Over 130 applications were received for the open international competition from artists and groups from Brazil, Finland, Israel, France, Australia, the USA, the UK, Norway, Luxembourg, Argentina, Columbia, the Netherlands, Mexico, Japan, Canada, Russia and other countries.
Digital video works accepted for the competition ranged from web-based, generative art and GIF to augmented reality, VR, AI, 3D modeling and neural network art.
The open competition was announced by CYLAND media lab in April 2020. The projects that made the short and long list will be shown at Cyfest-13, which will be held in St Petersburg, Russia, in the first quarter of 2021.
Video program curator – Viсtoria Ilyushkina.
CYLAND Media Lab would like to announce and congratulate the winners that made the shortlist of the video competition.
First prize
shared between two applicants – 500 + 500 USD
Francesca Fini (Italy), /S)CONFINAMENTO — first chapter, 2020
Francesca Fini created the performance project /S)CONFINAMENTO to show the city of Rome where life came to a halt under quarantine, by broadcasting the signal from security cameras. In the silent emptiness, these short fleeting lives, these lonely adventures in the closed city are narrative elements of an antiutopian story. With the software she developed, the artist transforms the tiniest movements into a unique sound performance and graphic visualization, and returns this digital stream to the web.
Aristarkh Chernyshev (Russia), Dystopia #02, 2018
Dystopia #02 is a critical project about the radical shift of concepts of consumption and post-consumption in modern society. The anti-aesthetics of garbage dumps and eternal urban renovations enter our lives and become part of everyday reality. This creates a feeling of apocalyptic “eternal timelessness”.
Second prize — 500 USD
Boris Shershenkov (Russia), Etheroforming, 2020
VR documentation of an experiment to discover the human impact on the etheric force, continuing the experiments by Thomas Edison. Test generators of pure signals are transmitted to a channel that contains the imprint of a historical layer of media.
Third prize — 500 USD
Fay Heady (Japan), OTAKU BOI, 2019
Otaku Boi is the chaos of a gamer’s life who migrates between the real and virtual worlds, conveyed by a synthesis of performance, computer chiptune music, animation and scenography.
Special prize — 250 USD
TONOPTIK (Yuriy Tolstoguzov, Alex Inkov) (Russia), ZEN, 2019
In this work, the Tonoptik group develops the idea of Nam June Paik and his work “Zen for film” (1962). The artists studied emptiness using tools of minimalism, comparing the perfection of mathematical objects and the imperfection of their analogous 3-D generation and perception by humans.