Juror Greg J. Smith has selected proposals from four artists for the 2013 – 2014 Terminal Awards. Projects by Gottfried Haider, Josh Hite, Frederick Witold Ostrenko, and Atif Akin were selected.
Juror Statement
In selecting the 2013 Terminal Awards recipients, proposals were evaluated based on the provocativeness and clarity of project outlines, the strength of related past work and the manner in which proposals directly engaged the internet, as a medium. The four selected proposals are listed below.
Gottfried Haider’s “Drawing Circuits” playfully proposes a rudimentary browser to 3D milling machine workflow through which visitors to a website can draw electronic circuits and then manufacture them. In conflating the sketchpad and the electronic enthusiast’s workbench this project promises to create both a social space and an educational tool.
Frederick Witold Ostrenko’s “Conglomeration” is a sharp critique of the carnivorous capitalism of Silicon Valley that will transform the logic of a crude game prototype into a First-person shooter (FPS). Ostrenko’s proposed game riffs on the informatics of gaming and the ubiquitous data streams and visualizations of financial markets.
Rather than plug work into the tedious trappings of stock web portfolio templates, Atif Akin’s “The Mutant Space” proposes a sincere rethinking of online photo archives. Utilizing Processing.js and experimenting with the capabilities of modern web browsers, this work promises to construct a dynamic space to exhibit the eerie non-place qualities of a collection of photographs documenting urban environments, frozen in time by the Chernobyl meltdown.
Delving into the world of vernacular video, Josh Hite promises to stitch together a video comprised of footage of ‘trundling’ – the rolling of rocks and boulders down hillsides. Curating a meditation on the essential qualities of landscape through YouTube footage might seem counterintuitive, but Hite’s past work demonstrates his capacity to identify and foreground strange idiosyncrasies and patterns, culled from the natural world.
Greg J. Smith February 2013
