New Horizons Award for Innovation in New Media

Every year or so, Leonardo/ISAST honors, through the Leonardo Awards Program, artists who work with science and technology. To assist with the selection of award recipients, Leonardo/ISAST enlists members of the art, science and technology community, who nominate artists or serve as jury members. Recently, as a result of this nomination and selection process, 10 finalists for the Leonardo New Horizons Award for Innovation in New Media were named. These artists share a commitment to the incorporation of technology in their works and to the achievement of significant imaginative content, yet employ many diverse types of media with dramatically different aesthetic results. From the list of 10 finalists, two artists were named and presented with the Leonardo New Horizons Award: Gregory Barsamian and Graham Harwood. We present the works of all 10 artists here, accompanied by texts by Awards Committee chair Barbara Lee Williams, in this Leonardo Gallery.

Gregory Barsamian creates dream-based animated sculptures--zoetrope-like machines that produce 3D animations. In these works, he fashions narratives composed of images from the unconscious and presents them on spinning armatures in a darkened space. His most recent traveling exhibition, Innuendo Non Troppo, was shown in Tokyo and throughout the United States.

Graham Harwood is a member of the technological media group Mongrel, which focuses on collaborative, socially engaged products--art, software and workshops. Harwood started out in the 1980s working with publications on such topics as working-class culture and new media in culture and society, moving on to studies and work in programming and education. Most recently he was commissioned by the Tate Gallery in London to produce an exploration of the Tate collection, the history of Millbank and its prison and a "reversioning" of the Tate's website.

The remaining finalists were (in alphabetical order): Bruno Buesch and Tina Cassani (France/Switzerland), two multimedia artists who produce global radio network events; José Wagner García (Brazil), who has employed a range of technology to create a multi-level installation probing environmental concerns in the Amazon basin; Toshio Iwai (Japan), who creates vivid yet playful interactive audio-visual and sound pieces; Tran T. Kim-Trang and Karl Mihail (U.S.A.), two video artists who also create complex installation works that probe the ethical implications of science; Melinda Rackham (Australia), whose screen-based digital art, sculpture and on-line (Web) art (e.g. Carrier) examine a provocative range of subjects from identity in the digital world to on-line sex; Marie Sester (France), who blends architecture with sound and video art to force a re-examination of modern environments; Igor Stromajer (Slovenia), a Web and performance artist whose work ranges from street performances to "megapathetic symphonies" and radiophonic sound/digital art; Fabian Wagmister (Argentina/U.S.A.), the creator of an enormous international Intranet project, Worship, which has resonant historical and social content.

Acknowledgments

This year's New Horizons jury included: Donna J. Cox, professor, School of Art and Design/National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Hervé Fischer, Daniel Langlois Chair in Digital Technologies and Fine Arts, Université Concordia FIAM, and co-chair of La Cité des arts et des nouvelles technologies de Montréal; Ginette Major, chair of Le Café Électronique de Montréal and co-chair of La Cité des arts et des nouvelles technologies de Montreal; Roger Malina, astronomer and executive editor of Leonardo; Rejane Spitz, artist and professor of art at PUC-Rio University, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Annette Weintraub, media artist and professor of art at City College of New York; Benjamin Weil, Curator of Media Arts, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and San Francisco Bay Area art critic Barbara Lee Williams.

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