Since its inception in 1987, Prix Ars Electronica has always worked as a trend barometer and a platform for the gathering of the current and future images of “Art, Technology, and Society” projected by artists. This year, more than a year after the world experienced a pandemic, what trends and tendencies were seen in the award-winning works? What were the evaluation criteria that the jury focused on this year?
Emiko Ogawa, Head of Prix Ars Electronica, invites jury members from three categories to share their insights.
Participants:
Jens Hauser – Jury Member of „Artificial Intellignce & Life Art“ category Prix Ars Electronica 2021
Jens Hauser (DE/FR/DK) is a Paris and Copenhagen based media studies scholar and art curator focusing on the interactions between art and technology, trans-genre and hybrid aesthetics. He is a researcher at University of Copenhagen’s Medical Museion, following a dual post-doctoral position at the Faculty of Humanities and the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, and coordinates the (OU)VERT network for Greenness Studies. He is a distinguished affiliated faculty member of the Department of Art, Art History and Design at Michigan State University, where he co-directs the BRIDGE artist in residency program, and an affiliated faculty member at the Department for Image Science at Danube University Krems, He is also a guest lecturer at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, the University of Innsbruck, a guest professor at the Department of Arts and Sciences of Art at Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, and a researcher affiliated with École Polytechnique Paris-Saclay. Hauser has curated about thirty international exhibitions and festivals.
Helen Starr – Jury Member of “Computer Animation” category Prix Ars Electronica 2021
Helen Starr (TT) is an Afro-Carib curator, producer and cultural activist from Trinidad, WI. She began curating exhibitions with artists such as Susan Hillier, Cindy Sherman and Marcel Duchamp in 1995. Helen founded The Mechatronic Library in 2010, to give marginalised artists access to technologies such as Game Engines, Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR). Helen has worked with many public institutions such as Wysing Art Centre, FACT, Liverpool and QUAD in Derby. Being Indigenous-American Helen is interested in how digital artforms transform our understanding of reality by world-building narratives through storytelling and counter-storytelling. How, by “naming one’s own reality” we can experience the Other. Helen is on the board of QUAD, Derby and in 2020 she co-founded DAAD Futurism with Amrita Dhallu and Salma Noor.
Cedrik Fermont – Jury Member of “Digital Musics & Sound Art” category Prix Ars Electronica 2021
Cedrik Fermont (CD/BE/DE) is a Berlin-based Belgian-Congolese composer, musician, mastering engineer, author, radio host and label manager (at Syrphe) who operates in the field of noise, electronic, elctroacoustic and experimental music since 1989. He has toured extensively in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe and North America. His main research focuses on electronic, electroacoustic, experimental and noise music from and in Asia and Africa. In 2017 he released together with Dimitri della Faille the book Not Your World Music about noise music in South-East Asia, winner of the 2017 “Golden Nica” Prix Ars Electronica in the “Digital Musics & Sound Art” category.
