May 21, 2004
Winners of Turbulence's Comp_04
http://turbulence.org/comp_04/awards.htm

New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. is pleased to announce the winners
of Comp_04:

1. Kate Armstrong and Michael Tippett
2. Andy Deck with featured poster graphics from contributors Sonja
Smith, Jorn Jontvedt, Bina Altera, Veronica Perales, Fred Adam, jimpunk,
Paul Garrin, Laurent Fetis, Fran Duncan, and John Schettino.
3. Nick Montfort, Dan Shiovitz, and Emily Short
4. Martine Neddam, with BlueScreen and students from Shanghai
University, China.
5. Ricardo Miranda Zuniga, with collaborators in the US and Nicaragua
(to be announced)

Each team will receive $5,000. The commissioned works will be launched
in spring 2005. Eighty-seven collaborative applications involving
several hundred individuals were received, many of which were highly
competitive.

Comp_04 was made possible by a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for
the Visual Arts. Turbulence will run a second international and
hopefully multilingual competition in 2005.

PROJECT DESCRIPTIONS

GRAFIK DYNAMO
by Kate Armstrong and Michael Tippett

Grafik Dynamo will use XML and RSS feeds to load live images from blogs
and news sources on the web into a live action comic strip. The images
will be accompanied by narrative fragments that are dynamically loaded
into speech and thought bubbles and randomly displayed. The strip will
run indefinitely, fed forever by events in the world. The only
interactive function allowed to the user is a single button, "POW,"
which, when pressed, takes a snapshot of Grafik Dynamo at that exact
moment. The user may have this image emailed as keepsake of a moment in
narrative time that has passed.

IMPRIMATUR&
by Andy Deck, with featured poster graphics from contributors Sonja
Smith, Jorn Jontvedt, Bina Altera, Veronica Perales, Fred Adam, jimpunk,
Paul Garrin, Laurent Fetis, Fran Duncan, and John Schettino.

Imprimatur& is a free, easy-to-use tool for producing posters. Users
contribute, in real time, to a poster layout. Creativity becomes a
shared process, as unpredictable as the people who are passing through.
The artist, rather than providing images, provides a system intended to
activate the viewer's thought and expressiveness. Against the backdrop
of a mass media culture that promotes conformity and passivity,
Imprimatur… encourages "viewers" to choose themes and produce their
own messages. It propels on-line expression out of the ink jet and into
the streets.

UNTITLED
by Martine Neddam, with BlueScreen and students from the University of
Shanghai, China.

This team will create an online identity who will embody specific
aspects of Chinese culture and society. The public will not only be able
to communicate with this character by all possible online means, but
will be able to adopt and make use of his/her personality to express
themselves online and to the world. Custom-designed software
specifically created for this website will allow for the collective
sharing of this virtual character by any registered user, who will
remain anonymous and therefore able to express their opinions freely.

MYSTERY HOUSE TAKEN OVER
by Nick Montfort, Dan Shiovitz, and Emily Short

The artists will reverse engineer Mystery House, the first graphical
adventure game; reimplement it in a modern, free language for
interactive fiction development; and make a kit freely available to the
public so that others may modify Mystery House Taken Over as they see
fit. The artists will create their own modified versions and commission
ten such games from the interactive fiction community and from other
creators of net.art and electronic literature. Thus, the project will
also introduce several novel games, all with identical structure, which
will be artistic contributions themselves.

NICA TRUCK
by Ricardo Miranda Zuniga, with collaborators in the US and Nicaragua
(to be announced)

Nica Truck is an on-screen wrestling match that employs the history
between Nicaragua and the United States to define the match, a history
of intervention and resistance, dating back to the mid-19th century. The
game will offer at least four characters for the player to choose from;
each character will be modeled after specific physical stereotypes from
Nicaragua and the U.S. and each character will feature moves/abilities
pertaining to the history of that stereotype. Although the game will
simulate a wrestling match, it will alternate between free-style
wrestling and gift giving, depending on the choices made by the user and
the capabilities programmed into the game's characters. Players will be
able to chat with one another and if possible view one another via web cams.

COMP_04 JURORS: Luci Eyers, low-fi; Marc Garrett, Furtherfield; Eduardo
Navas, Net Art Review; Norie Neumark, out-of-sync; and Helen Thorington,
Turbulence.

For more information, see http://turbulence.org/comp_04/awards.htm