EX is pleased to announce the winner works from our Open IV Call. The works will be shown at Urvanity, New Contemporary Art Fair, from February 21st to February 25th, 2018 in LASEDE at COAM (Official College of Architects of Madrid).
FIRST PRIZE
The Trained Particles Circus by Patxi Araujo from Spain
The Trained Particles Circus proposes an improbable, precarious and potentially dangerous meeting place caged between the real and the virtual. Embodied in the relationship between a synthetic biomechanics and an automaton, it recreates the figure of the circus artist, the puppet with its own life or the fantastic animal; and it places us as spectators of a contemporary spectacle of hybrid and augmented subjects, mixing light and shadow, fake and magic, virtual and physical reality, machine and organism.
Jury’s decission: The depth and rigor of his research along with the re-visitation of the flea trainer character were the reasons on which this decision was based. The piece proves that Avant-garde art does not necessarily ought to turn its back to solid traditions.
Patxi Araujo (Spain, 1967) is an artist and researcher. Professor at the Faculty of Arts at the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU. His work combines human narrative, nature and fiction with their digital peers through bodies, perceptions and metaphors coming from programming environments, robotics, artificial life and simulation. He has made publications and numerous exhibitions and his works have been selected and shown at festivals such as ISEA, Technarte, MADATAC, ADAF, among others.
SECOND PRIZE
The Living Language Project by Ori Elisar from Israel.
The Living Language is a generative bio-linguistic research exploring the boundaries between culture and nature. Language and it’s speakers. It is a suggestion for a new evolution process of the Hebrew alphabet during the 2000 years it was considered to be a dead language. The Paenibacillus vortex bacterium, used to create old Hebrew characters that evolve themselves into modern ones is the main player in this research.
Jury’s decission: The employment of bio-artistic research as a bridge to the purest kabalistic tradition was the reason on which this decision was based. The piece presents an attempt to show a current nature of the alphabet as a response to the order of things and the universe.
Ori Elisar (B. 1982) is a Tel-Aviv Jaffa based designer, Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem graduate with a B.Des degree in Visual Communication. For the Living Language Project, Ori received a Certi cate of Typographic Excellence from the TDC (2015), an Excellence Award from the Japan Media Arts Festival (2017) and an Honorable Mention at The 9TH Annual International Design Awards (2015). Some of Ori’s exhibited are the JAPAN MEDIA ARTS FESTIVAL, Ars Electronica Festival, PyeongChang Biennale and the Jerusalem Design Week. He also gave Bio-Design workshops and talks.
SELECTED
Exploring extreme Surfaces and Terrains by Chiara Passa from Italy
A series of virtual reality video sculptures made by diverse VR geometric projection in continuous transformation that deconstruct and reshape extreme and minimalist, tangible surfaces and wireframe terrains. The VR visors (google cardboard), incorporated into the sculpture-surface (as part of the VR video sculptures), projected 360° onto the rough surface, which gives the three-dimensional spatial extension on geometric forms with an apparently icy and impersonal kind of abstraction
Jury’s decission: The thorough exploration of the dynamics between reality and virtuality was the reason on which this decision was based. Here, a dialogue between sculpture physicality and its potential iteration in the virtual world represents this line of research.
Chiara Passa (Italy). Her artwork combines different media as: internet-art projects, animations, interactive video-installations, digital art in public space as site-specific artworks, video-mapping and video-sculptures. I also develop Art-applications (using AR and VR) and widgets for mobile platforms. She uses new technologies in a wide-range production in order to comprise its intrinsic language, and experimenting in rigorous and personal way on the unknown creative possibilities that the new media are continuously offering to me.
A Gallery Situation by Caz Egelie from Holland
In A Gallery Situation the rest material from various 3d scans forms the backdrop for a proposal for new ways of visiting the gallery space. The figures in their uncanny states interfere with and run through these newly created, fictional spaces, in which parts of various artworks and museums can be discovered.
Jury’s decission: The humorous portrait of the relations between artworks and contemporary art museum visitors when it occurs in a rush was the reason on which this decision was based.
Caz Egelie (1994) is a visual artist, art educator and curator based in Utrecht. In his visual work he makes use of a wide range of media, varying from sculpture, performance and painting to digital means. His work is a reflection on the current art world and art history, which, remarkably, mostly doesn’t result in a critical point of view. Instead, his installations invite the viewer to playfully reshape their opinions on modern art, and to engage a new relationship with the works we’ve already seen so many times. In this, appropriation functions as a tool to respond to art history, making unexpected, new combinations between (well- known) modern works and work of his own.
