Prix Ars Electronica 2006 Linz

Prix Ars Electronica 2006
International Competition for CyberartsThe Prix Ars Electronica - International Competition for Cyberarts is being conducted for the 19th time in 2006.
In addition to the classic categories-Interactive Art, Net Vision, Computer Animation / Visual Effects and Digital Musics-Digital Communities and [the next idea] Art and Technology Grant competition that debuted last year will be reprised.
Prix Ars Electronica 2006 Start of Online Submissions: January 10, 2006
Online Submission Deadline: March 17, 2006

Details about entering are available online only at http://prixars.aec.at

Total Prize Money: 117,500 Euro 6 Golden Nicas12 Awards of Distinction Up to 12 Honorary Mentions in each category
For further information please contact Iris Mayr: info@prixars.aec.at

COMPUTERANIMATION / VISUAL EFFECTS
The "Computer Animation / Visual Effects" category has been part of the Prix Ars Electronica since its very inception. It recognizes excellence in independent work in the arts and sciences as well as in high-end commercial productions in the film, advertising and entertainment industries. In this category, artistic originality counts just as much as masterful technical achievement.

DIGITAL MUSICS
Contemporary digital sound productions from the broad spectrum of "electronica" come in for consideration in the "Digital Musics" category, as do works combining sound and media, computer compositions ranging from electro-acoustic to experimental music, or sound installations. This category's programmatic agenda is to expand horizons beyond the confines of individual genres and artistic currents.

INTERACTIVE ART
The "Interactive Art" category is dedicated to interactive works in all forms and formats, from installations to performances. Here, particular consideration is given to the realization of a powerful artistic concept through the especially appropriate use of technologies, the innovativeness of the interaction design, and the work's inherent potential to expand the human radius of action.

NET VISION
The "Net Vision" category singles out for recognition artistic projects in the Internet that display brilliance in how they have been engineered, designed and-especially-conceived, works that are outstanding with respect to innovation, interface design and the originality of their content. The way in which a work of net-based art deals with the online medium is essential in this category.

DIGITAL COMMUNITIES
This category focuses attention on the wide-ranging social impact of the Internet as well as on the latest developments in the fields of social software, mobile communications and wireless networks. "Digital Communities" spotlights bold and inspired innovations impacting human coexistence, bridging the geographical as well as gender-based digital divide, or creating outstanding social software and enhancing accessibility of technological-social infrastructure. This category showcases the political potential of digital and networked systems and is thus designed as a forum for the consideration of a broad spectrum of projects, programs, initiatives and phenomena in which social innovation is taking place, as it were, in real time. A Golden Nica, two Awards of Distinction and up to 12 Honorary Mentions will be awarded in the Digital Communities category in 2006.
[the next idea] Art and Technology Grant
The aim of this grant focusing on the mutually enriching interplay of art and technology is to nurture concepts for the future that young thinkers are coming up with today. This category's target group includes interested persons throughout the world between the ages of 19 and 27, who have developed a not-yet-realized concept in the fields of media art, media design or media technology. The winner will receive a 7,500-euro grant and an invitation to spend a semester as scientific assistant and artist-in-residence at the Ars Electronica Futurelab.

Iris MayrPrix Ars Electronica Project Manager
Ars Electronica Center LinzHauptstraße 2A-4040 Linz Code: Prix
Tel. ++43.732.7272-74Fax ++43.732.7272-676
info@prixars.aec.at
>
http://prixars.aec.at

In Love With Reality Truly, Madly, Virtually

In Love With Reality Truly, Madly, Virtually

By MICHAEL RUSH
Published: January 8, 2006

font: NYTimes http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/08/arts/design/08rush.html?pagewanted=1

THE word "virtual" has gotten a bum rap since it appeared a few centuries ago. It means "the same, but not really." It's a simulation, an adjunct to the real deal, like virtual temperature or virtual height.

How times change. Right before our eyes, this thing that we call the world has been irrevocably altered, along with the "reality" we have counted on. Virtual reality is so permeating our lives that one day soon we may find it impossible to distinguish the virtual from the real.
In fact, there are those who are already counting on it. From Peter Jackson's largely computer-based reimagining of the love story between the ape and the blonde to PlayStation's latest interactive bloodbath, producers of entertainment are promulgating the wizardry of the digital, and the public is falling for it.
Millions of people worldwide are now exchanging reality for virtuality. "Massively multi-player online role-playing games" are challenging movies as the go-to entertainment for the 18-35 crowd. (The "King Kong" version was released the same day as the film.) Ever larger numbers of poseurs are inventing alternative virtual personalities in chat rooms. Reality, it seems, is not all it's cracked up to be.
But whatever happened to the good old-fashioned goggles-and-joystick, immersive virtual reality of the mid-90's? Although the gear was cumbersome and fearsomely expensive, illusory full-body absorption into real and imagined universes through powerful computers, graphics and head devices at one point seemed irresistible. A 1993 show at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, optimistically titled "Virtual Reality: An Emerging Medium," sought to jump start what was thought to be the next big thing.
So why didn't it take off? John Ippolito, the show's curator, said, "V.R.'s original promise, to construct a ghostly realm where consciousness could roam free of the constraints of flesh, became socially obsolete."
But there was a bigger, more concrete problem: while cellphones with all the whistles cost as little as $99, virtual reality environments, like medium-priced New York condos, could set you back about $1.5 million.
Until now. Virtual reality is now available to artists for about $3,000. This is the kind of watershed moment that video art enjoyed in 1965, when portable video recording equipment became available at mass-market prices.
Software to create this art can also be secured free of charge from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where researchers at the Integrated Systems Laboratory under the direction of Hank Kaczmarski have created a portable virtual reality set-up developed specifically for artists. The open-source technology, known as Syzygy, is downloadable at http://www.isl.uiuc.edu/. Others are also accessible through the University of Indiana's "John-e-box" system (http://www.avl.iu.edu/) and at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria (http://www.aec.at/).
It is no accident that the University of Illinois has been the force behind Canvas. In 1992, the virtual reality pioneers Dan Sandin, Tom DeFanti and Carolina Cruz-Neira created the prototypical large-scale virtual environment known as Cave Automatic Virtual Environment, at the university's Chicago campus. Whatever the thrills of Imax or 3-D horror movies, Cave's effects are exponentially greater. When you put on the active stereo glasses and step inside the six-walled cube, it's like diving into an ocean in another galaxy with everything around you crystal clear. Your body is fully engaged as your perceptions and sense of balance are challenged.
Though the effects are slightly less encompassing than those of its forebears, the Canvas experience is nonetheless transforming, at a fraction of the cost. With as few as two projectors ($1,000 each) fitted with polarizing filters ($300 each), an up-to-date desktop computer, three rear projection screens (optional) and the Syzygy program, Canvas is open for business (at http://www.canvas.uiuc.edu/) for artists who want to take that next step into a medium that has been largely commandeered by military strategists and those with commercial backers. All the public needs is a pair of passive stereo glasses ($1) or datagloves ($20).
Rose Marshack, a multimedia artist/musician/programmer (weren't artists waiters in the old days?), calls Canvas "the missing link I've been waiting for, the opportunity to make new art from hardware." She and the novelist Rick Powers, a onetime MacArthur fellow, are using it to create what they call a 3-D "emotional travelogue" through the 20th century.
Not one to play second fiddle to an offspring, Mr. Sandin, the Cave innovator, has developed a transportable virtuality system. With one short computer tower, two laptops, two PowerPoint projectors and a folding rear-projector screen, he travels the world exhibiting his "tele-immersive" artworks, as they are called.
All of Mr. Sandin's projects involve multiple users. "EVL: Alive on the Grid" is his name for a series of virtual art-world experiences in which audiences can interact in shared virtual spaces. In "Looking for Water," the participants become emerged in an outer-space environment based on real-time satellite images. As the navigators proceed, they experience themselves falling to Earth and landing on an archipelago whose lakes are fashioned from 3-D images in videos Mr. Sandin made on a kayaking trip.

The creation or re-creation of a super photorealist world lies at the heart of most virtual reality artworks to date, which is problematic for some artists - the New York artist John Simon, for example, who creates his own software for non-immersive virtual realities. "Each of my artworks is a small world that evolves and changes with its own rules," he says of his displays, some of which are inspired by Mondrian. "These worlds are not based on real-world physics, but rather on color theory, rhythmic motion and automatic composition."

"Atlantis," a classic in the virtual-reality field, seen from the outside.

Mimicking the real is generally not what interests artists. Altering perception is. When Bruce Nauman, Michael Snow and Peter Campus turned to video technology in the 1960's, they did so to challenge viewers' expectations by tipping them off balance, providing an ambiguous experience rather than a familiar one.

Mr. Nauman's "Spinning Spheres" from 1970, for example, is a large, and, to that extent, immersive four-screen projection featuring a spinning steel ball. Its effect is truly dizzying. Experimental film artists of that period, including Hollis Frampton and Joyce Wieland, shared a similar fascination with perception-bending.

The seductions of virtual reality probably need to be resisted before truly masterly art can emerge from it. Kathleen Harleman, director of the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says she hopes that with Canvas, "artistic imaginations will match the technological innovations - artists will not just use the technology, but free it."

For the new-media artist Lynn Hershman Leeson, who generated virtual worlds in her films "Conceiving Ada" (1997) and "Teknolust" (2002), "V.R. allows someone to enjoy a second life parallel to one's former reality," she said.

Virtual reality affords incomparable access to light, space, sound, sensation, perception, visualization and disruption, all ingredients in contemporary art. "The secret, however, isn't in the contraption," Mr. Ippolito said.

Of course not. It's in the concepts. The technology is available, but is waiting to be freed.

Michael Rush is the director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University and the author of "Video Art" (Thames & Hudson, 2003) and "New Media in Art" (Thames & HudsonWorld of Art, 2005).

Fumetto Concorso Festival Internazionale del Comix di Lucerna

Fumetto Concorso FUMETTO Festival Internationale del Comix di Lucerna - bandisce ogni anno un concorso, il cui scopo è di dare a tutti i disegnatori di fumetti la possibilità di confrontare le proprie opere con quelle di altri fumettisti e di presentarle ad un vasto pubblico. Il tema di quest'anno è «Musica». Condizioni di partecipazione Termine d’iscrizione 20 gennaio 2006 (data del timbro postale). Formato A4 o A3 (non si accettano altri formati) Dati nome/cognome, indirizzo, n. telefonico, e-mail e data di nascita sul retro di ogni pagina Pagine al massimo 4 (solo un fumetto) Confezione buste grandi e robuste, (non si accettano rotoli). Risposta postale prepagata allegare francobolli svizzeri o 5 euro (se il valore non sarà sufficiente per la risposta, i lavori verranno trattenuti presso il festival Fumetto, non oltre un anno) Categorie Cat. 1: a partire da 18 anni Cat. 2: 13 – 17 anni Cat. 3: fino a 12 anni
Fumetto non si assume alcuna responsabilità in caso di perdita o danno del materiale inviatogli. A meno che non venga specificato il contrario dal partecipante, Fumetto è autorizzato ad utilizzare i lavori ricevuti per uso giornalistico o pubblicitario e per esposizioni itineranti con riproduzioni. Gli indrizzi dei disegnatori possono essere trasferiti a terzi se non viene specificato il contrario da parte del partecipante.
La giuria 2006 Stefano Ricci, disegnatore, Hamburg Helge Reumann, illustratore, Ginevra Katja Lüthge, giornalista (taz), Berlin Mirjam Broger, manager culturale, Parigi Yves Demay, giornalista, Lausanne
Esposizione Da 40 a 50 lavori di quelli nominati dalla giuria verranno esposti al pubblico e quelli non nominati verrano esposti in forma di cartelle consultabili. Inoltre le riproduzioni dei lavori nominati saranno utilizzate per l'esposizione itinerante.
Premiazione La premiazione si terrà sabato 8 aprile 2006, alla quale sono invitati personalmente tutti i disegnatori. I nomi dei vincitori verranno resi noti durante la serata in presenza della giuria.
Premi La giuria assegnerà tre premi per ogni categoria, nonchè un premio per la migliore scenografia. I visitatori del Festival decideranno a chi assegnare il premio del pubblico. Verranno assegnati anche premi in denaro per la somma complessiva di 5‘000 CHF e premi in natura per l‘ammontare della stessa somma.
Categoria 1premio «Boesner» Categoria 2 premio «Data Quest» Categoria 3 premio «MIGROS» Premio scenario offerto del «STRAPAZIN» Premio del pubblico offerto del "Neue Luzerner Zeitung", pubblicazione inclusa nello stesso giornale.
Spedire a Fumetto Concorso Postfach 5163 CH – 6000 Luzern 5
FESTIVAL 1. - 9. April 2006 www.fumetto.ch

LA Freewaves (experimental media art, video,animation, shorts)

LA Freewaves (experimental media art, video,animation, shorts)

Open Call: Too Much Freedom? LA Freewaves 10th Celebration of Experimental Media Arts Postmark Deadline: February 15, 2006. The showcase will present experimental media art from around the world at art venues in Los Angeles in November 2006 and through the Freewaves web site. Media art works include experimental video and film (narrative, documentary, art, animation, etc.), DVDs, websites, simple installations, and video billboards. Works from the festival will also appear on public television, cable stations and video-streamed on the Internet. Competitive selection process will be conducted by a group of international and local curators with diverse specialties and backgrounds. Notification of acceptance is in July 2006. Artist payments will be $200 for selected works.

:
* Work must be completed since January 1, 2003.
* Entries must be postmarked to Freewaves by February 15, 2006.
* Include completed entry form.
* Label entries with title, artist?s name, length, date of work and format.
* Include a resume or bio plus a one paragraph description for each work submitted.
* For websites, indicate URL address on application form.
* For installation proposals, include additional description and diagrams/images.
* If you are in US, include self-addressed stamped envelope for return of work.
* There is no entry fee to submit work for consideration.

Entry form: http://www.freewaves.org/opencall.pdf

transmediale.06 REALITY ADDICTS Berlin

transmediale.06 REALITY ADDICTS Berlin, February 3 - 7, 2006
Akademie der KuensteBerlin, Hanseatenweg 10
Conference
The transmediale.06 conference runs under the title 'Reality Addicts' and dealswith artistic and social ideas that don't stop at the borders of mediatisedreality. 'Reality Addicts' does not approach the relationship of media andreality from the perspective of technologies that impose specific perceptionsor constructions of reality. Rather, within five panels and four lectures theconference explores ways in which these constructions can be subverted,exaggerated or reduced to absurdity. 'Reality Addiction' is a positive,affirmative attitude towards reality, faithful to the power of humour as a formof critique and social practice. Being addicted to reality means to longever-more for it, always contradictory to and inconsistent with what we alreadyknow. The conference offers a reality-check of the present, taken from artistic,cultural and socially committed perspectives.
In cooperation with the Federal Agency for Civic Education.

Humour Politics Fri 3 Feb 2006, 14h
For artists, humour is one of the most important strategies to deal criticallywith social and political issues and to explore the potentials of socialchange. Parody, play and the carnivalesque are forms of criticism that bothartists and activists from political and social movements use in order to gainthe attention of the public. By means of humour they rebel against the limitedviews of a realism whose only concern is functionality, not consequences. Theyunmask the media's fixation with the spectacular and protest against newjudicial and political restrictions, as well as against all attempts to limitthe freedom of expression. For the politically-committed arts, humour is ameans of survival.
with Anne-Marie Duguet, Gerald Raunig, Sebastian Luetgerthosted by Brian Holmes

Dominique Noguez: 'L'humour n'existe pas' Fri 3 Feb 2006, 19h - 20h30
Dominique Noguez, French philosopher, author and essayist, is the most importantcontemporary thinker concerned with humour as a concept and social practice. Bypointing out the boundaries of humour Noguez discusses the multiple nuances ofhumour, its numerous forms of expression and its cultural and historicalsignificance.

Media Addicts I Sat 4 Feb 2006, 12h
The panel 'Media Addicts' deals with the phenomena of a fully mediated world. Itdiscusses the technologies which permeate our existence and examines therepresentation, perception and transformation of reality by media. Have wearrived in the futurological scenarios and 'science fiction' of the 1980s? Andhow are the subjective, social and political structures evolving that thetechno-utopians so often ignored, or painted in the rosiest of colours? Thisfirst part of 'Media Addicts' (the second part follows the next day) places theemphasis on the socio-political aspects of media technologies.
with Jordan Crandall, Simon Penny, Lu Jiehosted by Matthew Fuller

Transgressions Sat, 4 Feb 2006, 16h
Contemporary culture is characterised by the paradoxical juxtaposition of excessand control. While the transgression of aesthetical and moral borders isbecoming as normal as the daily dose of shock and horror, we also learn to livewith increasingly rigid mechanisms of control and exclusion. This panel dealswith artistic and theoretical aspects of this antagonism between extremefreedom and control. Are there any more ethical borders or walls against whichart can rebel? And how significant are the aesthetic strategies oftransgression within today's reality?
with Shu Lea Cheang, Jens Hauser, Katrien Jacobshosted by Sigrid Schade
Gerburg Treusch-Dieter: 'Mouthpiece-Pipe-Container.

Effects and Defects of a Desiring Machine' Sat 4 Feb 2006, 19h
Gerburg Treusch-Dieter has been dealing with the gender codes of human-machinerelations for many years. With a profound sense of humour and unrelentingquestions she approaches the phenomena of contemporary life as well as those ofhistorical mythologies, and connects and combines whatever belongs together. Hertalk is devoted to the vacuum cleaner whose multiple psychological layers areexemplary for the way in which technologies and bodies are interconnected.
hosted by Marie-Luise Angerer

Media Addicts II Sun 5 Feb 2006, 13h
Many people today surround themselves with a panoply of digital gadgets. Mobilephones and MP3-players, GPS and navigation systems, as well as a multiplicityof media channels for information and entertainment are part of their everydaylives. Wavering between the terror of consumption and comprehensiveauto-surveillance, these 'Media Addicts' move through a world determined bytechnologies, in which the borders between the individual, media prostheses andthe hybrid layers of cyberspace are blurred. How is our subjective perception ofthese 'augmented realities' changed by mobile media, and what are the effects onsocial cohesion and on the public sphere? Which desires and which necessitiesdrive us to enter these extended media realities?
with Michael Bull, Janet Cardiff, Marie-Luise Angererhosted by Matthew Fuller

Mistakology Sun 5 Feb 2006, 16h30
Every technology has its mistakes and accidents already built in. This insightis not new, but it is still consistently ignored in an approach to technologythat demands it to be controllable and safe, functional and useful. Technicaldysfunctionality is 'repressed' by modern society, in a Freudian sense.Functional discrepancies between people and machines are called 'humanfailures' even in cases in which the technology is making impossible demands onits human user. Machines and their mistakes are thus an inexhaustible source ofhumour and parody.
with Claus Pias, Norman Whitehosted by Inke Arns

Sun 5 Feb 2006, 17h30 Simon Critchley'To be or not to be is not the question - on Beckett, Humour and Film'
As Beckett aptly states, 'nothing is funnier than unhappiness'. SimonCritchley's talk explores the dark humour of Samuel Beckett through a screeningof his one-and-only experiment with cinema: 'Film' (1965) starring BusterKeaton. Critchley focuses on 'the agony of perceivedness' at the core ofBeckett's work and on the way in which this avoids Hamlet's famous dilemma. AsCritchley shows, humour is much more tragic than tragedy.
Sun, 5 Feb 2006, 19h - 20h30Jean-Jacques Perrey
Jean Jacques Perrey was born in France in 1929 and is among the most seminalpioneers of electronic music. In the early 1950s, he gave up his medicalstudies in favour of his love for the then new and now legendary Ondolinesynthesizer - he has devoted himself to electronic music ever since. Togetherwith another obsessive synthesizer musician, Gershon Kingsley, he beganproducing 'Music for Laughs and Smiles' in the 1960s in New York, using theOndoline and the Moog and reworking field recordings a la musique concrete -music to make you happy. Perrey and Kingsley are known as the founders of SpaceAge Pop and had their first big success with their LP 'The In Sound from WayOut'. Perrey not only worked with such celebrities as Raymond Scott, RobertMoog, Pierre Schaeffer, Edith Piaf, Walt Disney, Angelo Baladimento, but hismusic also served as material for samples and remixes by musicians of youngergenerations, like in the 1996 Beastie Boys Album 'The In Sounds from Way Out',or in the remix of the seventies funk classic 'EVA' by Fatboy Slim.On the occasion of transmediale.06, Jean Jacques Perrey comes to Berlin for thefirst time. On February 6th he, together with Dana Countryman, will present hisnew CD at Club Transmediale. One day prior, he goes on stage at Akademie derKuenste where he presents sound samples and images illustrating his exemplarycareer.
hosted by Timothy Druckrey

transmediale.06REALITY ADDICTS festival for art and digital culture berlin
http://www.transmediale.de/info@transmediale.de

transmediale is funded by the Federal Cultural Foundation.