Jury 2022

Prix Ars Electronica

Credit: vog.photo

Categories:

Computer Animation

Isabelle Arvers (FR) is a French artist and curator whose research focuses on the interaction between art and video games. For the past twenty years, she has been investigating the artistic, ethical, and critical implications of digital gaming. Her work explores the creative potential of hacking games through machinima and games as a new medium for artists. In 2019, she embarked on an Art and Games World Tour in the Global South to engage with a decolonial geography of art and games.
isabellearvers.com
Peter Burr (US) is an artist from Brooklyn, NY. His practice often engages with tools of the video game industry in the form of immersive cinematic artworks. These pieces have been presented internationally by various institutions including Documenta 14, Athens; MoMA PS1, New York; and The Barbican Centre, London. Previously Burr worked under the alias Hooliganship and founded the video label Cartune Xprez through which he produced hundreds of live multimedia exhibitions and touring programs showcasing a multi-generational group of artists at the forefront of experimental animation. His practice has been recognized through grants and awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital Grant, and a Sundance New Frontier Fellowship.
peterburr.org
Daito Manabe (JP) Tokyo-based artist, interaction designer, programmer, and DJ. Launched Rhizomatiks in 2006. Since 2015, has served alongside Motoi Ishibashi as co-director of Rhizomatiks Research, the firm’s division dedicated to exploring new possibilities in the realms of technical and artistic expression with a focus on R&D-intensive projects. Specially-appointed professor at Keio University SFC.
Manabe’s work in design, art, and entertainment takes a new approach to everyday materials and phenomenon. However, his end goal is not simply rich, high-definition realism by recognizing and recombining these familiar elemental building blocks. Rather, his practice is informed by careful observation to discover and elucidate the essential potentialities inherent to the human body, data, programming, computers, and other phenomena, thus probing the interrelationships and boundaries delineating the analog and digital, real and virtual.
daito.ws
Rebecca Merlic (HR/AT) is an European digital artist and architect, experimental filmmaker and university assistant in the core team of Experimental Game Cultures at the University of applied Arts Vienna. Her work is strongly influenced by alternative ways of society and transgression in socioeconomic conventions as well as new forms of artistic and architectural production employing new technologies. She is the holder of the Marianne von Willemer Prize 2020 for digital media. Currently she is a transdisciplinary resident at European Alliance of Academies: Ignorance is Strength AIR program and she is working on DigitalHumanism x FutureLiving in collaboration with the Austrian Cultural Forum in Tokyo.
rebeccamerlic.myportfolio.com
Helen Starr (TT) is an Afro-Carib world-building producer, writer, curator and a Sci-Fi lover. Carib people are indigenous to Trinidad, WI, where Helen was born. Helen founded The Mechatronic Library in 2010, to give artists with protected characteristics access to cutting edge technologies such as Game Engines and Virtual Reality (VR). Working at the intersection of Art, Technology and social care, Helen has commissioned, curated and produced several exhibitions with interactive artworks for public institutions such as South London Gallery, Wysing Art Centre, FACT (Foundation for Art & Creative Technology) and QUAD in Derby. Helen sits on the board of QUAD, Derby and was on the 2021 Computer Animation Jury for Ars Electronica in Linz. She is part of the winning team for the Wolfson Economic Prize 2021 — which answered the question How would you design new hospitals to radically improve patient experiences, clinical outcomes, staff wellbeing, and integration with wider health and social care?
themechatroniclibrary.com

Digital Communities

Rashmi Dhanwani (IN) leads the Art X Company, a strategic consultancy for the cultural sector focused on strategy, audience development and sector research. Prior to founding Art X, Rashmi has worked with NCPA Mumbai, Breakthrough in Delhi, the newspaper Daily News and Analysis (DNA); Kalaghoda Arts Festival, and The Goa Project. She holds a Masters in Cultural and Creative Industries from King’s College London. She has also been a recipient of the ARThink South Asia Fellowship (2011-12), a participant fellow at The Academy—a program of Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School and the Weill Music Institute’, a scholarship grantee of the JN Tata Trust and Charles Wallace India Trust, and a 2017 Global Fellow of the International Society for Performing Arts (ISPA), New York. Rashmi has also founded Arts Culture Resources India, a network and platform for cultural professionals in India and South Asia. In 2021, the Art X Company was awarded a grant by the British Council to design and develop festivalsfromindia.com, a portal showcasing all arts and culture festivals in India and a platform for festival professionals to learn, network and upskill themselves. Rashmi is the cofounder of this portal.
art-x.co
Professor Thomas Gegenhuber (AT) is the head of the Sustainable Transformation Lab at the Linz Institute of Technology at Johannes Kepler University Linz and visiting professor for digital transformation at Leuphana University Lüneburg. When we think about the various grand challenges our societies face, communities and crowds are social structures worthy of our attention. Consequently, Thomas investigates in his research the interplay of these social structures with digital technologies and new organizational forms (e.g., platforms).
Twitter @gegenhuber
Sarah Kriesche (AT) is working as a journalist for the Austrian public radio station “Ö1”, covering the progress of IT in industry, economy, research and politics. Some stations of her professional career include the ORF radio-program “Nachbar in Not”, which reported in six languages (on short and medium wave) current events in Southeastern Europe in 1999. For her radio-series “Vielfalt in Wien” (portraits of Viennese who also have cultural roots in other countries, portraying how this cultural togetherness enriches the city and its life-quality) she received the “Prälat Leopold Ungar Anerkennungspreis”. Her feature “Zeitreise Überwachung” (covering the history of surveillance in Austria) won the Hamburg “surveillance studies price” in 2017. Nowadays, working in the science department of Ö1, her focus is on technical innovations and their impact on society.
twitter.com/SarahKriesche
Farah Salka (LB) is a Beirut-based Lebanese-Syrian feminist organiser. She graduated from the American University of Beirut in 2006 with an undergrad in Public Administration and Political Science. She then received her masters in Human Rights Law from the University of Malta in 2007. Farah is the founder and Executive Director of the Anti-Racism Movement (ARM) and the Migrant Community Center(s). She works on organizing with migrant communities, asylum seekers and particularly migrant women and migrant domestic workers. Her heart and mind is in organizing around issues of racism, xenophobia, the kafala system, migrant justice and labor justice. The MCC(s) which ARM runs provide space, support and resources to sustain MDW-community networks and support migrant workers, MDW activists; MDW-led initiatives; mobilizing collaboration and solidarity between local activists and migrant domestic workers against rampant racist abuse and exploitation in Lebanon. Farah sits on the Advisory Board of The A-Project, a Lebanon-based feminist group working on gender and sexuality via an affirmative and sex-positive approach. The A project runs a sexuality hotline providing information on sexual and reproductive health, abortion, HIV, contraceptive choices, sexual orientations, gender identities, violence, safety and pleasure, amongst other topics.
armlebanon.org
Simon Weckert (DE) likes to share knowledge on a wide range of fields from generative design to physical computing. His focus is the digital world – including everything related to code and electronics under the reflection on current social aspects, ranging from technology oriented examinations to the discussion of current social issues. The outcomes are technological systems, installations and hybrid objects that strive to make complicated issues accessible.
simonweckert.com/

Digital Communities Advisory Board 2022

Interactive Art +

Professor Jussi Ängeslevä (FI) is a designer, an artist and an educator. Based at the Berlin University of the Arts but lecturing around the planet, he is actively involved in the ever expanding field of new media, working with digital materiality and interaction design. In parallel to the academic work, he is the creative director of ART+COM Studios, where his work in public art commissions, exhibitions and installations are consistently yielding international recognition. His independent works have been awarded by institutions such as Royal Society of Arts, NESTA, BAFTA, Art Directors Club of Europe, D&AD, Ars Electronica and ZKM. Over the years he has served in numerous international art and design juries, academic chairs and boards. Throughout his career his focus has always been intentionally in between fields: combining understanding of visual, physical and interaction design with algorithmic, electronic and mechatronic knowledge to create innovative and elegant experiences. His design ethos is leveraging hardware, software, physical and visual design in the search for elegance in spatial communication, where the meaning is inseparable from the medium communicating it.
angesleva.iki.fi
DooEun Choi (KR) is currently serving as art director of Hyundai Motor. Choi has recently worked as co-curator of the 5th International Digital Art Biennial in Montreal and curator for the Pioneer Tower Iconic Public Art Project in Fort Worth. Since 2000, she has curated numerous international exhibitions of art and technology in many cities in Asia, Europe, America, and virtual spaces. Choi treats the space as a laboratory for experimenting with the types of experience and aesthetics that can emerge from combining scientific knowledge, artistic practices, and historical narratives. Choi’s projects include Aurora 2018 in Dallas; Da Vinci Creative 2015 & 2017 at Seoul Art Space Geumcheon of Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture; Quayola: Asymmetric Archaeology, at Paradise Art Space, HOW Art Museum; Han Youngsoo: Photographs of Seoul 1956—63, at ICP MANA; Why Future Still Needs Us: AI and Humanity, at Art Center Nabi, QUT Art Museum; Mediacity Seoul 2012 Biennale, at Seoul Museum of Art; and ZERO1 Biennial 2012, at Zero1 Garage.
Rashin Fahandej (US) is an immersive storyteller and cultural activist. Her projects center on marginalized voices and the role of media, technology, and public collaboration in generating systemic change. Fahandej is the recipient of Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction and Foster Prize at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. She has served as a Boston Mayor’s Office Artist-In-Residence and lead artist at American Arts Incubator Austria at ZERO1 and the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Fahandej is the founder of “A Father’s Lullaby. “ A proponent of “Art as Ecosystem,”she defines her projects as “Poetic Cyber Movement for Social Justice,” where art mobilizes a plethora of voices by creating connections between public places and virtual spaces. Fahandej is currently a research fellow at MIT Open Documentary Lab and an assistant professor of emerging and interactive media at Emerson College.
rashinfahandej.com
José-Carlos Mariátegui (PE/UK) is a writer, curator, scholar and entrepreneur on culture and technology. Studied Biology and Applied Mathematics and holds both Masters and Doctoral degrees in Information Systems and Innovation from the London School of Economics and Political Science — LSE (London). Dr. Mariátegui is the founder of Alta Tecnología Andina — ATA (Lima, Peru), an organization working at the intersection of art, science, technology and society in Latin America. He is a Lecturer at LUISS (Rome), a Board Member of Future Everything (UK) and has published in journals such as AI & Society, Third Text, The Information Society, Telos and Leonardo. His multidisciplinary research embraces media archeology, digitization, archives and the impact of technology in memory institutions. He has curated internationally for more than two decades. One of his latest exhibitions, Quántica /Broken Symmetries (co-curated with Monica Bello), explores transdisciplinary artistic practice in interaction with scientists at CERN. He recently co-edited a special issue for AI & Society on Cybernetics in Latin America.
ata.org.pe
Irini Papadimitriou (GR/UK) is a curator and cultural manager, whose practice draws on interdisciplinary and critical discourse to explore the impact of technology in society and culture, and the role of art in helping us engage with contemporary issues. Currently Creative Director at FutureEverything, an innovation lab and arts organisation in Manchester, she was previously Digital Programmes Manager at the V&A, and Head of New Media Arts Development at Watermans. Her most recent exhibition, YOU and AI: Through the Algorithmic Lens, was commissioned by Onassi Stegi and displayed outdoors in a public park in Athens in summer 2021. Irini is a co-founder of Maker Assembly, a critical gathering about maker culture, an Industry Advisory Group member for School of Digital Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University, and an Advisory Board member for ONX Studio, a collaboration between Onassis USA and New Museum’s cultural incubator NEW INC. She has been a recipient of curatorial research programmes including MOBIUS (Finnish Institute), Art Fund, Mondriaan Fonds and British Council.
futureeverything.org

u19 – create your world

Sirikit Amann (AT) has been a juror since the very inception of the u19—create your world category for youngsters under 19 years of age in Austria. She was director of cultural education at KulturKontakt Austria. Since 2020 she is the head of the sector “Education and Society” with a focus on digital education at the OeAD-GmbH. The OeAD is the Austrian Agency for Education and Internationalization. She had previously served as an expert advisor in artistic affair at the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Art and Culture and in the Office of the former Federal Chancellery Minister.
oead.at
Reni Hofmüller (AT) is artist, musician, composer, performer, organizer and activist in the fields of (new) media, free software, open hardware, technology and politics in general, engaged in development of contemporary art. She is founding member of esc media art laboratory in 1993, an experimental art venue in Graz, that focuses on art in technological context; she is founding member of Radio Helsinki, a noncommercial community radio in 1996; founding member of murat, strategic plattform for internet experimentation and usage in 1998; last president of Eva & Co, a feminist artists group, member of the Institute for Media Archeology. She is interested in art as a possibility to create space for exchange, that can build the basis for reflection about society. Art can offer an atmosphere for encounter of the other, and this can lead to a deeper and better understanding of our environment.
renitentia.mur.at
Martin Hollinetz (AT) is innovation expert and pioneer of regional development in Austria. Well-connected as a visionary of a new way of working, creator of a new network culture and participatory corporate structures. Idea bearer and developer of the location concept Otelo, Open Technology Laboratory (37 locations nationally and internationally) and the Otelo e-Gen cooperative; specialist in the mediation of new business concepts and digital education formats (future space, ket, etc.).
oteloegen.at
Conny Lee (AT) is already part of the core team of u19—create your world. The host of Radio FM4 is known nationwide – there she hosts the afternoon show FM4 Connected, produces and co-hosted the bilingual FM4 Morning Show and a show about video games in a socio-political context. In addition, Conny Lee is head of the “love department”, which deals with current topics in the areas of sex, love and dating. As an editor she reviews games, literature and comics.
fm4.orf.at/tags/connylee
Martin Retschitzegger (AT) is Creative Director and Creative Technologist at the Berlin studio m box for spatial media staging and interactive installations. He was and is involved in numerous national and international projects as a creative and technical lead, such as the Saudi Arabian Pavilion at Expo 2010 in Shanghai or the Zwinger Experience in Dresden 2021. With over 25 years of experience in design and Production of digital media in the film and installation sector, his main focus is on immersive productions in connection with innovative technical solutions.
m-box.de