origin

The Prix Ars Electronica is the world’s highest endowed prize for digital arts. It’s awarded in seven categories. The CyberArts 2011 exhibition showcases prizewinning works in Hybrid Art, Interactive Art and Digital Musics & Sound Art. The opening takes place at September 1st 5:30 pm. You can join a guided tour every day at 1:30 pm.

A Balloon for …

Davide Tidoni (IT)

is an itinerant project that brings to life the sound responses of specific spaces. By bursting balloons, the project discovers unique acoustic sites and invites people to explore space through listening.

A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter

Larsen Caleb (US)

This is a two-part work of art: it’s a small piece of sculpture with a controller and active internet connection; it’s also a script by means of which the sculpture is offered for sale on eBay. With each sale, the script launches a new auction on the popular online sales site.

algorithmic search for love

Julian Palacz (AT)

Songs as well as videos you’ve downloaded or shot yourself—nowadays, there’s hardly a home PC hard drive on which the quantities of data haven’t gotten completely out of hand. Julian Palacz (AT) has developed a cleaver search tool. It finds spoken or sung words and word combinations and then indicates precisely where they occur in a particular song or video sequence.

Be Your Own Souvenir

blablabLAB (ES)

Having your portrait sketched by a quickie downtown sidewalk artist was yesterday. The latest rage is an instant bust generated by a 3D printer! Be Your Own Souvenir invites you to pose and then take your likeness home with you in the form of a three-dimensional statuette.

Bee

Apostolos Loufopoulos (GR)

A work of sound art, bee conveys listeners into the acoustic cosmos of insects. Intensive movement and occasionally rapid rhythms with fast transitions are characteristic of this work. Moments of tranquility, of quiet and minimal motion alternate with sudden spurts of activity, and thus shed light on the antithetical motion patterns of flies, bees and other insects.

Cinema for Primates

Rachel Mayeri (US)

It has long been known that our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, the chimpanzees, follow with interest what happens on a TV monitor. But until now, nobody has taken the trouble to develop programming that appeals to primates. And then along came Rachel Mayeri (US). Cinema for Primates is a series of videos produced especially for chimps living in the Edinburgh Zoo.

Continuization Loop

Wim Janssen (BE)

A 35mm film that consists solely of black and transparent surfaces runs over 150 guide rollers and thus produces a “wall of film” completely without projection. Wim Janssen’s (BE) work thus evokes elements from three generations of visual media: the materiality of film, the emptiness of the video signal and the binary logic of the digital.

empathetic heartbeat

Hideyuki Ando (JP), Junji Watanabe (JP), Masahiko Sato (JP)

In this installation, the visitor’s own heartbeat becomes a medium of empathy. Subjects use a stethoscope and headphones to listen to the beating of their heart. At the same time, they watch film clips and acoustically bond so intensively with the on-screen protagonists that the sound of their heart dissolves in total empathy with acoustic existence.

Face to Facebook – Hacking Monopoly Trilogy

Paolo Cirio (IT), Alessandro Ludovico (IT)

In the wake of their critical-subversive confrontations with Google and Amazon, Cirio and Ludovico set their sights on internet behemoth Facebook. They deployed some home-brew software to circumvent the social network’s well-oiled gears. It computes its way through the inconceivably vast number of faces depicted on that site and groups them into various categories that correspond to the ordering patterns people use in everyday life in dealing with others.

Gambiocycle

Gambiologia Collective (Fred Paulino, Lucas Mafra and “The Goose” / BR)

The street merchants and brokers of political information who ride their two-wheelers through Brazilian cities were the inspiration for the Gambiocycle. As a piece of ambulant sculpture and a mobile transmitter unit for digital graffiti and interactive video projections in public spaces, the Gambiocycle is ideally suited to electronic happenings and guerilla information activities.

Inside the Tropospheric Laboratory

Agnes Meyer-Brandis (DE)

As a gigantic and rather confusing data & image generator, Tropospheric Laboratory enables us to see such things as aerosols that, as floating gas particles, make up the core of the clouds in the atmosphere. Meyer-Brandis’ (DE) installation thereby artfully veils the boundary between the visible and the invisible. The cloud cores are simultaneously omnipresent and, due to their nano-size, invisible.

Is there a horizon in the deepwater?

HeHe (FR): Helen Evans (UK), Heiko Hansen (DE)

In 2010, the Deep Horizon oil platform exploded, unleashing the worst-ever marine oil catastrophe. With her performance Is there a horizon in the deepwater? HeHe works through the ecological tragedy by minutely reconstructing the event.

MACHT GESCHENKE: DAS KAPITAL

Christin Lahr (DE)

The restrictiveness with which cash outflows from bank accounts are regulated is matched by the liberality with which capital can flow into the same account. Equally unlimited is the freedom to state what the payment is for on the paperwork documenting the transaction. Christin Lahr (DE) has discovered the art of transferring funds and uses this as a means of lowering Germany’s budget deficit. Every day since 2009, the online banking user has transferred one euro cent to the account of the Deutsche Bundesbank. In the memo section, he includes a 108-character quotation from “Das Kapital.”

May the Horse Live in Me

Art Orienté Objet (FR)

This performance spans a bridge between animal and human being as well as between the discipline of bioart and extreme body art. May the Horse Live in Me performs the ritual of blood brotherhood between horse and performer. Immunologically prepared horse blood is injected into a human’s body and initiates a potentially therapeutic process.

Newstweek

Julian Oliver (NZ/DE), Danja Vasiliev (RU/DE)

Newstweek is a high-tech device—small and unobtrusive, but nevertheless well suited for an attack on the nervous system of democracy. As something that appears to be a normal part of the technical infrastructure of an internet hotspot, Newstweek makes it possible to manipulate what’s received by those accessing the internet via W-LAN without them knowing about it. This is done by secretly modifying the news they read on their laptops, smartphones and tablets.

Pigeon d’Or

Tuur van Balen (BE)

This proposed solution to the pigeon problem consists of two elegantly designed birdhouses—one for the home; one for a parked car. In it, you can catch pigeons, feed them with a special bacteria culture that converts the birds’ highly infectious excrement into a disinfectant cleanser that works on such things as window panes and car windshields.

Particles

Daito Manabe (JP), Motoi Ishibashi (JP)

This walk-through installation by Manabe (JP) and Ishibashi (JP) is an exquisitely beautiful work of light art. On a construction that resembles a rollercoaster, light balls can be orchestrated via control screen to whiz about in all directions and grouped into brilliant moving patterns.

Safe Cuddling

Helge Fischer (DE)

Originally conceived as an ironic statement about Western societies’ deepseated fears that are being assiduously stirred up by the media, this Safe Cuddling suit designed for children became the center of a dead-serious discussion about dealing with parental fear of child abuse. Helge Fischer’s (DE) construction offers protection by sounding an alarm when a child is cuddled too long or in an inappropriate place.

Sentient City Survival Kit

Mark Shepard (US)

The Sentient City Survival Kit is a bitingly ironic comment on the rapidly materializing vision of ubiquitous computing that’s being accompanied by the total surveillance of our behavior as consumers, our habits and our
movements. It consists of, among other things, an umbrella that generates crazy light effects to disrupt any video surveillance system, a not-your-everyday navigation app for cell phones, communication-enabled coffee cups and underwear that can easily outfox the RFID chip sensors at the mall.

Six-Forty by Fourty-Eighty

Jamie Zigelbaum, Marcelo Coelho (US)

This interpretation of the touchscreen principle consists of handy magnetic pixels that can be arrayed however the user wishes. One touch is all it takes to change a pixel’s color or to copy onto another.

TUNNEL

Rejane Cantoni (BR), Leonardo Crescenti (BR)

Tunnel is a finely designed, moveable passageway, living architecture that several persons can walk through simultaneously. Depending of the pedestrians’ weight, size and movement, it changes its design and dimension to fit the circumstances.