Solitude & ZKM Create International Net Art Award »Hash«

The Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, and the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, have jointly established the international Net Art award Hash for net-based projects in the fields of art, technology, and design. Join us for the first award ceremony which will take place on February 15, 2018, within the framework of a public networking event with short talks and presentations at the ZKM | Karlsruhe. All web residencies winners in 2016 and 2017 are eligible for the Hash award. The current call for web residencies is still open!

Hash is a 8,000-euro prize donated by the Foundation of the Landesbank Baden-Württemberg. An independent juror will select the winning 2016/2017 web resident from the English-language Web Residencies program by the end of this year.

Initiated in 2016 by Akademie Schloss Solitude and organized and implemented with the ZKM | Karlsruhe since 2017, the Web Residencies program is dedicated to artists, designers, programmers, researchers, and activists who use the Internet as a place of production in an innovative way. Within art’s liberated space, the participants negotiate digital topics, »trends,« and tools, question or develop them further, and respond to the rapid developments of technology and Internet with artistic, critical, and progressive positions.

Web Residencies: The Stats

Over 20 months, 18 projects by participants from eight European countries as well as the US, Canada, and UK were supported and realized online. With each open call, a new digital spectrum and network opened up with knowledge and ideas that were visualized and communicated through the program. The invited curators designed calls connecting to current discourses in the fields of net culture, net-based art, as well as digital technology and society. Among the issues were: How can Net Art be decentralized? Can artists be whistleblowers? Which new opportunities arise from Virtual Reality? The web residents, which were selected from 100 to 150 applications, experimented with Twitter bots, digital painting software, generative music, or data visualization. They developed technologies that outwit mobile phone tracking services, analysis software with which Facebook users can evaluate their own data, or new formats for online art galleries in the darknet. Thus, a unique international network and online archive of different digital disciplines came to life and continuously expands.

New Call

The current call for web residencies, An AI Summer, curated by the designer and net curator Nora O Murchú, focuses on artificial intelligence. Applicants can submit concepts by October 20, 2017 (midnight), at this link http://webresidencies-solitude-zkm.com/. The four-week Web Residencies take place in November 2017. Winners are also eligible for the Hash award.

The Web Residencies program is supported by the Ministry for Science, Research and Art of Baden-Wuerttemberg. 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/