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Bruno Beusch/Tina Cassani: Net Vision/Net Excellence Jury Members

Last year, you have been responsible for the redesign of the old .net category of Prix Ars Electronica. You have introduced the two categories 'Net Vision' and 'Net Excellence' and the committee of Nominating Experts. Are you satisfied with the results?

Beusch/Cassani: Absolutely! We were thrilled with the range of ideas exhibited by last year's winners. They represented, in a bewildering array of forms and formats, the full bandwidth of current trends on the Internet: online-capable console games, location-based i-mode applications, straight investigation journalism, coder and designer platforms, and much more. The expansion of the Internet category, and the subdividing into categories like 'Gaming', 'Design', 'Music', 'Wireless', 'Open Source', 'Digital Divide', 'Distributed Knowledge' - each overseen by a nominating expert - was designed to reflect the dizzying rate of innovation occurring in the field. And we are very happy that this explicit opening has received so much positive feedback.

For the Ars Electronica Festival you are developing the Electrolobby. In 2001 the focus was on gaming. Why Games?

Beusch/Cassani: Computer and console games have transformed our cultural environment. They transport a life style, a way of thinking, and a strong community spirit, in much the same way, and with a shared outlook, as electronic music and the Internet. With the Electrolobby, this young digital culture, a culture spawned at the hot spots where the game, net, and club cultures converge, has finally received a dedicated arena inside the Ars Electronica Festival. For these new-media professionals featured at the Electrolobby, games are a source of inspiration, a playground, essential to their creative process.

This is why, last year, we gave a broad overview of current developments in the game culture - professional gaming, games for mobile platforms, a collaborative encyclopedia based on game structures, musical gameplays, an online recruiting game, gameboy live-concerts, screenings of current console game animations, etc. We also invited four game design agencies to join forces to develop an online game hall from scratch during the festival week.

And this year we look forward to seeing what the representatives of this generation, who have grown up with video games, computers and the Internet, all in a heavily globalized context, will have to say in the context of this year's festival theme.

You have been in Korea at the first Olympic event for Games. In Korea games are much more accepted than here. What has you impressed most?

Beusch/Cassani: The energy with which Seoul has established itself as the world capital of gaming. The enthusiasm and the huge interest triggered by this event among young and old generations (not to mention the media coverage: live broadcasting on two TV-channels around the clock). The absence of that narrow mindset fixated on seeing games as the end of civilization-as-we-know-it (which gave discussions about games a quality we sorely missed here in the West). And of course the performance of Elky, our French champion, who almost managed to win the Starcraft-competition ;)

Will the game industry be the new Hollywood?

Beusch/Cassani: The emergence of a new sector doesn't automatically mean the disappearance of another one. Rather than asking this question whether new forms eliminate older ones, we should look at their mutual cross-pollination. The clash of different media generates new, exciting, and oftentimes unintended hybrids. What happens when the game quest of a videogame is transferred to the web? In Korea and Japan, we visited numerous game companies working to develop such innovative approaches. And this is where we see, in the future, an important role for the Electrolobby: to offer a platform for these concepts. And this is also the aim of a new show on mobile games which we will be curating at the upcoming Biennal for Digital Culture in Paris.

What are your expectations for this year's Prix Ars Electronica? In your eyes: What kind of projects are worth a Golden Nica?

Beusch/Cassani: If, for an instant, we imagine the Internet as a huge pin-ball machine, and the different projects as balls inside of it, then we would wish to see projects who, in turn, trigger a lot of extra balls - in other words: projects with a whole lot of heart, brimming with vitality, and who are capable of inspiring a host of startling, new projects in the very near future.




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