The awardees:

Jana Linke, Germany

REINIGUNGSGESELLSCHAFT (Martin Keil, Henrik Mayer), Germany

The SINE WAVE ORCHESTRA (Ken Furudate, Kazuhiro Jo Daisuke Ishida, Mizuki Noguchi), Japan

The Edith Russ Site for Media Art has awarded three six-months work stipends for 2009. The 10.000 € stipends are sponsored by Stiftung Niedersachsen. The advertisement was answered by 388 applications from all over the world.

The Jury:
Stephen Kovats, artistic director Transmediale Berlin (CAN/GER)
Graham Harwood, artist (GB)
Amanda McDonald Crowley, executive director of the art and technology center Eyebeam, New York (US)
Yukiko Shikata, curator, ICC – Intercommunication Center Tokyo (J)
Sabine Himmelsbach, Artistic Director, Edith Russ Site for Media Art (GER)

The Jury 2009 (left image f.l.t.r.): Graham Harwood, Yukiko Shikata, Sabine Himmelsbach, Amanda McDonald Crowley, Stephen Kovats
 

Jury-Statements:

Jana Linke, EMDAS1 (a machine, that creates work)
For much of the 20th century there was a direct correlation between the amount of capital placed in the production of a machine and the size of the labour force expected to run it, or maintain it. In recent years this correlation has been reversed. Within this context Jana Linke proposes the construction of a 'decadent' machine for the creation of work. Her principle is that systems, beyond balancing accumulation and production, also need to consider the principle of the waste of energy and the futility of labour. The project asks whether machines create more work than they eliminate, questioning the central value and function of the machine as a tool of globalised labour in our society.

Jana Linke: click&glue 2

The jury liked the clarity and poetic simplicity of the proposal. It represents a clear further development of Linke's well crafted and technically precise work dealing with the relationships between system aesthetics and human process, encouraging us to consider our machinic environment as a philosophical speculation rather than simply the product of a utilitarian universe. Without giving concrete answers the work reflects upon the processes inherent to science, information and technology.
The proposal plays on numerous historical references from the ancient Greek 'Deus ex machina', to the non-sense machines of 19th century literature and the fantasmagoric constructs created by Marcel Duchamp critiquing society's increasingly blind(ing) reliance on technology. Set in the digital context of the 21st century the machines expanded in the networks and bind us exclusively, EMDAS1 notifies us that the fundamental role of art as creating decadent machine.


REINIGUNGSGESELSCHAFT (Martin Keil, Henrik Mayer), The Risk Society Scientific management (Taylorism) was the driving force that compelled the first business computer Leo (Lyons Electronic Office) in 1951. Unlike it's American cold war counterparts this was not for the relatively simple task of calculating ballistic trajectories but was for the much harder task of calculating the financial risk associated with tea and cakes sales in the UK. Leo's logic, more than any of its cold war cousins, has embedded itself into the logic structure of a risk society. According to the artists there was an assumption that the economy has had primacy during the last decades. But under the effects of the current financial crisis this dogma can be put into question. By asking “how does this global crisis affects human identifications with labour?” and whether there “is there an increasing tendency to assign economic risks to individuals” the proposal questions the control systems and software cultures that a risk society propagates.

REINIGUNGSGESELLSCHAFT: The Risk Society

REINIGUNGSGESELLSCHAFT employ a wide range of media in their explorations, and the jury liked the group's strategy to engage local communities in Oldenburg, linking their artistic activities to public interaction via the Edith Russ Site fro Media Art through conversation, workshops, and presentations. With an artistic practice that examines media and society as process, their form of critique unveils the mechanisms of turbulence and risk in both a thought provoking and humorous manner.







The SINE WAVE ORCHESTRA (Ken Furudate, Kazuhiro Jo, Daisuke Ishida, Mizuki Noguchi)
The fundamentals of our networked, global and technological culture and our resulting means of interaction are connected by the sine wave. We dance to them on our mp3 players, watch TV because of them and surf their peaks and troughs while making long distance phone calls. Sine waves form an ethereal and omnipresent framework, which become the tactile material the SINE WAVE ORCHESTRA (SWO) sculpts and manipulates through unique participatory sound events. Based on a series of performances and experimental sound constructs that the group has been performing since 2002, the proposal for the Edith Russ Site for Media Art foresees the creation of a light sensitive tool to structure the visual component of a piece to take place in a large darkened space. The audience as a whole becomes participants who collaborate in the creation of a sea of sine waves acting as the unified sonic representation of the light that they are producing.

The SINE WAVE ORCHESTRA at ZeroOneSan Jose/ISEA 2006 The SINE WAVE ORCHESTRA induces both new forms of sound performance while creating shared systems and environments which explore means of participation, behaviour and interpretation by transforming the act of listening into the act of playing. In doing so, the SINE WAVE ORCHESTRA also transforms the minimal nature and simplicity of sine waves into a complex artistic construct that brings us into intimate contact with the physics of our acoustic environment.

Biographical information and images will be provided by the Edith Russ Site for Media Art on request.

Press images can be found here...