Jury Statement To our knowledge, this is the first award given and solely dedicated to software art. This award is not about what is commonly understood as multimedia - where the focus is on data that can openly been seen, heard and felt. This award is about algorithms; it is about the code which generates, processes and combines what you see, hear and feel. The mere fact that the transmediale artistic software award is the first of its kind proves that algorithms have a longer history of being overlooked in the perception and criticism of digital art. While the code of a mere image, sound or text file passively relies on other pieces of software in order to be perceivable and editable, program code actually actively manipulates the machine. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of computing is that code - whether displayed as text or as binary numbers - can be machine-executable, that an innocuous piece of writing may upset, reprogram, crash the system, that the Internet and almost any electronic device technically depends on writing. The word processors we use on computers are typewriters built from writing. Your word processor behaves typewriter-like because the programmer chooses certain functions of the mechanical typewriter to model in code. It is modest self restriction on the part of the programmer that the word processor adheres to the typewriter model instead of filling your writing with random letters, twisting or erasing bits at will or improvising new writing from your words. Unless you know the program source code, you can't tell whether your E-Mail software sends your mail to the destination you specified or whether your operating systems actually stores your files and won't delete some of them on every February 29th because it contains some malicious code. Computer viruses might be seen as a critical form of software art because they make so-called users aware that digital code code is virulent. Computer software is not simply a tool. Every program that pretends to be a tool disguises itself. You expect that 'Save' will save and not erase. This feeling that you understand and control what the software is doing in the machine can only be based on trust in the programmer. For us, software art is opposed to the notion of software as a tool; not because we would want to differentiate some kind of high art from some kind of low craftsmanship of programming. Instead, software art has the potential to make us aware that digital code is not harmless, that it is not restricted to simulations of other tools, and that is itself a ground for creative practice. Software art could be algorithms as an end to themselves, it could subvert perceived paradigms of computer software or create new ones, it could do something interesting or disrupting with your computer, it could be creative writing, it could be science. Since we talk about algorithmic code when we talk about software art, we also talk about programming languages - perhaps even poetry in programming languages -, and we talk about the difference of source code in programming languages and executable compiled code. Unfortunately, we ran into problems here that might be telling how new the playing field is that this award has opened. With the single exception of Axel Roch's entry, the jury didn't receive the source code of any of the 49 contributions entered for the competition. Also, no works were entered in which algorithms or program code was part of its own presentation. We even had a high amount of entries where we could judge no software at all, since only video tapes of software-based installations were sent to us. Nevertheless, we are convinced to have entered an exciting field; a field which many artists raised in other new media still have to reckon with, while many other artistic coders we know didn't send entries. We could well have imagined to award something very simple - an elegant or a disturbing piece of program code, a sophisticated oneliner that blows one's mind and perhaps even one's machine. We have imagined many aspects of artistic software code which we partly found and partly didn't find in the entries. What we didn't or couldn't see were: - algorithms - meta-code - code-modifying code - efficient code - beautiful code - code as diary ( e.g. autobiographic writing, code that contains the history of it's own creation. - code libraries - embedded code What we saw were: - synthesizers (i.e. algorithmic generators of data) - filters (i.e. algorithmic processors of data) - code as social platform - code as environmental control - code as glue - obscure code - ironic code - simulated code - missing code - non-working/impossible code - application code - self-disguising code - insignificant code - code as writing - disruptive code - code as attitude There was no rule of thumb for us except that we excluded work we either didn't find interesting as software, or which we didn't find interesting as artworks, or both. We did not award a first price, but rather saw the entries we shortlisted as signals; signals from where software art departs and where it is tending towards. Vexation 1 - Randomness is an interesting software art issue. There is, at the core, the many problems of the generation of random/pseudo random number sequences. Further, how are those sequences incorporated into the code? To what aspects of the software are they applied? Too much randomness deteriorates into noise - boring. Too little randomness is regular and predictable - also boring. Dancing along the chaotic edge takes practice and greatly influences the pacing, attitude and apparent depth of the software. One particularly appetizing flavor off randomness among the entries is exhibited by "Vexation1" by Autoine Schmitt. - While the visual image suffers from predictability, a unchanging pong-like puck, the movement of this puck within the frame is anything but predictable. The quirky randomness within the program's restrictions is engaging and is able to keep you guessing far longer than seems likely. Audiovisual Environment Suite Audiovisual Environment Suite by Golan Levin was a large and involved entry which took a while to sort through. While the software was presented as a a nondescript interactive installation, the jury felt the real strength of the work was in the widely experimental nature of the writing. The Flocculus software in particular was a beautiful sign of how writing it yourself (WIY) can open new territory. Visiting the author's website, (http://acg.media.mit.edu/people/golan/index.html) shows his depth of coding and range of experimentation. To what will he finally apply all this visual language? After making his discovery, the author seems less decided as to what to do with the code, often putting the choice in the user's hands. We think Mr. Levin could be more articulate in defining how the software is presented. As a source of writing, the motion and shape of the Flocculus seems to have already created a rich vocabulary and he could spend more time experimenting with what can be said with it. DJ I Robot Okay, okay, we admit the DJ I Robot is cool and the jury would love to see it perform at the Transmediale festival - especially in competition against human DJ's. But the reason we choose to mention the DJ I Robot is that it is a clear example of how ideas can be expressed in machine control code. The area of overlap between the timing of the machine and musical time is an open ground for improvisation in coding. The DJ I Robot software controls the mechanical arm movements of a robot to work turntables, spinning them to produce sounds. To make the DJ good, the timing code must be more than functional, it must also be musical. Here are some things to consider about the robot's code: What is a good 'DJ algorithm'? How does one create a model for spinning records? Can human DJ movements be sampled and filtered? To what extent is the mood of the party accounted for as feedback in the code's decision tree? Would your DJ algorithm be the same as mine? The code for a DJ is clearly a matter of style. We like DJ I Robot because it highlights the personal and subjective possibilities of coding. Ultima Ratio Among the works submitted for the transmediale artistic software award, Daniela Alina Plewe's "Ultima Ratio" certainly is one of the conceptually most rigorous. It's a elaborate piece of philosophical-linguistic software with an interactive video installation as its equally elaborate visual interface. The program isolates inner conflicts from Shakespeare's "Hamlet" - "Should Hamlet kill Claudius?" - to logically resolve them through a web of pro- and contra-questions. Some parameters, as well the visualization in the installation space, can be influenced by the user. Since they were invented, computer-generated poetry and chat bots like Joseph Weizenbaum's notorious program "Eliza", the computer psychoanalyst, have traditionally favored deception and randomness. "Ultima Ratio" is quite the opposite to such rhetorical devices. It brings the formal rigour of analytic language philosophy into computer art. Not surprisingly, this has stirred up controversies in the computer and net art communities, objections that "Ultima Ratio" reduces the complexity of language, cognition and social interactions to formalisms. While it's interesting enough when an artwork provokes such debates, we would like to put it the other way round: It might be questionable if language can be modelled through computing, but it goes without saying that computing is modelled through language. The intersection of language, decision-making and machines is exactly what computing, and "Ultima Ratio", is about. We thus found it unfortunate that we couldn't judge the work after its software itself, but only after a video tape and the concept description. Nevertheless, our honorary mention does not only include Daniela, who authored the concept and supervised the development of "Ultima Ratio", but also her programming and design team the Technical University of Berlin, the City University of London and the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg. The people who coded and technically implemented this work are: Bela Bargel, interface design, Joachim Boettger, interface design and visualization, Eike Dirks, Web design, Uwe Küssner, computer linguistics, Andreas Raab, chief developer of visualization, Mario Schmidt, Web design, Michael Schröder, credited by Daniela for "default logic" and Web design, Manfred Stede, computer linguistics and Marcus Verwiebe, visualization. Signwave Auto-Illustrator We said that software art begins where so-called software tools end. The two second prizes we give were the clearest signals in that direction, or, to be more precise, one won in the "signal" category while the other one was our favorite in the "noise" department. We consider the "Signwave Auto Illustrator" a signal because it subverts the notion of the software tool and throws generative visuals at the face of its "user": Upon first glance, it is a smooth vector-based graphics program similar to Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw, programs whose interfaces themselves have driven the interface metaphor of the tool to an extreme. When a user actually employs these tools, trying - for example - to draw a circle, the circle ends up as a smiley face, using the text tool inserts randomly generated words, the rectangle tool makes a house. Auto-Illustrator also creates tools that have interesting but unconventional uses such as the magnet that pulls nearby lines together. We notably value the Signwave Auto Illustrator as a statement from where software art departs - namely those so-called 'tools' digital artists have accustomed themselves to work with - and where it goes, namely towards an artist who becomes a programmer himself and whose work is algorithmic and generative even where it presents itself as a text or as an image. Nebula.M81 As the noise complement to Signwave Auto-Illustrator's signal, we picked Netochka Nezvanova's "Nebula.M81". This program has been subject of our heated discussions pro and contra, a fact we eventually found an important reason itself to give it an award. Nebula is a web-based Macintosh user application that, apart from that, defies an exact description: It is an aesthetic processor of html code retrieved from arbitrary web sites which it turns into animated text, graphics and sound displays that can partly be influenced by user-triggered parameters. Nebula, along with the extremist chic ASCII art communication of its author also known in the Net.art community as antiorp, ranked highest on our scales of code as attitude.