PRIX NET ART 2015: A RECAP
The Prix Net Art held an open call for nominations in July 15, 2015, with a deadline of August 17. It received 137 nominations, with another 12 nominated by the jury members. The winner of the $10,000 Prix Net Art 2015 was Dutch artist Constant Dullaart. The $5,000 Award of Distinction went to Berlin-based collective Weise 7.
A PRIX NET ART TOAST & OPEN SCORE PRESENTATION
Constant Dullaart was celebrated publicly the weekend of 29 January, 2016. On Friday, 29 JANUARY, 50 VIPs—including many influential digital artists, as well as guests from start-ups like Electric Objects and Artsy; art world venues such as the Guggenheim, the Met, and the New Museum; and publications such as Art in America and Artforum—joined the co-organizers at the private home of dealer Jonathon Carroll (Carroll/Fletcher, London) to toast Dullaart. Speakers included Zhang Ga (Chronus Art Center), Michael Connor (Rhizome), Zachary Kaplan (Rhizome), Carroll, and the artist himself.
The next day, Dullaart participated in Open Score, a significant new art & tech conference from the New Museum and Rhizome. The program was sold-out, with 180+ in attendance and another 2,124 watching live online.
PRIX NET ART AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT
Social Media
The announcement of the Prix Net Art winners had increased social media impact in 2015, evidencing the heightened prestige of the prize. The inaugural call received greater social traffic. From Twitter/Facebook/Instagram’s own analytics the various announcements had the following reach.
Winner’s Announcement (November, 2015)
197 Tweets with a reach of 407,886 people
26 Facebook shares, and 116 likes for a reach of 16,744 people
170 Instagram likes (not used in 2014)
Open Call (July-August, 2015)
54 Tweets with a reach of 186,206 people
52 Facebook shares, 100 likes, 28,102 people reached
102 Instagram likes (not used in 2014)
Website Stats From Google Analytics:
Rhizome Front-Page Exhibition of Constant Dullaart (November, 2015)
4,453 unique visits total (no front-page exhibition in 2014)
Announcement Video (November, 2015)
2102 unique views total (no announcement video in 2014)
Rhizome Editorial (6 posts July-January)
24,752 unique visits total
Nominations from Online Portal (July-August)
137 artist nominations submitted
Email Traffic: Direct Announcements
Rhizome sent two direct mail-outs to itsvast list of members.
About Prix Net Art 2015
Prix Net Art is co-organized by Chronus Art Center, Rhizome and Tsinghua University Art and Science Media Lab (TASML).The Prix Net Art celebrates the current moment of net art and its future, and was created to acknowledge the shifting relationship between art and the web. Increasingly, the internet is the frame through which all contemporary art and culture is seen and understood.
Co-Organizer
CHRONUS ART CENTER (CAC)
CAC is China’s first nonprofit art organization dedicated to the presentation, research / creation and scholarship of media art, established in 2013. CAC creates a multifaceted and vibrant platform for the discourse, production and dissemination of media art in a global context, with its exhibitions, residency-oriented fellowships, lectures and workshop programs, and through its archiving and publishing initiatives. CAC is positioned to advance artistic innovation and cultural awareness by critically engaging with media technologies that are transforming and reshaping contemporary experiences.
RHIZOME
RHIZOME is an arts organization based on the internet, affiliated with the New Museum in New York. It advocates for contemporary art that creates richer and more critical digital cultures. Working online and off, it re-thinks artistic creation, distribution, and reception in relation to changing conditions associated with the internet, through exhibitions, events, commissions, collection and critical writing. It is a leading international organization to support art and technology, online since 1996.
TASML
Under the auspices of the Art and Science Research Center of Tsinghua University, TASML is a research laboratory that aims to synergize the rich resources available among the Tsinghua’s diverse research institutions and laboratories to create an incubator for crossbred, interdisciplinary experiments among artists, designers, scientists and technologists. TASML also functions as a center and a hub for worldwide exchange and collaboration both with academic and research institutions and the global media art and design community.
JURY
JOSEPHINE BOSMA
Josephine Bosma is a journalist and critic living and working in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She focuses on art in the context of the Internet. In 1997 Bosma became one of the key figures participating in and molding the then-new sphere of critical Internet discourse (and practice) taking place in email lists such as Nettime and Rhizome. Since then her writings on net art and net culture appear in numerous magazines, books and catalogues, both on- and offline, from Ars Electronica, Telepolis, Mute, and DU to Metropolis M and Frieze D/E. She co-edited the Nettime book README (Autonomedia 1999), the Next5Minutes3 workbook (N5M organization 1999) and briefly edited the online newsletter CREAM (2001-2002). In 2011 her book Nettitudes – Let’s Talk Net Art appeared. Since 2011 Josephine Bosma is an external PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam.
CHRISSIE ILES
Chrissie Iles is Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Her specializations include film, Minimalist and process-based art of the sixties and seventies, and film and video installation. She is part of the curatorial team formulating the artistic policy of the Whitney Museum. Iles is an adjunct Professor at Columbia University, a member of the Faculty of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, and External Examiner for Goldsmith’s College London. She was a Juror for the 2003 Turner Prize at Tate, London, and is an advisory committee member for the New York State Council on the Arts, New York.
DOMENICO QUARANTA
Domenico Quaranta is a contemporary art critic and curator. His work confronts the impact of current technological developments on art and society, with a focus on art in networked spaces. He has contributed to a number of print and online magazines, including Flash Art, Rhizome, Artpulse; and his essays have been featured in catalogues and books, most recently Art and the Internet (London, 2013). He is the author of Beyond New Media Art (2013) and In My Computer (2011), and a co-editor of GameScenes. Art in the Age of Videogames (2006) and The F.A.T. Manual (2013). Since 2005 he has curated a number of exhibitions, including: Holy Fire. Art of the Digital Age (iMAL, Bruxelles 2008); Playlist (LABoral, Gijon and iMAL, Bruxelles 2009 – 2010); Collect the WWWorld; The Artist as Archivist in the Internet Age (Brescia, Spazio Contemporanea 2011; HeK, Basel 2012; 319 Scholes, New York 2012); Unoriginal Genius (Carroll / Fletcher Project Space, London 2014). In 2009 and 2010 he curated the media art selection for ARCO Madrid. He is a co-founder and Artistic Director of the Link Center for the Arts of the Information Age, and the editor of the parent publishing label Link Editions.
About Constant Dullaart
CONSTANT DULLAART’s (Netherlands, 1979) practice reflects on the broad cultural and social effects of communication and image processing technologies, from performatively distributing artificial social capital on social media to completing a staff-pick Kickstarter campaign for a hardware start-up called Dulltech
. His work includes websites, performances, routers, installations, startups, armies, and manipulated found images, frequently juxtaposing or consolidating technically dichotomized presentation realms. Recent solo exhibitions include The Possibility of an Army, Kunsthalle Schirn, Frankfurt; Jennifer in Paradise, Futura, Prague; The Censored Internet, Aksioma, Ljubljana (2015); Stringendo, Vanishing Mediators at Carroll / Fletcher, London; Brave New Panderers, XPO gallery, Paris (2014); Jennifer in Paradise, Future Gallery, Berlin;Jennifer in Paradise, Import Projects, Berlin (2013) and Onomatopoeia, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City (2012). Group exhibitions include Then They Form Us, MCA, Santa Barbara; When I Give, I Give Myself, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; Algorithmic Rubbish, Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (2015);Casting a Wide net, Postmasters, NYC, USA; Online/Offline/Encoding Everyday Life, Transmediale, Berlin (2014); Online Mythologies, Polytechnic Museum, Moscow; Genius without talent, de Appel, Amsterdam (2012); A Painting Show, Autocenter, Berlin (2011). Dullaart lives and works in Berlin and Amsterdam.
ABOUT WEISE7
WEISE7's studio is jointly run by artists and engineers in Neukölln, Berlin, and a home to Critical Engineering Working Group (Julian Oliver, Gordan Savičić, Bengt Sjölén, Danja Vasiliev). Since publishing “The Critical Engineering Manifesto” in 2011, Weise7’s projects have pursued a set of strategies encompassing “interventions in infrastructure”.
