THE WINNER IS...

transmediale awards 2006
The Winner is ...

The transmediale.06 Award for this year’s competition was announced at the international media art festival on Monday evening in Berlin. The jury awarded a first prize to Agnes Meyer-Brandis from Cologne (4,000 Euro), Germany, and decided to split the second prize between the Spanish artist/activist group Platoniq, Andres Ramirez Gaviria (Columbia) as well as Yuko Mohri and Soichiro Mihara from Japan (each 1,500 Euro)

Out of more than 1,000 applications from 52 countries the international jury, composed of Kazunao Abe (Japan), Marcos Boffa (Brazil), Nuria Enguita Mayo (Spain), Honor Harger (Great Britain) und Christian Hübler (Switzerland), had shortlisted six works. Five more works were honourably mentioned. The transmediale award is donated by the company AVM Computer Systems.

From the jury's statement:

Agnes Meyer-Brandis - SGM-Iceberg-Probe
Her work explores brilliantly the possibilities of new narration through the collapse of fiction and reality. "SGM-Iceberg-Probe" proposes a highly-sensitive use of technology in art and creates humorous and fantastic contexts to her works, not unlike a 1950's sci-fi movies. She develops, very efficiently, the tools, mechanisms and images that are part of her work.

Platoniq - Burn Station
The project, Burn Station - which is based on software in accordance with the principles of "free culture" - should be seen as an attempt to award Platoniq for their interventions in institutionalised contemporary art spaces and not merely as an acknowledgement of the musical-data-distribution possibilities Burn Station represents. This nomination seeks to underscore the need for new media projects which scrutinise contemporary artistic practices by breaking down established boundaries between media and styles, and in doing so, pave the way for new understandings.

Andres Ramirez Gaviria - -./
The image-pulse moves in diagonal lines, and dispels the former, stable visual experience or analysis. Therefore, it has succeeded in extrapolating the essential movement that is dynamic, sharp, and yet grooves, latent in the Kandinsky piece. This work does not look to Modernism but rather, looks towards a new direction of modern sensory-experience.

Yuko Mohri, Soichiro Mihara - Vexations - Composition in Progress
We gradually part from the music, and focus on frequencies that are comprised of the sounds, most intriguingly those gathered live within the exhibition-space. We can then experience unexpected and invisible spatial expansion as the physical and spatial features of the frequencies are emphasised and made to stand out. By arranging current computer software and multi-layering it in unexpected ways, its invisible state is revealed.