[transmediale] Award 2010 - and the winners are ...
In preparation for the festival, transmediale and the CTM (club transmediale) invited competition submissions for both awards. Invited were artistic positions, which in their formal language, approach, and practice, question and enrich our relationship to our itechnologically-driven society. From the approximately 1.500 submissions from 75 countries, the international jury selected nine nominated entries, which are being presented at the transmediale.10.
This year’s winners of the transmediale and Vilém Flusser Theory Award have been announced. The awards were presented on the evening of February 6 by Barbara Kisseler, head of the Berlin Senate Chancellery, and the members of both juries.
The first-prize winner of the transmediale Award 2010 is the Canadian artist Michelle Teran, who lives in Berlin, with her work Buscando al Sr. Goodbar. Teran receives a cash award of 6.000 euros.
In her works Michelle Teran (Canada) explores the interplay between social and media networkswithin urban environments. Her project Buscando al Sr. Goodbar (2009) is a threefold tour through the Spanish town Murcia simultaneously taking place by bus as well as on Google Earth and YouTube. The bus can be followed virtually on Google Earth while YouTube videos are screened on the bus itself. By entering the spaces where videos were produced, an intimate encounter occurrs between video makers and audience. The project can be easily repeated at other locations such as Berlin as well, in the course of the transmediale.10.
A distinction, worth 2.000 euros, goes to the artists Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey from the USA for their work, Bicycle Built for Two Thousand.
The online work Bicycle Built For Two Thousand (2009) by the American artists Aaron Koblin andDaniel Massey is comprised of over 2,000 voice recordings collected via Amazon’s Mechanical Turkweb service. Workers were asked to listen to a short sound clip, then record themselves imitating what they heard. The result was a reconstructed version of the song Daisy Bell – the first song to implement musical speech synthesis in 1962 – as rendered by a distributed system of human voices.
The Vilém Flusser Theory Award, worth 2.000 euros, is awarded to Warren Neidich for his research project Neuropower. Warren Neidich is from the USA and lives in Berlin.
The project Neuropower is a manipulation in the literal sense of the word. Departing from recent insights of brain research, the trained biologist Neidich searches for strategies to manipulate the process of ongoing cerebral reconstruction. Through artistic means – as for instance the performa-tive gesture – Warren Neidich attempts to re-conquer those cognitive realms which are normally subject-ed to the effects and mechanisms of the mass media in a globalised world defined by neoliberalism. Byjoining scientific and aesthetic knowledge elegantly, Neidich’s work commences right there where reality is first of all constructed: in the neuronal networks of the brain.
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