\\international media art\award 2001

Award winners

The Bureau of Inverse Technologie: »Bit Plane«, 1999
[Categorie Video]

Alvar Freude und Dragan Espenschied : »insert_coin«, 2001
[Categorie Interactive]

Denis Beaubois : »In the event of Amnesia the city will recall...Part I«, 1996/97
[Special Award]

Further informationen about the works ::

° Categorie Video ::

The Bureau of Inverse Technologie: »Bit Plane«, 1999

»The video is based on aerial shots of Silicon Valley taken from a remote controlled aircraft. An image-text montage delivers a clever commentary on familiar surveillance–camera footage, thus developing an exciting dialogue between non-verbal visual stimuli and ironic yet serious comments in the form of linguistic reflections. The emotional and intellectual breadth of this work accommodates includes ironic smiles as well as solemn warnings.
Successful linguistic structuring gives the tape an individual feel: popular images from surveillance cameras are fed in and at the same time shifted into a new context.«
[excerpt from the jury's statement]

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° Categorie Interactive ::

Alvar Freude und Dragan Espenschied : »insert_coin«, 2001

»These two graduates of the Merz-Akademie in Stuttgart succeeded in using a simple but completely convincing way of manipulating the college server so that net addresses were automatically switched around, or retrieved data was falsified.
The artists' manipulation only came to light when the server failed completely, but the anticipated cries of horror from their victims failed to materialize. Only a very few of their fellow-students were at all curious about how things had been manipulated, the majority remained passive. Either they hadn't even noticed that their mail had been misdirected or the wrong information produced, or they were totally indifferent.
Finally, this conceptual work shows how vulnerable »users« are to the handicaps imposed by a computer industry not interested in making its programs and application software transparent, fostering browser modulation, or promoting the open-source movement. To this extent »insert_coin« comes close to the hacker scene, which has often shown us the opportunities and risks involved in a technology that is still alien. «
[excerpt from the jury's statement]

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° Special Award ::

Denis Beaubois : »In the event of Amnesia the city will recall...Part I«, 1996/97
[video documentation of the performance by the same name]

»Beaubois is one of the young generation of artists who grew up fully aware of video technology and the images it produces. It is easy to film everyday events now, so it is possible to develop control mechanisms of the kind we are all too aware of today. But from the outset, these technologies also showed artists how trivial subject matter could be filmed and transformed artistically. Thus the young Australian has revealed the structures of observation humorously and ironically, and then used them for his own devices. Beaubois swaps over the roles of observer and observed by establishing contact with a camera installed in front of a public building. He uses large panels of text to enter into a dialogue with the cold eye of technology, which finally responds to his challenge and accepts his instructions, thus signalling agreement. Thus, the artist casually changes the established role assignment: the victim becomes the director, while the perpetrators, the people behind the surveillance camera, are demoted to the role of compliant objects.«
[excerpt from the jury's statement]

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