The Prix Ars Electronica Jury Sessions

Patterns of Choice: The Prix Ars Electronica Jury Sessions

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Dietmar Offenhuber

Leonardo, Volume 45, Number 3, 2012, pp. 226-232 (Article)

Published by The MIT Press

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Access Provided by MIT Libraries at 07/20/12 1:30PM GMT general article Patterns of Choice: The Prix Ars Electronica Jury Sessions

a b s t r a c t

Dietmar Offenhuber This article investigates the social structures reflected in the annual jury sessions of the Prix Ars Electronica, a major media art competition—the composition, the temporal evolution and ultimately the decisions of these juries. The author focuses on three different structures: the network of co-jurors across ocial Network Analysis (SNA) has become a To answer these questions, meth- different categories and years, S the co-artist network formed by critical tool of artistic practice, adopted by a large number of ods of network analysis used in the media artists and activists and used for investigation and cri- social sciences seem applicable. the jury decisions, and finally tique of political and economic systems. This form of analysis, Other scholars have, for example, the interaction between these two networks. The results not however, has hardly ever been applied to the field of media investigated jury decisions in cul- only reveal different roles of art itself, as a system of institutions, festivals and individual tural competitions, such as the individuals in the jury process networks. Within this system, festivals and competitions play Eurovision Song Contest, by us- but also reflect the evolution a crucial role in shaping the field. They are stepping-stones ing social network analysis to gain of the field in general. Based for emerging artists and allow scholars to probe the state of solely on public data, the results insight into the interplay between show a multifaceted picture of a the field. culture and political agendas [4,5]. dynamic field. Among the numerous media art competitions that ex- For these methods of analysis, a ist today, the Prix Ars Electronica holds a special place. For wealth of relevant and suitable data one, it is among the oldest of its kind. It has been carried out is available in digital archives and annually since 1987 in conjunction with the Ars Electronica data repositories. Currently, however, such approaches and Festival, which has been held since 1979. Furthermore, the data sets play little role in humanities research. award is highly prestigious in terms of both its endowment and its public visibility. As demonstrated in a related study, a significant proportion of media artists have at some point Research Questions submitted a project, received an award or participated in a One of the commonplace themes in media art is the conver- jury session for the competition [1]. Throughout its history, gence of art, science and technology [6]; interdisciplinarity— the Prix has consisted of three to eight categories, inviting a or the rejection of disciplines altogether—has therefore always wide range of submissions including blockbuster animation been seen as a defining property of the field [7]. The Prix movies, contemporary sound art and experimental media art, Ars Electronica has embodied this idea since the beginning. as well as online community projects. Each category awards Its scope transcends the art world and addresses commercial one main prize called the Golden Nica, two Awards of Distinctions companies and organizations, academics and autodidactic and 12 Honorary Mentions. Since 1998, the competition has enthusiasts. The result is an often startling mix, spanning also included a category for young local artists under the age across works such as commercial Hollywood productions, of 19, and, since 2004, a fellowship grant for artists younger hybrid artworks, theoretical essays and on-line community than 26 [2,3]. platforms. The question arises as to how these seemingly for- This article discusses the relevance and applicability of so- eign fields and categories relate to one other in the context of cial network visualization for understanding the structure and the competition. Furthermore, how is this mixture reflected social dynamics behind such a heterogeneous and historically in the social structure of the competition—the relationship rich institution as the Prix Ars Electronica by examining the between and among the organizers, the juries and their de- network of co-juror relationships and award decisions. As the cisions? Finally, is the structure of the competition a result field of media art keeps evolving and changing, questions of historical development or the result of a programmatic emerge about the relationship between these fields and cat- vision? egories within the competition and how this relationship is To address these questions, I will use the term social network reflected in the social composition of the juries and the track with a disclaimer: This article is not directly investigating the record of their decisions. private and professional connections between jurors or artists. Rather than exposing hidden arrangements and networks Dietmar Offenhuber (researcher), Senseable City Lab/MIT, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, through investigative journalism, this article is aimed at under- 10-400, Cambridge, MA 02139, U.S.A. E-mail: . standing what can be gleaned from public data—by focusing See for supplemental files associated with on the relationships between publicly known facts. As Josh On this issue. has demonstrated in his seminal piece They Rule (2001)—showing the personal interconnections between members of For- Article Frontispiece. (top) Topology of the complete jury network tune 500 companies’ directorial boards—even commonplace covering the period 1987–2009. (bottom) Detail view. (© Dietmar public data can unveil an additional dimension of information Offenhuber) if aggregated and examined as a network [8].

© 2012 ISAST LEONARDO, Vol. 45, No. 3, pp. 227–232, 2012 227 The following analysis is based on a receiving awards from these juries, cover- years or have changed their name. For set of simple, uncontroversial facts: first, ing the entire history of the competition the sake of consistency and simplicity, I who participated in the same jury ses- since 1987. By combining the informa- have grouped similar categories of the sion and, second, who got awards from tion about jurors, jury sessions and award same “pedigree” together, for example this jury. The resulting jury network re- recipients, I have extracted two different grouping the categories of Digital Mu- flects to a large degree the preferences networks. The first network describes sic and Computer Music into a branch of of the organizers, who are responsible the co-juror relationships among per- Music categories, and categories such as for selecting and inviting the jurors. sons participating in jury sessions over World Wide Web, net.art and net.vision into However, as jury members often have the years (Article Frontispiece); the sec- a branch of Net-Based Arts. the opportunity to recommend other ond network represents the connections This study is part of the Mapping the jurors—formally or informally—the net- among the artists who were selected by Archive project presented at the 2009 Ars work also reflects acquaintanceships, or the Prix juries (Color Plate B). Each Electronica Festival (Fig. 1) [11]. The “weak ties” [9], between these jurors. An node in these networks represents either study is closely related to the quantitative Ars Electronica jury session is an intense a person or a jury session from a specific analysis of Ars Electronica submissions by 3-day process, during which hundreds category and festival year. A connection Gerhard Dirmoser, who collected a com- of entries need to be discussed and the between these nodes either describes a plete dataset of individual submissions jurors get to know each other very well, person’s participation in a specific jury and traced their “echoes” in publica- if they have not done so before. In a typi- session or the receipt of an award from a tions [12]. Both studies were conducted cal jury session, five to six jurors collec- jury. The networks are bi-partite, which using semaspace, a network visualization tively decide on the winners of the Golden means they only contain connections be- tool I have been developing together Nica, the Awards of Distinction and the tween persons and jury sessions—never with Gerhard Dirmoser since 2004 [13]. Honorable Mentions from the pool of non- direct connections between persons. The software is based on a force-directed anonymous submissions, which often Currently, the Prix encompasses seven layout paradigm [14] that was adapted exceed 500 entries per category. A jury different categories, including Computer for the real-time layout of large networks session concludes with a statement col- Animation/Film/VFX; Digital Musics & including radial and timeline representa- lectively authored by the jurors, justifying Sound Art; Interactive Art; Hybrid Art; tions. Network centrality measures were their decisions. Digital Communities; U19; and [the next calculated using Ulrik Brandes’s Visone idea]. Over the years, the categories tool [15]. have changed substantially: categories Data Sources and such as Computer Graphics were dropped Representation while others, such as Digital Communi- The Jury Network The dataset used in this study was gener- ties, were introduced. Yet others, such Analysis of the jury network reveals the ated entirely from information available as the theory-focused Media.Art.Research first surprising fact about the jury net- on the Ars Electronica website [10]. The Award, part of the 2007–2009 compe- work: It forms a single cohesive struc- data include the list of jurors for the dif- tition, made only brief appearances. ture instead of multiple isolated network ferent categories of the Prix Ars Elec- Many categories have also undergone fragments. This indicates a strong move- tronica and the list of artists and projects substantial programmatic shifts over the ment between the different categories,

Fig. 1. Presentation of the Mapping the Archive project at Ars Electronica 2009. (Photo © Dietmar Offenhuber)

228 Offenhuber, Patterns of Choice Fig. 2. timeline view of the jury network, with bill buxton highlighted. (© Dietmar Offenhuber)

explained by the fact that many jurors initial observations already tell a story these persons act as bridges connecting have participated in more than one cat- about the nature of the different fi elds different categories—without them the egory over the years. With one exception, involved—while the Animation category network would break into many uncon- there has never been a jury session with- is well defi ned and shows little change nected “islands.” In network terminol- out a juror who participated in another over time, Interactive and Hybrid Art have ogy, they have a high betweenness centrality Prix Ars Electronica jury in an earlier or been subject to continuous changes and [16]. Nodes with a high betweenness cen- later year. The network supports the im- redefi nitions. trality often occupy important positions pression that Ars Electronica represents in real-life social networks, being facili- a very well-connected social system. Fur- tators of information exchange between thermore, the jury network shows dis- inDiViDual JuRoRs: different fi elds. tinctive regions corresponding to the hubs anD bRiDGes By inviting individuals such as Naimark different categories—some are more Besides the overall morphology of the and Sommerer to the juries of different central than others. Some categories network, the roles of individuals are categories, the organizers acknowledge appear as heavy, compact clusters, while of special interest. Some jurors occupy their transdisciplinary competence. others form an extensive, intricate web. the center of a cluster, having been in- Therefore, the bridges in the network Still other categories appear as narrow vited many times to a jury session of the established by those jurors can be read ribbons winding between the perimeters same category. In network terminology, as the organizers’ perspective on interdis- of other categories. these persons have a high degree centrality. ciplinarity. One particularly interesting The categories Computer Animation and Usually, these are jurors who have had example is the history of Bill Buxton’s Computer Graphics are among the oldest a great infl uence on the programmatic involvement in Ars Electronica juries. categories of the competition. Having direction of a specifi c category. Examples He was fi rst involved as a member of the shared many jurors over the years, they of such hubs are the U.S.-based curator Computer Music jury in the late 1980s. He appear in the layout as tightly connected and composer Naut Humon, who has joined the Interactive Art jury in the early with one another. Their concentrated ap- shaped the music competition for many 1990s and 10 years later he participated pearance results from the fact that in the years; net activist Joichi Ito for the net- once again as juror of the Computer Ani- early years of the competition the fi eld based art categories and the Digital Com- mation category (Fig. 2). This path re- was small, and especially in the fi rst 6 years munities category; and Sirikit Amann, the fl ects his professional trajectory from the jury composition changed very little. organizer of U19, the “junior” category. electronic music to Human-Computer Another early category, Computer Music, The importance of these three individu- Interaction and, as a research scientist in shows a similarly pronounced center but als is emphasized by the fact that other a 3D software company, to visual inter- also has fringes reaching out to other jurors in the same categories changed faces. categories—reflecting programmatic frequently and seldom participated more The record of jury participations not changes toward a more interdisciplinary than twice. only refl ects the personal histories of the approach in later years. By contrast, the Other jurors, such as the artists Mi- individuals involved but also shows trends categories of Interactive Art, Hybrid Art chael Naimark and Christa Sommerer and connections in the whole fi eld of me- and the categories covering net-based (who teaches at the art academy in Linz) dia art. The differences in the roles of ju- art forms form an extensive mesh with- have participated overall in fewer jury rors can be also expressed through their out a clear center, though still sharing sessions but have served in more than network centrality measures. Among the many of the same jury members. These one category. In the network layout, jurors with the highest number of jury

Offenhuber, Patterns of Choice 229 or the Next Idea competitions wins a prize Table 1. A comparison of degree and betweenness centralities of persons in the jury network. in one of the main categories. On the left, persons ranked by the number of jury participations from 1987 to 2009; on the right, persons ranked by their betweenness centrality measure, specifying the percentage of Some artists have received multiple all shortest paths in the network running through the specific node. awards either in the same category or in different fields. While jurors serving on Rank Degree Juror Betweenness % Juror different category juries reflect the orga- 1 12 Sirikit Amann 3.29 Naut Humon nizers’ perspective on interdisciplinarity, 2 10 Naut Humon 2.60 Jean-Baptiste Barrière artists winning in different categories reflect interdisciplinarity in artistic prac- 3 10 Alfred Nemeczek 2.40 Michael Naimark tice. A number of artists have received 4 9 Horst Hörtner 2.17 Christa Sommerer awards in both Computer Animation and 5 9 Joichi Ito 2.09 Horst Hörtner Interactive Art, but none in both an animation and a net-based arts category. 6 9 Loren Carpenter 1.95 Joichi Ito Tamás Waliczky, one of the most success- 7 8 Roger Frank Malina 1.90 William Buxton ful Prix participants, has received awards 8 8 Gerhard Johann Lischka 1.60 Roger Frank Malina in Computer Graphics, Computer Animation and, later on, in Interactive Art. Maurice 9 8 Rolf Herken 1.57 Florian Hecker Benayoun’s record shows a similar tran- 10 8 A.J. Mitchell 1.37 John Markoff sition from Computer Animation in the early 1990s to Interactive Art in the late 1990s. A similar pattern emerges in the early 2000s, showing a transition of artists previously awarded in Interactive Art mov- Table 2. Artists and companies who received the most awards (primarily names from the ing on to receive awards in net-based art Computer Animation and Visual Effects categories) forms: Digital Music and Hybrid Art. Rank Degree Artist Betweenness % Artist 1 7 John Lasseter 1.47 Tamás Waliczky The Networks Combined: 2 6 Tamás Waliczky 1.29 Paul DeMarinis Artists as Jurors 3 6 Industrial Light & Magic 1.28 Golan Levin The organizers of the competition often 4 5 Golan Levin 1.2 PIXAR invite awarded artists to join a jury in subsequent years. In order to account for 5 5 PIXAR 1.06 Shelley Eshkar this fact, I combined the jury and artist 6 5 Alejandro Viñao 1.06 Paul Kaiser networks. In the resulting network, the 7 4 Paul DeMarinis 0.93 Carsten Nicolai role of an individual as either a juror or an artist is expressed through the direc- 8 4 Bob Sabiston 0.91 Alessandro Ludovico tion of the link connecting the person 9 4 Andrew Stanton 0.85 John Lasseter to a jury session: links from a jury session 10 4 Kristi Allik 0.76 Scott Sona Snibbe to a person, for example, indicate that the person received an award from that particular jury. The combined network contains over 2,000 nodes, showing the participations (degree centrality) are are associated with the jury session from intertwinedness of the different fields in persons closely affiliated with the insti- which they received an award such as the a more distinctive way. For instance, only tution, such as Sirikit Amann, the U19 Golden Nica, an Award of Distinction or an the combined network shows the central organizer, and Horst Hoertner, the di- Honorable Mention. Compared to the co- role of the Interactive Art category in the rector of the Ars Electronica Futurelab. herent structure of the jury network, the history of the Prix Ars Electronica, which The top-10 list of persons with the most result offers a different picture: The art- occupies a central location between the jury participations also contains many ist network is more fragmented. This can other categories. This role can be con- jurors from the early phase of the com- be explained by the higher diversity of firmed by looking at the centrality val- petition (Table 1, left). Ranking the ju- awarded artists and the fact that it is rarer ues. In terms of degree centrality, the rors by betweenness centrality changes for an artist to receive multiple awards, highest number of prizes to single artists the picture. Now, the persons affiliated compared to the high number of jury was awarded in the animation category with Ars Electronica score lower, while members who participate in more than (Computer Graphics, Computer Ani- jurors who are located at the intersection one year. Still, a substantial number of art- mation and Interactive Art), while the between different fields move up in the ists have indeed received more than one individuals with the highest between- list, which is headed by artists associated award. Most of these artists are part of ness centralities are mostly individu- with music and interactive art (Table 1, two large and dense sub-networks, which als primarily involved in Interactive Art right). shape the most prominent features of the (Table 2). artist network. The smaller sub-network Most interestingly, the combined net- is composed of winners of the catego- work reveals the distinct decision pat- The Artist Network ries dedicated to young artists, U19 and terns in the interaction between jurors The process used to generate the jury [the next idea]. It may be speculated that and awarded artists in the network (Fig. network can be repeated in order to con- at some point these two “islands” will 3). The first pattern describes a situation struct a network of award winners, which merge, once an award winner from U19 where the same juror awarded a prize to

230 Offenhuber, Patterns of Choice Fig. 3. three decision patterns in the combined Jury/award network. left: an artist receiving multiple awards from juries sharing the same members. Middle: two artists who also served as jurors and each received awards from juries the other participated in. right: a juror receiving an award from a jury of which he was a member. (© Dietmar Offenhuber) the same artist repeatedly over multiple history so far: fi lm director Mark Dippé 20 years, the juries became more diverse years. On the structural level, this pattern in the Computer Animation category 1998 and jurors changed more frequently. can be identifi ed by isolating four-node (Fig. 3, right). However tempting, these Still, the overall composition and for- cycles in the network. Notably, this pat- patterns cannot be interpreted as evi- mat of the competition juries remained tern was quite common during the fi rst dence of a juror’s personal agenda, since remarkably consistent, judging from the 5 years of the competition, when the fi eld the personal infl uence of a juror on the fact that individual jurors from the very was much smaller and less diverse (Fig. decision is limited, keeping in mind that early Prix years kept getting invited until 3, left). A second pattern shows mutual a jury consists of fi ve to six individuals recently. award exchanges—an artist has received making a joint decision. The role in and impact of individual an award from a jury that included an jurors on the general competition is most artist who has received an award in an strongly visible in the temporal view. A earlier year from a jury in which the the tempoRal Dimension few individuals stand out in particular. former artist served as juror. This pat- The last aspect of this paper concerns Naut Humon, for example, played an im- tern can also be identifi ed by fi nding the temporal development of the jury portant role in the Music juries between four-node cycles in the network; in this composition. Organizing the jury net- 1997 and 2006, when he participated case, all nodes in the cycle have the same work along a temporal axis reveals how every single year. During this period, he number of incoming and outgoing links the number of categories and jurors grew was the only constant factor on the jury, (Fig. 3, middle). A third pattern shows an over time. Initially, Prix juries consisted as other jurors were frequently changed. artist receiving an award from a jury in of a relatively small group of individuals Before 1997 and after 2006, however, which the artist participated as a juror, a who served as jurors for multiple consec- Humon did not participate in any jury case that occurred only once in the Prix utive years. Over the course of the past of the Prix Ars Electronica (Fig. 4). Joi-

Offenhuber, Patterns of Choice 231 chi Ito held a similar position during the spective on the interfaces between the of Hegemony in the Eurovision Song Contest. Acta decade of 1995 to 2004 in the networked- different categories and their evolution Sociologica 39, 3 (1996), 309–325. art–related and Digital Communities over time. On the other hand, the award 5. Fenn, D., Suleman, O., Efstathiou, J., and Johnson, categories. network shows the perspective of artistic N.F. How Does Europe Make Its Mind Up? Connec- tions, Cliques, and Compatibility between Countries It is worth mentioning that the tran- practice, as far as connections between in the Eurovision Song Contest. Physica A: Statistical sition between the three major eras of fields are concerned. The temporal as- Mechanics and Its Applications 360, 2 (2006), 576–598. the festival, shaped by the artistic direc- pect shows how different fields of prac- 6. Wilson, S. Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Sci- tion of Gottfried Hattinger, Peter Wei- tice have influenced each other, reflected ence, and Technology. MIT Press, 2003. bel and Gerfried Stocker, did not leave in the biographies of individual artists. 7. Mitchell, W.J.T. Interdisciplinarity and Visual Cul- significant traces in the jury structure in While rarely acknowledged in the histo- ture. The Art Bulletin 77, 4 (1995) 540–544. general. The competition expanded and ries of media art, computer graphics and 8. On, J. From They Rule to We Rule: Art and Activ- evolved, but the fundamental orientation animation were an important influence ism. In G. Stocker and C. Schöpf, eds., Unplugged: of the competition remained unchanged. on the further development of interac- Art as the Scene of Global Conflicts. Hatje Cantz, 2002. This phenomenon represents a strong tive art, as reflected in the personal tra- 9. Granovetter, M.S. The strength of weak ties. Ameri- contrast to competing media art awards jectories of artists such as Peter Weibel, can Journal of Sociology 78, 6 (1973) 1360. such as the Transmediale Award, which Maurice Benayoun or Tamás Waliczky, all 10. ars electronica. ARS Electronica Festival History. underwent some dramatic changes and of whom received awards in the Computer 2010; . re-orientations, including the abolition Animation category. 11. Stocker, G. and Schöpf, C. Human Nature—Ars of all categories in 2005 [17]. Of course, one has to keep in mind Electronica 2009. Hatje Cantz, 2010. what the links in these networks actu- 12. Dirmoser, G. Quantitative Kunsthistorik—ARS ally represent and not get carried away Medienkunst. 2008; .

Who are the artists and jurors that have relational data such as the examined 13. Offenhuber, D. and Dirmoser, G. Semaspace. been most successful and influential networks contain a wealth of implicit in- 2009; . networks give an ambiguous answer. ous in the raw data. In the future, the 14. Fruchterman, T.M.J. and Reingold, E.M. Graph Counting awards and jury participa- study could be extended in two ways: Drawing by Force-directed Placement. Software— tion, the Computer Animation and Visual First, to complement the Ars Electronica Practice and Experience 21, 11 (1991) 1129–1164. Effects categories play a dominant role. data set with social network information 15. Baur, M., Benkert, M., Brandes, U., et al. Visone Directors and companies such as John from other sources, such as professional Software for Visual Social Network Analysis. In Graph Drawing. 2002, 554–557. Lasseter, Pixar and Industrial Light and and institutional affiliations, data from Magic have received more awards than social networking sites or participa- 16. Freeman, L.C. Centrality in Social Networks: I. Conceptual Clarification. Social Networks 1, 3 (1979) any other participating artists so far. Fur- tion in other festivals and conferences. 215–239. thermore, the same two categories have A second possibility would be a textual 17. transmediale. transmediale05. 2005; . less often than in the other categories. terminology and references with the so- 18. The jury networks can be explored interac- Many might see this prominence of cial network data gathered for this study. tively using the semaspace software tool at the fol- computer animation as anachronistic, We have already started to explore this lowing address: . in the current media art discourse. How- of the Mapping the Archive project men- ever, shifting the focus to a different set tioned earlier. The key question remains, Glossary of network properties—the relative lo- What characteristics can be explained cation of categories and individuals— through the relationships that are repre- topological distance—the term “distance” in this article usually refers to topological distance (the changes this picture. In this respect, sented in the network—the interactions number of steps along network paths between two the Interactive Art category holds a cen- between jurors, artists and curators? In nodes) rather than metric distance (the geometric tral location in the network between all this respect, the purpose of this article position in the layout). other categories. Accordingly, artists and has been to show how much implicit in- bi-partite graph—a network graph whose nodes can jurors associated with interactive, hybrid formation is contained even in a limited be divided into two different sets. Connections are only allowed between two nodes belonging to differ- and net-based art have the highest be- dataset. The two networks paint a rich ent sets, never between nodes of the same set. In the tweenness centrality values; they form picture of the Prix Ars Electronica as a example above, the two sets describe either persons or jury sessions. Persons can only be connected via a the bridges and interfaces that connect social system, its actors, their decisions shared jury session node. all other categories. This difference is a and their interconnections [18]. strong argument for the additional ben- network centralities—a considerable number of metrics have been developed for describing and efit of network analysis. While statistics References and Notes quantifying the location of a node in relation to the network it is embedded in. The three most basic cen- of awards and jury participations are Unedited references as provided by the author. reflected in the raw data, the different trality measures are degree centrality, describing the 1. Dirmoser, G., Ansätze einer quantitativen Kunst- number of incoming or outgoing connections of a roles of individuals and the relationships historik. 2009. Available from . distance to all other nodes, and betweenness centrality, describing the percentage of shortest network in the network representation. 2. Stocker, G., Leopoldseder, H., and Schopf, C. Ars paths that flow through a specific node. Network The comparison of the jury and the Electronica 1979–2009: The First 30 Years. Hatje Cantz, centralities are essential for understanding the role award networks shows different perspec- 2010. and importance of a node in a network in which information is exchanged. tives on interdisciplinarity in the field 3. Druckrey, T. Ars Electronica: Facing the Future: A Sur- of media art. On the one hand, the jury vey of Two Decades. The MIT Press, 2001. network represents the organizers’ per- 4. Yair, G. and Maman, D. The Persistent Structure Manuscript received 22 June 2010.

232 Offenhuber, Patterns of Choice