Web Residencies

by Akademie Schloss Solitude & ZKM

Brightly colored triangles rotate around the lettering
Duration
2017–2020

In the years 2017–2020, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart and the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe have announced nine calls for web residencies with different topics that were designed by invited curators.

The »Web Residencies« program was initiated by Akademie Schloss Solitude in 2016 to support young talents from the international digital scene as well as artists of all disciplines who deal with web-based practices to present the process and results of their work online on the platform www.schloss-post.com. For each call three to four people or teams were selected by the curators for a four-week »Web Residency,« which was rewarded with 500 USD.

With this new cooperation, Akademie Schloss Solitude as an artist residency – and »networkmachine« – and the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe as a museum and place of artistic research and development merged their expertise and practice to work jointly on the development of the program »Web Residencies«.

Both houses consider online artist residencies as a contemporary format for the support of artists in a globalized art scene shaped by digitalization. The digital space will be utilized to attempt new ways within the artistic practice and communication of art beyond geographical and institutional borders. The program is thereby consciously open designed to be shaped also by the ideas, concepts, and methods of a scene that operates beyond the mainstream art establishment.

The focus of the »Web Residencies« does not lie in the ready art piece but artists are invited to experiment with digital technologies and new art forms at the surface of digital art and communication within a defined topical frame. Thus they’re in direct exchange with the professional network of both institutions as well as a general digital public which in turn gets immediate access to the artists’ works. This format makes possible a decentralized and international discussion on topics set by the invited curators in the fields of digital arts, net culture as well as digital technology and society.

»Web Residencies« are carried out exclusively online, the works will be presented on www.schloss-post.com and web-residencies.zkm.de. There is no age limit for applicants, also students are eligible to apply. The Digital Solitude program with fellowships and the online platform Schlosspost are supported by the State Ministry of Baden-Württemberg for Science, Research and the Arts.

The Hash

In the years 2018 and 2020, the production prize »Hash« was awarded for outstanding projects by the Web Residents. The awardees were Marloes de Valk (2018) and Natasha Tontey and Pedro Oliveira (2020).

 

The award ceremony of the HASH Award 2020 with Elke aus dem Moore, Director of the Akademie Schloss Solitude
HASH Award
The production prize for net-based projects in the fields of art, technology and design is awarded every two years.
more information

Calls 2017

Web Residencies by Solitude & ZKM - 2017 - Call 02
Call No. 1 – Blowing the Whistle, Questioning Evidence

What is the role of art in the framework of whistleblowing and leaking? This call wants to focus on the act of producing evidence via artistic practices. If we expand the concept of art to whistleblowing, leaking and the act of producing awareness of power mechanisms, which kind of tactics and strategies for resistance can we imagine within the technological paradigm and beyond it? 

Web Residencies by Solitude & ZKM - 2017 - Call 02
Call No. 2 – Fractal Horses

We are looking for works that challenge the multiplicity and tensions of patterns and chaos – in any new art media discipline such as visual, music, sculpture, games or writing. We are looking for artists who face the nonlinear and the unpredictable, who design algorithms to draft the flap of a butterfly’s wings, watching out for the change of the course and the rhythm of the world to come.

The image shows a robot on an empty crater landscape. He carries a sign with the inscription: »I am an I. A computational I.«
Call No. 3 – An AI Summer

How should we think of machine intelligence in the context of art – as our nonhuman collaborators with their own drive and ambitions, or as a tool that extends the flex of our artistic capabilities?

No matter where we sit, there remains a more urgent need. 

Calls 2018

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Call No. 4 – Tegan Bristow: Ghosted

This is a call to take a closer look at the position and role of Internet culture and the globalized information economy in accordance with neo-colonialism: What impact do Western technologies have on non-Western cultures?
What are scientific or technological colonialisms in 2018?

Aisha Qandisha in front of a read surface
Call No. 5 - Morehshin Allahyari: Refiguring the Feminist Future

This is a call to the "female future". Feminism, which is more than women; it is a philosophy of the non-male, the non-white, the non-western. All those people who were at some point regarded as "less than" by the social systems that oppress them. This is a call to direct reality towards other futures so that we can collapse the political notion of linear space and time in an act of resistance.

A graphic figure moves against the background of computer-generated waves.
Call No. 6 - Mary Maggic: Planetary Glitch

Against the backdrop of climate change, rising sea levels, chemical change and the industrialization of the planet, this call called for new open source strategies to overcome the trap of global change. Curator and juror Mary Maggic invited artists, designers, (bio-)hackers, technologists, storytellers, writers, healers and shape-shifters to submit pleasure tutorials, witchcraft and alchemy, collective coping mechanisms, online care networks, information emancipation, training exercises and other formats.

Calls 2019

A colorful rectangle in red, blue, green, and purple is the symbol of this year's »Web Residency« by Akademie Schloss Solitude and ZKM Karlsruhe.
Call No. 7 – Jonas Lund: Rigged Systems

July/August 2019

What would suitable infrastructures, needed for public opinion-forming and by extension political debate, look like? How can we imagine new forms of political debate and places for political communication? How can we use social media not only as tools, but as spaces to perform alternative narratives that can discover and develop loopholes, hacks, hijacks, subversions, performances, to reclaim authority, to own a part of the structure and perhaps open up the opaque systems that control and govern our society?

It is an animated image which looks like the screenshot of a video. On the picture you can see a virtual robot hand holding a virtual human hand at the fingertips.
Call No. 8 – Daphne Dragona: Engineering Care

September/October 2019

The call »Engingeers Care« deals with the machines that care for us human beings. We live in an automated world that would no longer be imaginable without personalized, intelligent assistants or therapy robots and their constant way of taking care. Machines that are intended for care also inform, remind, accompany, mediate and give us feedback. They help young and old to lead a safe and independent life. But what is the relationship between new care technologies and the already existing crisis in old-age and disease care? What can we learn from these machines and how strongly do we depend on them in our lives and work today?

Three persons in military clothing with weapons and mobile phones
Call No. 9 – Dani Ploeger: Violent Consumer Media

December 2019/January 2020

The ninth call for Web Residencies by Schloss Solitude and ZKM seeks to explore how consumer technologies and user-generated online content affect both the representation and performance of violence. Curator Dani Ploeger invites artists, designers, technologists, and activists to engage with the role of mobile phones, action cameras, toy drones and other digital gadgets in warfare, terrorism, hunting, and other forms of subjective violence.

Project website
https://schloss-post.com/overview/web-residencies/
Organization / Institution
Akademie Schloss Solitude & ZKM | Center for Art and Media
Credits
Team ZKM
Project Development and Management Akademie Schloss Solitude (2016-2019)Clara Herrmann 
Project Management ZKM (2017-2020)Margit Rosen
Assistant ZKM (2018–2020)Jenny Starick

 

Curators and Artists (2017)

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