The Edith Russ Site for Media Art has awarded three six-months work stipends for 2013. The 10.000 € stipends are sponsored by Stiftung Niedersachsen.

Stiftung Niedersachsen sponsors the stipends at Edith Russ Site for Media Art continually since 2001. Many of the works developed in Oldenburg have been shown in international exhibitions and have been awarded various prizes.

With their support Stiftung Niedersachsen intends to encourage one of the leading sites for media art in Germany, in its highly qualitative profiling to make art creation possible and to create international networks as well as local cooperations.

The Jury:

Renate Buschmann

Claudia Giannetti

Hermann Nöring

Andrea Sick

The grants from the Foundation of Lower Saxony at the Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art 2014, each endowed with €10,000, are awarded to:

Derek Holzer, Delilah Too
Sound art installation

Ivar Veermäe, Center of Doubt
Audiovisual installation

Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa, Paradise
Mixed-media installation

Grounds for the Jury’s Decision:

Derek Holzer, Delilah Too

With his project DELILAH TOO, the Berlin-based American sound artist Derek Holzer conducts media archeological research toward the development of a language cryptography instrument on the basis of a vocoder. This device from the history of electronic music constitutes the foundation for a multipart sound installation. It enables visitors to transmit encrypted conversations from one private space to another, where the listener can then decrypt them. The voices modulated in this way produce an abstract electronic spatial sound that can be perceived by all of the visitors in the surrounding public space.

With his experimental sound art project, Derek Holzer not only transforms an instrument from the early history of electronic music for current use in producing analogue compositions, he also creates an artistic transmission of the current debate concerning the protection of the personal and the boundaries of the public sphere. The jury was persuaded in particular by Holzer’s in-depth research on the history of electronic sound generation and his scheme for its artistic implementation in a do-it-yourself process as well as by his socio-political approach, which not lastly find expression in his eponymous reference to Alan Turing’s secure speech device Delilah.

Ivar Veermäe, Center of Doubt

For quite some time now, Estonian artist Ivar Veermäe has been dealing with global data centers and Internet companies whose sphere of influence is transparent for Internet users yet whose operations and control centers are difficult to localize. Veermäe’s mostly video-based installations make visible the representative buildings of these powerful, apparently siteless centers for the collection of information and data.

The artist calls his artistic research project Center of Doubt, and the actual sites of these control and storage centers assume visual form. He uses a restrained, decidedly documentary visual language in his search for clues along the lines that mark what appear to be industrial facilities—along security fences, gated barriers, and hidden signs.

The jury supports the artist’s investigations, which are currently a highly explosive social issue. The collection, appropriation, processing, sharing, and monitoring of personal and public information is a present-day phenomenon that demands artistic commentary. Within the scope of the grant, Ivar Veermäe will carry out a critical observation of a new building currently being constructed by the German Telekom in Biere in the state of Saxony-Anhalt and the largest data center in Germany. The jury would like to provide the artist with the opportunity of continuing his research and converting his substantial, for the most part video-based collection of material into an artistically adequate form of representation.

Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa, Paradise

The artistic research and installation project by Emma Wolkukau-Wanambwa, born to Ugandan parents in Glasgow and currently living in Berlin, deals with the forgotten story of European refugees who were evacuated to Iran during World War II and from there fled to Africa, for example to Uganda into refugee camps set up by the English. This project ties in with the artist’s previous works, in which she deals with colonialism in East Africa and also focuses on memory techniques.

The jury was persuaded by her Paradise project, in particular due to the controversial subject matter, which is capable of making visible a previous little publicized connection between Europe and Africa. The preliminary work already carried out by the artist bespeaks a very precise, assiduous, and multilayered treatment of the material she has discovered. For the jury, the narrative, documentary work, planned as a mixed media installation based on photography, film, and text, has the potential to pose important questions to the public concerning the history of migration and colonization that are capable of shedding new light on the current contexts of refugee flows.