The awardees:

Kerstin Ergenzinger, Germany

Antoine Schmitt, France

Christoph Wachter / Mathias Jud, Switzerland/Germany

The Edith Russ Site for Media Art has awarded three six-months work stipends for 2012. The 10.000 € stipends are sponsored by Stiftung Niedersachsen. The advertisement was answered by 379 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 2012:

Agnieszka Kubicka-Dzieduszycka, Curator at the WRO Art Center (Wroclaw)

Domenico Quaranta, Art Critic and Curator (Italy)

Dr. Axel Roch, Assistant Professor at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (Groningen)

Rebecca Shatwell, Director AV Festival Newcastle and Founder alt.gallery (Newcastle)

Ingmar Lähnemann, Assistant Curator, EDITH-RUSS-HAUS for Media Art (Oldenburg)

Jury 2012, (f.l.t.r.): Axel Roch, Agnieszka Kubicka-Dzieduszycka, Rebecca Shatwell, Ingmar Lähnemann, Domenico Quaranta

Jury Statements:

Kerstin Ergenzinger: "Navigating Noise"

"Navigating Noise" is a poetic exploration of the means of orientation in space through sound. The artist alters our spatial experiences based on the everyday sound of walking and transforms them into new and perceptible fields. The structures of the soundscapes are generated through a physical net, which is vibrating, resembling a wired map or a mental diagramm of connectivities. The kinetical and electrothermal features of the net in space are turned into soundscapes by translating the presence of the observer into electromechanical acoustic fields.

Characteristic in Ergenzingers work is the sensitive usage of kinetic materials. Nitinol -- a nickel titanium alloy -- with its electrothermal features allow the artist to control and translate spatial presence and voltage into reactive soundscapes. The installation will create a 'resonating mesh' with connectors made of spiral forms. The audible frequencies vary according to tension and local temperatures of the overall net.

The work by Ergenzinger is rooted in artistic concepts introduced by John Cage, who made background noises audible through the introduction of pure emptiness in time. Here, however, a horizontal noise and its spatial aspect is altered by the introduction of a directional void. Cage foregrounded random background noise; Ergenzinger alters constant and non-accidental horizontal noise as a base to create a dynamic experience of distance and closeness, an experience of destabilized space.

Antoine Schmitt: “7 Billion Pixels”

“7 Billion Pixels” is an attempt to solve a conceptual, technological and aesthetic conundrum: how to visualize the entire world population within the space of a single image in a non-symbolical way. The project will end up in a projection in which 7 billion individual pixels cross the screen, each on its own path, at the rate of 1 million pixels per second, leading to a movie of a total duration of 1h 56' 40", and projected in a way that physically confronts the viewer to the flow. As Schmitt states, the work “reflects on the overwhelming challenge of making sense of this huge number of individualities all independent of each other, and all driven by individual intentions, desires and quests. It also questions the impossible dream of trying to control such masses, impossible but still happening every day [...] It also confronts the viewer to his or her own free will and life story, lost in the middle of so many other free wills and life stories.”

Schmitt's project "7 Billion Pixels" challenges the medium of video in many ways. To handle such a massive number of pixels in real time at high definition it isn't possible to use a traditional video format: the only solution is a generative software application creating the images in realtime. Schmitt goes to the limits of compressability within digital data streams, his resulting images themselves are uncompressable. They cannot be coded efficiently and, therefore, they resist transmission. It's abstract, while telling a story; it's pixel-based, but hi-resolution; it exceeds the limits of its own medium, as well as the ones of our ability to mentally visualize it; it exists as a concept, but we can only imagine it when we experience it.

Christoph Wachter / Mathias Jud: “Blacklist”

“Blacklist” is an installation depicting the regulations and restrictions that visual content on the internet undergoes in relation to legal order, ethical, moral and/or political correctness.

Reaching out to sub-territories of the net, the tool excavates prohibited images blocked by search engines and by retracing them in the form of mechanically produced pencil drawings brings them back into tolerated public debate.
This online robotic drawing machine keeps producing phantom images of the banned imagery and by doing so, it displays the contemporary web-based potential of a "work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction".

Christoph Wachters and Mathias Juds project "Blacklist" discloses the changing socio-political constraints of the net by connecting them to the legal (dis)orders being executed at the actual geographical locations of the work. It is therefore an instrument measuring the actual net condition in the context of freedom of images. Since the image is increasingly replacing text (as representation of language) in communication proccesses, it is important to create spaces where a critical analysis of power structures controlling the image traffic can take place.

The translation process of the prohibited images into a work of art offered by Blacklist combined with its ability to find and scan hidden zones of the net seems to be aesthetically as appealing as it is critical and provocative in the context of power and control structures.