On February 15, 2018, Akademie Schloss Solitude and ZKM will award the international production award »Hash« for the first time. The award honors net-based projects in the fields of art, technology, and design. The winner is selected: The prize, worth 8,000 Euros, will be awarded to the Dutch software artist and author Marloes de Valk. Juror is the curator and artist Marisa Olson.

Inspired by the Hash value from information technology, which is unique for each file and used as a test value for data transfer, the »Hash« award stands for project excellence. The prize is awarded to one of the 2016/17 web residents from the English-language online Web Residencies program, jointly organized by Akademie Schloss Solitude and ZKM.

What are international Internet creatives working on? What topics drive their work? What are their questions? And what artistic answers to developments in technology, society, and the Internet do they provide?

Three times a year, calls with different focuses – from virtual reality to artificial intelligence to surveillance technologies – are developed in the framework of the »Web Residencies.« In two years, around 550 artists, coders, designers, technologists, and scientists submitted ideas. 22 of them received a Web Residency.

Here, works emerged that were poetic as well as political, experimental as well as utopian. The works are primarily situated in the interstitial space between critique and optimism, reality and fiction. They show the tensions of technology and humans, intervene into common narrations of the Internet and society, or create space for new imaginations of another future. They reflect the role of art and its institutions in the age of the Internet and digital (re-)production.

This year's winner of the »Hash«, Marloes de Valk, critically examines the mechanisms and contexts of propaganda, fake news and climate change in her artistic work ranging from computer games to installations to publications, surveillance technologies and artificial intelligence. During a four-week Web Residency in 2017 on »Art & Whistleblowing«, she explored in an essayist work the strategies of industry and politics to manipulate public opinion and the role of the media, based on PR campaigns during the 1980s in the US.

In particular, juror Marisa Olson convinced the variety of media the artist uses as a »passionate and informed cultural commentator on the larger ecosystem of technological devices that includes network culture and its symptoms - from global warming to infectious surveillance states. When talking about Internet Art in 2018, it is essential to include this wider range of aesthetic, cultural and political considerations.« (Marisa Olson)

On February 15, »virtual goes real« for the community of web residents, which has been only virtually connected until now. The program’s curators and some artists will come together for an afternoon of short talks, presentations, and performances. They will present the program’s topics and most important questions in a public dialogue. The subsequent meetup allows time for discussions and networking. In the evening, the »Hash« will be awarded with a presentation by juror Marisa Olson.

The Web Residencies program is supported by the Ministry for Science, Research and Art of Baden-Württemberg. The prize money in the amount of 8,000 Euros for the first »Hash« prize in 2018 is donated by the Foundation of the Landesbank Baden-Württemberg.

See the projects on these websites:
https://schloss-post.com/overview/web-residencies/ and http://web-residencies.zkm.de/

Credits

• Margit Rosen (Project management)
• Clara Herrmann (Project management)

Project team

Assistant ZKM

Jenny Starick

 

Organization / Institution

Akademie Schloss Solitude & ZKM | Center for Art and Media