Syndicate: Prix Ars .Net Judging Article

[Matthew Mirapaul <mirapaul@nytimes.com> (by way of Andreas Broeckmann)]

http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/98/09/cyber/artsatlarge/10artsatlarge.html


          September 10, 1998

          By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL

          Judging the Net: The Insiders' Perspective

                 War has been declared at the Ars Electronica Center,
but the real conflict has already been resolved.

          The electronic-arts museum and studio in Linz, Austria, is
holding its annual festival this week, based on the theme "InfoWar." But
this confrontational theme masks the acts of delicate diplomacy
that occurred in a smoke-filled judging chamber four months ago, when
the stakes were real -- and literally more rewarding than the
six-day conference's conceptual battles.

          At last night's awards ceremony for the Prix Ars Electronica,
officials from the arts center and the
          Austrian Broadcasting Corporation, which organizes the
prestigious annual competition, doled out
          a total of 1.35 million Austrian schillings (about $111,000)
to 15 of the top award recipients in five categories.

          There was no "envelope please" suspense over who would walk
away from the dais with a
          "Golden Nica" statuette. The five juries met in late May, and
the winning names were posted on the Web a few weeks later.

          For the ".net" category, the simple list of winners belies the
struggle involved in the selection
          process, a friendly three-day skirmish in which values were
challenged, loyalties tested and the state of online art exposed.

          The five members of the Internet-projects jury were asked last
week to reconstruct how they
          made their award choices. To a man (only a few women were
invited to serve on the judging
          panels), they expressed dissatisfaction with the overall
quality of the 500 entries they reviewed.

          "We were very disappointed in that the pieces aren't getting
better as fast as we had hoped," said Derrick de Kerckhove, director of
the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of
Toronto.

          In fact, one of the prize winners, Xchange, an online locus
for sound artists experimenting with the RealAudio format, was not
formally submitted but was instead nominated by a juror, a practice
that contest rules allow.

          The Golden Nica went to IO_dencies, a Java-based
representation of traffic flows and other urban systems. Xchange and
PostPet, a
          menagerie of Tamagotchi-like creatures that deliver e-mail
messages, earned awards of distinction. The German-Austrian group
          responsible for IO_dencies got 100,000 schillings ($8,200),
and the two runners-up each got half that amount. Twelve other projects
          received honorary mentions but no cash.

          "The curve fell off rather quickly after the top three," said
John F. Simon Jr., a New York artist. "Net art is young, and most of
these projects hadn't had more than five or six months' development,
if that. When you look at art projects, you want to see sustained,
          thoughtful development, and it's very hard to find that in Net
art work."

          When the jury convened on a Friday morning, its initial task
was to set the criteria by which the 500 projects would be evaluated.
          Surprisingly, aesthetic considerations were not necessarily
the most important.

          Joichi Ito, a Japanese journalist and Internet entrepreneur
who has served on all four Internet juries, explained: "Even though it's
called Ars Electronica, it's not really an art competition. We have
this discussion every year because all the artists come to the symposium
and criticize us for not awarding art. The purpose of Ars
Electronica is to look at innovations in technology. We talk about art,
but it [the award winner] doesn't have to be art."

          Instead, more important factors included a project's ability
to evolve online, to create a community, to capitalize on timeliness and
to demonstrate interactivity. They are components of what de
Kerckhove termed "Webness."

          "Webness" might more accurately be called "Netness" --
especially since none of the top prizewinners resides fully on the Web.
          IO_dencies is a stand-alone Java applet, PushPet works through
standard e-mail protocols and the members of Xchange, the most
          Web-oriented of the three projects, often swap ideas and
suggestions through a mailing list.

          Defining benchmarks is one thing, but as the panel soon found
out, applying them is somewhat more difficult. Even when juries
          understand the criteria, Ito said, "the priorities of what we
think are most important within the criteria are not clear. We've always
hoped we'd get a perfect [submission], but the problem is, there's
no one piece that has everything."

            In fact, many of the entries had nothing.

                                     A contest staff member sorted the
submissions and built a list of the 100 leading contenders. By the
 end of the first day, the jury had worked through the list and, determined
to be thorough, spent Saturday churning through the remaining 400.

                                     "We all noticed a common confusion
between submissions that were about art and happened to be
                                     on the Net, and sites that
experimented with the Net as an artistic medium," said Robert Gehorsam,
                                     vice president of programming for
Sony Online Entertainment in Manhattan.

                                     Immediately dismissed were the
"self-servers," sites that de Kerckhove described as having a
                                     photograph of the artist on the
home page or sites that contained every project the creator had
          produced. He noted that the number of submissions had doubled
from last year, but that the judging period had not, making these
          stringent measures necessary.

          With four computers at hand, the jurors would drift from
machine to machine as Web pages finished loading, sampling multiple
projects at once. The process would slow to a near standstill in the
afternoon when North American users would log on and clog the Internet.

          To pass the time, the jurors turned to cigarettes. Gehorsam
said: "I was the only non-smoker in a closed room for three days. I felt
like Roberto Duran -- 'No mas.'" Simon maintained that he had to
smoke in self-defense.

          As the second day ended, each juror felt he had a few projects
that he could defend as deserving of the top prizes. Curiously, none was
 drawn from the initial staff-chosen list of 100, although some
of those would receive honorary mentions. A discussion about the merits
of one project, Radio Internationale Stadt, led Andreas Broeckmann to
propose Xchange, to which he occasionally contributes.

          On Sunday, the group assembled to pick its 15 winners: a top
prize, two runners-up and a dozen honorary mentions. They started by
          naming their favorites.

          Simon recalled: "We expected to get a list of however many --
20, 25, 30 -- from which we'd winnow it down to 15. But when we got
          the short list together, there were 15, and that's how many
projects we needed all together."

          With so few high-quality choices, it became tough to argue
against a project because there were no adequate replacements that would
 restore the list to 15.

          "I don't think there was a single prize where everybody
agreed," Ito said. "Nothing was unanimous. What we would do is concede
one point and take another. It was like the U.N."

          There was general agreement that IO_dencies was the best
project, despite Ito's opinion that the project falls short on the scale
of  community-building.

          But a more fundamental issue surfaced. Broeckmann, a cultural
historian who works as a project manager for V2, a highly regarded
          media-arts organization in Rotterdam, is identified as a
"theoretical advisor" in the credits for IO_dencies. Even though
competition rules
          do not exclude jurors from promoting projects in which they
are involved, Broeckmann recused himself from the final vote, fearing
the  appearance of a conflict of interest.

          "He was not that involved," Gehorsam said. "He had said his
piece from the beginning. The real point is, by establishing the
criteria up front, we could point to those."

          "We've had different policies in different years," said Ito,
who decided not to push a project by one of his students. "I have to
admit, it is a very difficult problem."

          Ito noted that there is a relatively small pool of Internet
artists who can act as judges. "If you have something that's great, it's
very likely
          that one of jurors will be involved in it. And if you don't
allow somebody who knows what it is about to pitch it, sometimes you
don't get to the really cool part."

          Ito did push for PostPet, which was developed in Japan. "If
you look at the kids who are doing PostPet, there's this thriving
community
          of little girls who never would have used the Net and now
understand it much more thoroughly than the businessmen who use the
Net," he said.

          Gehorsam said he resisted the project, in part because it has
Sony roots. Others were put off by its overly cute, very commercial
          characters. "Who gives a hang, really?" de Kerckhove said
exasperatedly. "It does create human relations, but it's not of the
quality that you would expect from the Web."

          Broeckmann also lobbied hard for Web Stalker, an alternative
Web browser, but jurors said they were reluctant to award all three top
          prizes to projects he championed. "On the top level, you try
to pick the best stuff and you try to do the most fair thing, but
everybody's got a different opinion and sometimes you have to play the
politics," one juror said.

          For next year's competition, the jurors would like to see more
rigorous submission guidelines to help weed out
          the "self-servers" and other inappropriate entries, including
projects that would be better presented on a
          CD-ROM or floppy disk instead of the Internet. Simon would
expand the category to include software, while
          de Kerckhove believes that the so-called "active worlds" and
3-D environments may start to flourish.

          Broeckmann considers the dearth of worthy Web projects to be
significant.

          "If the people who produce genuinely interesting new projects
have to move away from the Web as interface, then that might mean that
          the limits of HTML have been reached as a means of artistic
innovation," he said. "You can still do things with the medium, but in
terms of pushing the limits, it might be happening elsewhere."

          Although Gehorsam shared his fellow jurors' disappointment
with the quality of the submissions, ultimately he took a more
optimistic view.

          "This medium is so young and so plastic that anyone who was
satisfied wouldn't be doing his job," he said. "Even the prize winners
could have been better. Unlike a much more mature medium, you can
see the warts. But they were all ambitious, and they all represent the
          result of someone's passion."




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Matthew Mirapaul at mirapaul@nytimes.com welcomes your
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