produces the whole book continuously within seven months. All 66 books of the Bible are written on rolls and then retained and presented in the library of the installation.

“Bios [Bible]” focuses on questions of faith and technical progress. The installation correlates two cultural systems that are fundamental for societies today—religion and scientific rationalism. In this context scripture has always had an elementary function, as holy scripture or as formal writing of knowledge.

In computer technology the “basic input-output system” (bios) designates the module which basically coordinates the interchange between hardware and software. So it contains the indispensable code, the essential program writing, on which every further program can be established.

Thomas Traxler (AT)
www.mischertraxler.com

Honorary Mention Hybrid Art

Installation during the festival, afterwards the work will be presented as a documentation.

“The idea of a tree” translates the various sunshine conditions that occur during a day into a three-dimensional object. It is driven by solar energy and translates the intensity of the sun through a mechanical apparatus into one object a day. The outcome reflects the various sunshine conditions that occur during this day. Like a tree, the object becomes a three-dimensional recording of its process and time of creation.

The machine starts producing when the sun rises and stops when the sun goes down. After sunset, the finished object can be “harvested”.
It slowly grows the object by pulling threads through a coloring device, a glue basin, and finally winding them around a mould. The length/height of the resulting object depends on the hours of sunlight during the day. The thickness of the layer and the color depends on the amount of solar energy (more sun = thicker layer and paler color; less sun = thinner layer and darker color).

This correlation between input and output makes the changes visual and readable. The product becomes a three-dimensional “photograph” of the time and the space in which it is produced and communicates certain characteristics of locality. The process does not just react to different weather situations, but also to shadows occurring in the machine’s immediate surroundings. Each object represents one day at one spot where it was produced.

Georg Tremmel (AT), Shiho Fukuhara (JP) / BCL
www.common-flowers.org

Honorary Mention Hybrid Art
Installation

“The ‘Common Flowers’ project is based on the first commercially available genetically modified flower, the blue ‘Moondust’ GM carnation developed and marketed by Japanese beer-brewing company Suntory. But although Suntory applied for and was granted permission to grow this GM plant in its key markets, it has chosen not to. Instead the blue GM flowers are grown in Columbia, harvested, and shipped as cut flowers to the worldwide markets.

With ‘Common Flowers’ we reverse the plant-growing process, by growing, multiplying and technically “cloning” new plants from purchased cut flowers using plant tissue culture methods. The blue GM carnations are brought back to life using DIY biotech methods involving everyday kitchen utensils and easily purchasable and ready materials.

And because the plants are officially considered ‘not harmful’ and therefore legally permitted to be grown outside, we took the next logical step and released the blue GM carnation into the environment. This action is intended ask questions about the state of intellectual property, ownership and copyright issues surrounding the bio-hacking and bio-bending of plants. Our goal is to make these flowers available as shared ‘Common flowers’ and to create the free spaces where they can grow and prosper, in a ‘flower commons’.”

Georg Tremmel, Shiho Fukuhara

Mechatronische Installation (BMW Museum, München)
ART+COM
www.artcom.de/kinetik

Honorary Mention Hybrid Art
Documetation

The “Kinetic Sculpture” is a metaphorical translation of the process of form-finding in art and design. 714 metal spheres, hanging from thin steel wires attached to individually-controlled stepper motors and covering the area of six square meters, animate a seven-minute-long mechatronic narrative. In the beginning, moving chaotically, then evolving into several competing forms that eventually resolve into the finished object, the kinetic sculpture creates an artistic visualization of the process of form-finding in different variations.

Harwood, Wright, Yokokoji (UK)
http://www.mediashed.org/TantalumMemorial

Honorary Mention Hybrid Art
Installation

“Tantalum Memorial” is a series of telephony-based memorials to the more than four million people who have perished in the complex wars that have gone on in the Congo since 1998, often referred to as the “Coltan Wars”. Coltan ore is mined for the metal tantalum, an essential component of mobile phones, which is now more valuable than gold and therefore coveted by dozens of international mining industry and warring militias.

The first thing that visitors see is a towering rack consisting of electromagnetic Strowger telephony switches. The switches are triggered by a computer, which is tracking calls from Telephone Trottoire, a “social telephony” network designed for use by the international Congolese diaspora. The audience can see the dialing progress of the calls on a nearby monitor and can hear the messages that are being passed around through headphones (spoken in Lingala). The movement and sound of the switches create a concrete presence in real time for this intangible network of conversations, weaving together the ambiguities of globalization, migration and our addiction to constant communication.

“Telephone Trottoire” was designed by the artists in collaboration with the London radio program “Nostalgie Ya Mboka”. The project builds on the traditional Congolese practice of “radio trottoire” or “pavement radio”, the passing around of news and gossip on street corners to avoid state censorship. 90 percent of Congolese people in the UK are refugees and their mistrust of official media has made them a particularly hard-to-reach community. Yet Trottoire has proved very popular—this version has already grown to 1,800 users and archived over 1,000 recordings.

Evelina Domnitch (BY), Dmitry Gelfand (RU)
http://portablepalace.com

Honorary Mention Hybrid Art
Documentation

“The Earth is the cradle of humanity; however, it is impossible to spend one’s entire life in a cradle.”

Constantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky

The reduction of gravitational effects may evoke emancipatory associations, yet such conditions predominate in our universe, and are in fact a significant obstacle for a variety of procedures conducted beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. In a spacecraft, the only way to transport and position nearly all uncontained gases, liquids, and powders, is a phenomenon known as acoustic levitation. Below on Earth, the selfsame phenomenon creates the impression of a localized absence of gravity, enabling the airborne levitation of fluids and solid matter.

For this rendition of “Sonolevitation,” slivers of gold are acoustically suspended and spun in different directions at varying speeds. The spin reveals the rotary consequences of acoustic vibrations as well as the dynamics of frictionless motion (untainted by gravitational forces).

A close-range microphone monitors the slivers’ modulation of the levitatory standing wave: the slightest disturbance or change in spin has highly audible repercussions. The slivers also interact with each other, modifying one another’s spin patterns.

“Space” exploration is not only imperative for scientific and survivalist reasons, but also for purely aesthetic ends. “Sonolevitation” is the first in a series of projects in preparation for microgravitational, near-vacuum environments. The capacity to create artworks in large-scale vacuums (much larger than the ones that could ever be produced on Earth) permits the actuation of altogether unforeseen optical and acoustic processes.

Tim Otto Roth & KASCADE Experiment (DE)
http://www.imachination.net/cosmicrevelation/

Honorary Mention Hybrid Art
Documentation

“Cosmic Revelation” lets you experience science up-close-and-personal. A four-hectare light installation makes visible the energies of the cosmic radiation emanating from the depths of the universe and constantly raining down upon our planet. One or two times per second, these cosmic forces are unleashed in 16 specially designed lightning sculptures that are linked up to the Karlsruhe (Germany) Research Center’s KASCADE detector field.

As a new form of land art, this blitz-studded terrain is not only an open-air physics demonstration; it also illustrates how the atmosphere acts as a buffer zone and protective layer, and is an essential precondition for the existence of life on Earth.

Bill Fontana (US)
http://resoundings.org/

Golden Nica Digital Musics
Documentation

Speeds of Time 1

Scott George, Sound Engineer from Autograph Sound Recording Limited

Speaker’s Advisory Committee on Works of Art, House of Commons, Palace of Westminster

Meyer Sound Labs

Charlie Richmond, Richmond Sound Design

Speeds of Time 2

Scott George, Sound Engineer from Autograph Sound Recording Limited

BBC Radio 4

The Arts Council of England

Meyer Sound Labs

Tate Britain

Chelsea College of Art

Haunch of Venison Gallery

“Speeds of Time” is a musical deconstruction of the most famous acoustic icon and symbol of time, Big Ben. Live sensors and microphones are mounted on the clockwork mechanism and near the bells of Big Ben to generate a spatial-acoustic composition, which is placed in an historic colonnade of the New Palace Yard, directly below and within earshot of the bells. The presence of the sound sculpture in this setting interacts with the natural sound of the bells, creating a multi-dimensional acoustic zone.

While this work was installed in Westminster, a 12-hour multi-track recording of the sound sculpture was made that makes it possible to fully recreate the real time sense of this artwork, which can be realized as an eight-channel sound installation. This recording is fully accurate to real time and, if started at precisely five seconds before 10 o’clock, it will faithfully keep time.