The winners of ars electronica are online. There is this new Hybrid Art i was particularly curious about. I feel that its boundaries should be made a bit clearer but I can’t think of many art groups who deserved a Golden Nica more than Symbiotica.
An award of distinction in that category was given to Wim Delvoye for the ultra-famous Cloaca, an installation that gulps food and mechanically processes and produces what is —even under scientific examination—impossible to differentiate from human excrement (not my favourite work in the lot but it is oh so photogenic.)
The other distinction award went to Biological Habitat: Breeding Spaces Technology, Made in Space, by Zbigniew Oksiuta, which explores possible ways to grow new forms of life in outer space. The project is based on the insight that environment and physical laws determine the respective forms of life to the extent that their “experience� over the course of evolution is implemented in the building blocks of life, the strands of DNA. In the embryonic state, however, life emancipates itself from these guidelines and prescriptions. This is what the biological habitat uses; it provides a biotope that is not determined by gravitation and physical laws on Earth but rather by conditions in outer space. Therefore, biological forms of life also develop differently here and —similar to life on Earth— reproduce themselves over the course of an evolutionary process.
Cloaca
Honorary mentions went to Andrew Gracie (yay! congrarts!) and Brian Lee Yung Rowe of Hostprods for Autoinducer_Ph-1 (cross cultural chemistry); Blast Theory for Day of the Figurines; Masaki Fujihata‘s Unreflective Mirror; Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand for Camera Lucida; Beatriz da Costa with Cina Hazegh and Kevin Ponto for Pigeon Blog.
and works i just discovered: Latent Figure Protocol, by Paul Vanouse; Nothing Happens by Nurit Bar-Shai; @c + Lia by Miguel Carvalhais, Pedro Tudela and Lia; Exploding Camera by Julien Maire; public conVENience, by Tabaimo; Five Pieces of Evidence by Raqs Media Collective.
Image on top corner: GeneMusiK, a project developed under the aegis of Symbiotica.