The awardees:

HeHe (Helen Evans / Heiko Hansen), Frankreich / Deutschland

Ralf Baecker, Deutschland

Anahita Razmi, Deutschland

The Edith Russ Site for Media Art has awarded three six-months work stipends for 2010. The 10.000 € stipends are sponsored by Stiftung Niedersachsen. The advertisement was answered by 329 applications from all over the world.

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:
Andy Cameron, Artistic Director fabrica - The Benetton Group Communications Research Center (Treviso, Italy)
Susan Collins, Artist (London)
Steve Dietz, Artistic Director 01SJ Biennial (San Jose)
Sabine Himmelsbach, Artistic Director Edith Russ Site for Media Art (Oldenburg) \Ingmar Lähnemann, Assistant Curator, Edith-Ruß-Haus für Medienkunst (Oldenburg)
KH Jeron, Künstler (Berlin)

Jury 2010 (f.l.t.r.): Andy Cameron, Susan Collins, KH Jeron, Sabine Himmelsbach, Steve Dietz

Jury-Statements:

Ralf Baecker Crystal Set [Kristalldetektor]

Crystal Set is an electronic apparatus built entirely from natural materials with special electronic properties: crystals with semi-conducting behaviour such as silicon, germanium, and pyrite, as well as wolfram wires, platinum, iron, copper, magnesium, phosphor and amber. These resources are arranged into an electronic circuit that activates a processing system and calculates the classic “game of life” algorithm, which will be visible on a screen. Semi-conducting crystals were first used in radio-receivers (crystal sets) in the 1920s. In 1947 William Bradford Shockley built the first working transistor from a piece of germanium crystal. As with incandescent light bulbs, the wiring of the installation is realized from wolfram wires by which the different current flows generate constant changing glowing patterns, locked in a vacuum chamber to avoid the burn out of the material by the surrounding oxygen.

The jury was impressed by the way in which Crystal Set represents an elegant hybrid of the natural and the technological and serves as a stunning evocation of key milestones in the history of technology. As a fully fledged and functioning digital system, Crystal Set effortlessly unites science and art and succeeds in bringing together mathematics, logic, artificial life, physics and chemistry into a coherent aesthetic expression. The piece represents a development of the practice of this exciting young German artist – in particular a concern with the history of computing, previously explored in his monumental kinetic sculpture, Rechnender Raum – and the jury were unanimous in their support for Crystal Set as a recipient of the Edith Russ Site for Media Art award for 2010.

HeHe (Helen Evans und Heiko Hansen) The China Syndrome [Das Chinasyndrom]

The China Syndrome is an installation simulating a nuclear meltdown on a model scale in an underwater post-industrial landscape. The installation is an exploration of two perhaps frightening, but highly seductive forms merged into one mini performance theatre: the cooling tower architecture of a nuclear power plant and the atomic mushroom explosion. The simulation is achieved though the controlled manipulation of fluids in an aquarium, synchronized with a score of pre-programmed light and sound. This "disaster machine" is part of an ongoing series of works on the symbolism of manmade clouds.
In collaboration with the hydrodynamic research laboratory LadHyX, Paris, www.ladhyx.polytechnique.fr

The jury felt that The China Syndrome brings the disaster of an atomic explosion to a human readable scale. The miniature performance theatre provides several layers of interpretation with two competing languages – the language of art and the language of science. Both try to describe a possible reality. It is an experiment with an unpredictable result. Instead of creating an object, The China Syndrome focuses on the simulation of the disaster in a laboratory like situation. The installations create their own world-space, their own fanciful environment. Our perceptions of the physical reality are questioned in a playful manner. Today the metaphor China Syndrome also refers to the financial crisis. It could be the economies melting down and breaking out of the containment.

Anahita Razmi Road Trip und Videoinstallation

“I will attempt to import a Peykan, the most common Iranian car to Europe. The Peykan originates from the British Hillman Hunter and is very rarely found outside of Iran today. On a U.S. Ebay auction in 2009, a used Peykan sold for the incredible price of around $40,000. In Iran you get a Peykan for approximately $700. This iconic value, which is added to the car as soon as it crosses the Iranian Border, will be my starting point for the project, a kind of “Iranian-English Peykan” in the context of the Islamic Republic Iran, in reference to Simon Starling’s “Polish-Italian Fiat,” which deals in a similar way with border shifts and origins. Other cultural references form an exciting aspect of my export trip. I will make a video/film of the journey, using sampling and collage to contrast the original “adventure” with the genre of American “road movie,” as well as ambivalent reference points such as Sophie Calle’s and Greg Shepard’s film No Sex Last Night.” (Razmi)

The jury was unanimously excited by the humor and adventurousness in this proposal. Drawing on a sharp cultural awareness, Razmi quite literally crosses borders in her enacting of a road trip from Iran to Oldenburg. This contemporary journey references a long history of road trips in American film using a combination of humor, human interaction, and transactions to bring the work (and the car) to Europe and the Edith Russ Site for Media Art. The project represents a challenging next step for Razmi in the development of an already strong body of work which employs a range of strategies and media involving performance and performative objects.