Members of the FIVA ONLINE 95 International Jury considered 10 web-based interactive creations within the festival Competition section. We'd like to take this opportunity to offer them a profound "Thanks!" for all of their tireless efforts!
The festival jury was composed of Sara Diamond Artistic Director/Executive Producer of Media and Visual Arts at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Alberta, Canada. Mark Pesce Co-creator of the Virtual Reality Modelling Language, VRML, designed to bring three dimensional worlds to the Internet. Stephen Wilson Artist and educator from San Francisco State University.
FIVA.PRIX.ART.NET : Tele-Garden
For it's engaging use of the web, bringing together an international group of strangers to explore and nourish nature in sharing a common garden, the FIVA.PRIX.ART.NET goes to Tele-Garden as a powerful metaphor for virtual communities. It's detailed attention to nature on the net reminds us that a creative cyber ecology assumes a healthy biological world.
Details of the garden are delightful - planting a seed, watering it, observing its growth, dealing with the ecology of a small space shared with others. The chat and messaging capabilities are arranged in an intriguing way - one can leave messages and communicate with others as one passes over their virtual seed plot.
Congratulations to the entire Tele-Garden creation team.
Three interactive, network-based creations have been awarded special mentions by the jury for particular use of the Web as an artistic space or medium, either in their pursuit of narrative, fantasy, speculation, critique or pleasure.
A funny, hip, hilarious use of a hypermedium with artistic content unlike much found on the Web. The themes of science and pseudoscience are especially apropos. Moving down the page, like reading from an ancient scroll, serves as an excellent metaphor for going deeper into the water while traversing the mythological space created in this pseudo-historical world.
Technically and conceptually ground-breaking, with constant additions, this ambitious project provides an interesting combination of artist-initiated material and contributions from the Web community. The variety of text, images, sounds, and video resources is significant; allowing the user to construct their own media mix from content created for the hypermedium.
A whimsical but critical engagement with bioengineering. Somewhere between a quiz show, personal ad, mail order form--lots of humour in the interface. The linkage of the real "concrete" based exhibit with the Web event is an interesting mix given the conceptual focus of the site on the nature of bodies in a network age. The invitation to "choose" a body via forms is an appropriate exploration of the network context and successfully invites viewers to ask questions of themselves in the process.
FIVA ONLINE 95, The First Festival of Independent Audio/Visual Arts Online, brought together 50 artists and over 150 works of digital video, animation, imagery and interactive multimedia creativity. This public online festival has been attended by literally thousands of visitors in many countries with diverse cultures, backgrounds and artistic tastes.
The online audience cast their ballot for their FIVA ONLINE 95 Personal Favourites in both the Interactive Web Competition and the FIVA Gallery during the period of October 9-29, 1995.
The 1995 winners of the FIVA ONLINE 95 Public Awards are:
Congratulations to all the artists that helped make
FIVA ONLINE 95 an overwhelming success.See you next year!