Kat Austen, CultureLab editor
"When I was a little child I found a wasp. I picked it up and its body was all squishy, so I bit it." Sitting next to me on a tattered sofa in a late-night bar in Linz, Austria, home of the annual Ars Electronica festival, Marion Laval-Jeantet is explaining to me that she began experimenting on her own body at an early age.
(Image: Ars Electronica 2011)
Indeed it is an extreme form of self-experimentation that won Laval-Jeantet's art collective with Beno?t Mangin, Art Orient? Objet, this year's Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica for hybrid art. For the provocatively titled May the Horse Live in Me, Laval-Jeantet effected what she calls a "hybrid man/animal existence" by injecting herself with horse blood.
One motivation behind the project was to find out how the animal immunoglobulins would affect her mind and body. After navigating numerous ethical and bureaucratic hurdles - and struggling to convince a laboratory to help with the project - Art Orient? Objet were finally given the go-ahead to perform the piece at a gallery in Ljubljana, Slovenia. A month of inoculation preceded the performance, during which time Laval-Jeantet discovered that the infusions made her oversensitive to stimuli. She is still feeling the effects since the experiment took place in February this year: holding a small beer, she explains that though she is no longer as tired as she was, she can't tolerate much alcohol any more.
In the act of self-experimentation, May the Horse Live in Me explores the boundaries of our species in an evocative and challenging way. But it is also about control, and the regulation of how we use our own bodies, says Oron Catts, director of hybrid arts research space SymbioticA, who was on this year's judging panel. Subversion is a strong theme among this year's Ars Electronica prizewinners, and consciously so. Festival artistic director Gerfried Stocker admitted that the theme arose as a response to trends the committee identified when looking for art projects over the last year.
Das Kapital, winner of an award of distinction in the hybrid art category, is a long-term project by Christin Lahr, who has been depositing 1? per day into the German federal ministry of finance for more than two years. Every deposit is accompanied by a reference of 108 characters, each a portion of Karl Marx's classic critique of capitalism. Lahr intends in this way to deposit the entire text into the bank, (also incrementally disrupting their bookkeeping in the process).
(Image: Ars Electronica 2011)
The interactive art winner, Newstweek by Julian Oliver and Danja Vasiliev, exposes the fragility of online news sources. Through a local area network-based device, Newstweek uses hacker technology to intercept data from trusted news sources, such as The Guardian and CNN, allowing the public to change articles' headlines for other users sharing a Wi-Fi hotspot. The piece is a comment on the economic control behind news production, says Stocker, and raises questions about trust in news provision and its implications for democracy. Interestingly, it is the same type of technology used by the Turkey-based hackers who yesterday intercepted corporate websites including those of UPS and Vodaphone.
The timing of the Turkish hack seems significant. Renowned for being at the cultural cutting edge, Ars Electronica awarded a distinction to WikiLeaks two years ago. This year, P2P Foundation's Choke Point Project, which aims to map the entire internet, identifying vulnerable "off switches" that governments could use to pull the plug on their society's online world, won the Golden Nica for "The Next Idea", and the Chilean Fundaci?n Ciudadano Inteligente was awarded the Digital Communities Golden Nica for providing tools that allow citizens to promote political transparency.
Perhaps with this year's prizes, the prestigious cultural organisation aims to point the way toward a future built on the dream of community and openness of information that was born with the internet, and that will require us to keep pushing at the boundaries of society.
deus ex deus ex tom waits aetna aetna hp touchpads hp touchpads
No comments:
Post a Comment