The transmediale award is dedicated to current positions in digital arts and media. It is an open competition, into which artists are invited to enter their current work. The jury of this year’s award competition consisted of Olga Goriunova (Moskow), Nat Muller (Rotterdam), Florian Wüst (Berlin), Mihaela Vasile (Bucharest) und Wonil Rhee (Seoul). In order to reflect the growing number of theoretical and critical practice works submitted for the competition, the festival is announcing the creation of the Vilem Flusser Theory Award. In collaboration with the recently opened Vilem Flusser Archive at the Universität der Künste in Berlin, dedicated to the complete works of the influential visionary and media philosopher, the prize, endowed with 2.000 euros, honours outstanding theoretical or research based practice. The jury nominated the art works described here for the transmediale. 08 prize and the Vilem Flusser prize, both will be awarded on February 2 at 21:00 hrs. The nominated works will be presented by the artists within the festival programme.

Jury Statement:

Over the years, transmediale has been attracting an ever growing range of genres, practices and approaches to art and critical discourse, music and digital cultures, making the festival a unique venue to explore contemporary developments without dismissing a sense of history and contex- tualisation. This rich complexity is mirrored by this year's submissions to the transmediale award competition, which simultaneously constitute a great challenge, as well as a burden to the jury. How can one compare and judge such disparate aesthetics, thematics, technological platforms, and socio-political concerns?
Despite the wide range of styles and media, a certain trend could be discerned, which answered well to this year's theme of CONSPIRE... The works which captured the jury’s attention most were those which expressed a form of creative criticism towards our current condition: whether expressed by (re)interpreting and performing history with the necessary doses of irony; relaying the phobias, fear and constraints of the ever-globalising world; challenging the existing orders of power, property and discipline; and by, practically and conceptually, providing strategies of resistance and overcoming. What marks these works is a playful embrace of failure, stubborn refusals to submit to it, hopeful attempts to introduce the difference into seemingly monolithic structures. In any case, loopholes within - what appear to be - hermetic systems and closed networks are deliberately sought, pried open and rearticulated.

Jury sessions are - by definition - moderated conspiratorial acts. Common grounds need to be found and negotiated, the processes of decision-making dart sideways in an often unexpected fashion or eventually end in deadlock. Despite these lurking dynamics, we are confident to have attempted our best, nominating a relatively high number of projects to pay tribute to the above mentioned variety, quality and specificity of works.