New media art at ARCO, Madrid

BlackBox is a new media art exhibition within ARCO, Madrid's contemporary art fair. Here's what i found about it in the Spanish press:

Eduardo Kac
received the Arco-Beep award for electronic art for Time Capsule. In 1997, the artist inserted a microchip with an identification number into his ankle in front of photographs taken of family members during the 1930's in Europe. He then registered himself via the Web in a database designed for identification and recovery of lost animals, making it the first instance of a human being added to the database.

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In the offArco category dedicated to the media art works that were not present at Arco, the winners of the awards are: Ricardo Iglesias and Gerald Kogler for Independent Robotic Community. Special mention to Miguel Angel Martin's net-art work Skking.exe

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"skking.exe is small application to ease the life of today's employee.

Download skking.exe and a fake System RunTime Warning Default notice. It will pop up above your screen and will progress in loop for an unlimited period, prviding the employee with a wonderful excuse to sneak out of the office for as long as s/he wishes because of a computer probelm.

Each euro lost by the company will be summed up and shown on a webpage."

Daniel Canogar's Photosynthetic Rememberance 1 is the sculpture of a huge tree made of fiber optic and plastic fallen on the floor that embodies the paradox between environmental destruction by humans and technological re-construction. Canogar inverted metaphorically the photosynthesis processus. In the installation, it's the tree itself that emits the light and projects digital images of green leaves on an ondulating screen.

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In the video installation by Shilpa Gupta, viewers can interact with video loops of a row of young women dressed in camouflage fashion outfits. Clicking on each figure triggers different movements, such as marching, squatting, jumping and spoken phrases like "don