IMAGE.

Jury: Reinhard Braun, Gina Czarnecki, Piotr Krajewski

The starting point for the jurying of the “ Image" category for this year’s prize, the search for “innovative contributions to the development of moving images in the age of digital, interactive and network-based media” can hardly be translated into a pragmatic series of criteria for judging or even classification, based on the actual competition entries. The expansion of the notion of the image has made the fixing and demarcating of the visual, if only hypothetically, much more complicated. (...) Globalisation is prevalent in the language of the visual as our terms of references and knowledge become similar. Our historical trust in the image as arbiter of the truth is satirized through reappropriation, the “appearance of authenticity” becomes a software filter and truth or the quest for it has been transferred from the image itself to its means of production and dissemination. Images have become a complex language of related knowledges requiring understanding of the context, knowledge of histories, politics, technological developments and possibilities. But the resonance of images is so powerful and so appealing to our physiological attraction to visual beauty, rhythm, humour and our intrigue with space and time still elicit a gut reaction rather than solely a cerebral response. For this reason, the discussion about the entries focused on the question of the positioning of an image, not stylistically or aesthetically, but rather within its cultural context - to what extent can a kind of “politics of the signifier" (Benjamin Buchloh) appear? Above all, this locus of the image, the starting point of its circulation and meaning production, is at the center of what needs to be constructed.

Honourable Mentions
Dolores from 10 to 10 Coco Fusco (cu/us)
Reality Over Zdeno Hlinka (sk)
soft cinema Lev Manovich (us)
Andreas Kratky (de)
Besenbahn
Dietmar Offenhuber (at)
Bardosphere Andrzej Urbanski (pi)