[aha] ARCO Beep New Media Art Award

[Domenico Quaranta]

 From We-make-money-not-art, http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2009/02/arco-beep-new-media-art-award.php

Yesterday i met with the other members of the jury for the fifth  
edition of the ARCO Beep Award. The aim of this Award is to promote  
the research, production, and exhibition of art linked to new  
technologies, or new media art. The art pieces are submitted by  
commercial galleries participating to the Madrid Contemporary Art Fair  
ARCO.

It was a real pleasure to discuss with the other members of the jury:  
curator and art critic Domenico Quaranta, Fernando Castro from the  
Reina Sofía National Museum, the mythical art critic Arnau Puig and  
the charming artist Marie-France Veyrat. It was the fastest jury  
deliberation i had ever attended in my life. Although most entries  
were of remarkable quality, the work that stood out was a triptych  
part of the EKMRZ-Trilogy, by UBERMORGEN.COM.

Presented for the first time as a single installation on view until  
the end of the art fair at the booth of Fabio Paris Gallery, this "e- 
commerce trilogy" is the outcome of almost four years of work which  
i'm sure most of you are quite familiar with. Its episodes are called:

- GWEI - Google Will Eat Itself, an operation aiming at buying Google  
with Google's own money (in collaboration with Alessandro Ludovico and  
Paolo Cirio)
- Amazon Noir - The Big Book Crime steals books from Amazon and  
distribute them free on the web (in collaboration with Alessandro  
Ludovico and Paolo Cirio)
- and The Sound of eBay which generates music using eBay user data.

Fabio Paris Gallery had made a rather audacious challenge in choosing  
to present the EKMRZ-Trilogy and i'm delighted to see that audacity  
pays once in a while. The ARCO installation presents the iconography  
and mythology of the trilogy by means of prints, a google cheque,  
projections, music, animations, etc. You can visit it at the Pavilion  
6 of ARCO, it is part of Expanded Box, the section dedicated to the  
intertwining of technologies and art.

On occasion of the event, FPEditions is publishing the book  
UBERMORGEN.COM.

And if you live in the area of Milan, you might want to check out the  
Fabio Paris Art Gallery itself which is showing the world preview of  
the Austrian duo's latest project Superenhanced, which is dedicated to  
the issue of torture.


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Domenico Quaranta

mob. +39 340 2392478
email. qrndnc at yahoo.it
home. vicolo San Giorgio 18 - 25122 brescia (BS)
web. http://www.domenicoquaranta.net/

"Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid. Human beings are  
incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant. Together they are powerful  
beyond imagination." Albert Einstein