The transmediale Award is dedicated to current positions in digital arts and media. It is an open competition, into which artists are invited to enter their current work. The jury of this year’s award competition consisted of Inke Arns (Dortmund/Germany), Eva De Groote (Ghent/Belgium), Miguel Leal (Porto/ Portugal), Ellen Pau (Hongkong/China), Mike Stubbs (Melbourne/Australia).
Parallel to a recent history that some have termed a continual state of emergency, an important set of international debates have taken place, investigating and questioning the diversity of forms and meanings which constitute media art and interdisciplinary practice. Relationships with other art and design practices are inevitably called into play, especially as technologies, new media and devices are experimented with, assimilated and accepted across multiple disciplines and throughout all aspects of everyday life.
Through the selection of authors and works chosen for the award competition of transmediale.07, the jury wished to re-acknowledge values such as aesthetics, philosophy, elegance and wit, reflecting a maturation of the field, less reliant on technical effect and the fetishism of ‘device art’ pushing beyond the rhetoric of new and redundant technologies.
The jury felt the Nominations, Honourable Mentions and prizes should go to conceptually challenging, deeply engaged and confident artworks. These works escape defining contemporary practice as a closed circuit or an interactive system, instead addressing deeper complex relationships between analogue & digital, object & audience and perception & reality. In doing so, these works collectively speak of failed: utopias, economies and global connections. Attempting to redress an emotionally arrested development of technologies and mediation, the artworks honoured here form the traces of our contemporary epoch.
