The CyberArts – Exhibition shows the award-winning works of the Prix Ars Electronica 2013.

El Campo de Cebada

El Campo de Cebada (ES)
Golden Nica Digital Communities

Refugees United is a non-profit organization that makes a global, anonymous, user-driven search system available to families of refugees, which enables them to search for missing relatives independently of third parties.

Visualizing Palestine

Visualizing Palestine (PS)
Award of Distinction Digital Communities

Visualizing Palestine is committed to social justice and change for the better in Palestine. It focuses on the failure of the organizations involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, effective deployment of communication tools (and not relying exclusively on dry-as-dust reports, tables and graphics) and the inability of the media to deliver unbiased coverage (instead of providing one-sided reportage that concentrates on Hamas). The response that this crew’s data analysts and media designers have come up with features data put forth in an attractive, coherent way.

The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project

Koen Vanmechelen (BE)
Golden Nica Hybrid Art

The investigation of biocultural diversity and identity that Vanmechelen has been conducting since 1999 combines art, science and aesthetics. In his Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, the artist has crossed species of chickens from many different countries. The aim: breeding cosmopolitan poultry with genetic material from every one of the world’s chicken species.

Five Variations Of Phonic Circumstances And A Pause

Tania Candiani (MX)
Award of Distinction Hybrid Art

This work by Tania Candiani tunes in to the culture of hearing and audio technologies. It’s based on speaking machines and hearing systems, which she implements for poetic actions with machines, language, codification and the audio texture of narration. Each of the machines in Five Variations … addresses and expands on a particular conception associated with devices, instruments or technologies, and subjects their sounds or tonal characteristics to a variation.

Mycotecture

Phil Ross (US)
Award of Distinction Hybrid Art

Since the early 1990s, Phil Ross has been experimenting with living fungi which he introduces into a medium such as sawdust. Within a week, the mixture solidifies into a very versatile, plaster-like mass that Ross has used to construct furniture and a teahouse. The fact that it’s 100% organic and biodegradable isn’t the only reason why his invention is a terrific sustainable alternative to petroleum-based materials.

The Blind Robot

Louis-Philippe Demers (CA/SG)
Honorary Mention Hybrid Art

Louis-Philippe Demers set out to transform a robot arm from a cold precision tool into a sensitive instrument, and thereby create a new form of intimate touch by social robots. In his installation, the mechatronic arm gently feels the faces and upper bodies of installation visitors just like a blind person would do. Finally, a monitor depicts what the robot “saw” in going about this.

Pancreas

Thomas Feuerstein (AT)
Honorary Mentions Hybrid Art

Pancreas is a processual sculpture that converts books into sugar that, in turn, serves as nourishment for human brain cells. Book pages that have been shredded and soaked in water are put into a bio-fermenter serving as an artificial intestine where bacteria break down the cellulose into glucose. Once this material is filtered and cleaned, it’s fed to brain cells in a glass container. But this artificial brain is on a strict diet—its sole source of nutrition is one of the milestones of philosophy, Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit.

frequencies (a)

Nicolas Bernier (CA)
Golden Nica Digital Musics & Sound Art

frequencies (a) is a sound performance combined with light. It blends digital sounds with the crystal-clear tones of a tuning fork. By means of computer-controlled magnetic vents, Bernier imparts precise strikes to a tuning fork. This is accompanied by the pulsating of glistening lights, and the space is filled by a composition of light and sound.

Borderlands Granular

Chris Carlson (US)
Award of Distinction Digital Musics & Sound Art

Borderlands Granular is a new musical instrument that makes it possible to experiment with, touch and modify sounds by means of granular synthesis, a technique that uses stratification and/or overlapping of very brief sound fragments or “grains” to produce complex, dynamically changing timbres and tonal structures. The software supports flexible improvisation in real time and enables users—defined as organizers of sounds—to work directly with sound material even if they lack any formal musical background.

SjQ++

SjQ++ (JP)
Award of Distinction Digital Musics & Sound Art

This audiovisual tool enables multiple users to simultaneously compose music in real time. Via interaction, participants create sound data that are, in turn, visualized and depict the behavior of the respective users. The audience experiences the performance as an inseparably interwoven construction of sounds and visual elements. The sounds and images are not only perfectly synchronized; they also reciprocally influence and modify one another.

Pendulum Choir

Michel Décosterd (CH), André Décosterd (CH)
Golden Nica Interactive Art

Pendulum Choir is choral piece for nine a cappella voices and 18 hydraulic cylinders. The singers are engaged in a battle/playful encounter with gravity on tilting pedestals that, as an ensemble, form a living tonal body. This assumes various physical states that, in turn, influence its acoustic behavior—abstract, repetitive, lyrical or narrative. The forms of expression include subtle vocal polyphonies, lyrical flights of fancy, and dark, obsessive rituals.

Voices of Aliveness

Masaki Fujihata (JP)
Award of Distinction Interactive Art

Participants ride a bicycle equipped with a GPS logger and a video camera around a track prepared especially for this project—the so-called shouting circuit. While doing so, they’re requested to scream their brains out! As a collection of these loops and cries, Voices of Aliveness is a collective vocal sculpture that will be reproduced in cyberspace in the form of a ring.

Rain Room

rAndom International (GB)
Award of Distinction Interactive Art

Rain Room is a 100-m2 field of dripping water. The meticulously choreographed rainfall reacts so sensitively to installation visitors’ presence and movements that they can cross this high-precipitation zone without getting wet.

Down with Wrestlers with Systems and Mental Nonadapters!

Kawarga Dmitry & Elena (RU)
Honorary Mentions Interactive Art

Via a treadmill, installation visitors set a “social mechanism” into motion and can feel a bit like God as they go about it, since the movement of the mechanism as well as of the figures inside depend on the visitor’s own pace. The upshot is experiencing a sort of split consciousness: Does society co-opt us all, or do we create this enslavement mechanism ourselves? Reciting the Dada Manifesto into a microphone causes the installation to vibrate and several of the figures begin to tumble out of it. A monitor displays images captured by a mini video camera inside a black box in which another reality is to be found: the world of the artist.

Ishin-Den-Shin

Olivier Bau (FR), Yuri Suzuki(JP), Ivan Poupyrev (RU)
Honorary Mentions Interactive Art

In his 2012-13 series Angles, Daniel Rozin applies a new form of geometric image production. It dispenses with the usual rectangular grid and is based instead on rotation. The Angles Mirror, a triangular block of steel with rotatable pointers—doesn’t construct the image out of various levels of lightness and darkness; instead, it depicts the mirror image of the viewer taken by the camera in the form of various angles of inclination. Rather than a photorealistic picture, the Angles Mirror represents the three-dimensional movement of a figure that results from the change of distance from the reflecting sculpture.

AHORA. A song in the Hypertemporal Surface

Hernán Kerlleñevich (AR), Mene Savasta Alsina (AR)
Honorary Mentions Interactive Art

Software and installation, AHORA is a composition environment for music in space. A composed interactive song fragmented into its sound elements lies on the floor of the installation space. The sound elements make up the temporal corpus of the piece, which awaits the step of an installation visitor to make it resound. The sound elements are reordered depending on the visitor’s path, and thus the piece is rewritten depending on the particular route.

The exhibition is shown at the OK Offenes Kulturhaus im OÖ Kulturquartier during the following hours.

OK Offenes Kulturhaus im OÖ Kulturquartier
Opening Thu 5.9. 18:00
Thu 5. – Fr 6.9. 10:00 – 21:00
Sat 7.9. 10:00 – 23:00
Sun 8. – Mo 9.9. 10:00 – 21:00