Award ceremony

First of all, we as a jury want to thank the organizers of the Media Forum for their invitation. We are proud and honored to be delegated for this serious and difficult mission to select the award winners of the current competition in the two sections "Multivideo" and "TV presence by extension". We want to emphasize the importance of this festival and the responsibility to show and promote media art, to take it for serious, because media art is not underground art (as we often heard during this festival) but it is the most innovative and challenging brand of contemporary art.

So, now let's turn to the awards. First, we would like to give the two encouraging prizes which mean membership in the Filmmakers Union to two Russian Artists.

The first encouraging prize goes to Roman Kornilenko for "Doctor Lucik" for its interesting experimental innovation.

The second encouraging prize goes to a couple: Andrej and Julia Velikanov for "The Dualism of a Language Sign is Asymmetric" for its social and political comment on TV presence.

The first and the only prize in the category "TV presence by Extension" goes to Andy Cox and Gabriel Guzman from the USA for "Together We Can Defeat Capitalism". It perfectly represents the intervention of TV into social, private and political life. This work combines sheet performance with new media, and as a result, criticizes the existing economic system.

Now the "Multivideo" competition. What we saw it this category was a good overview of national and international video works with a broad range of aesthetical and artistic approaches.

We discovered a number of works which we recognize as well-done and which are characterized by sufficient quality. But we could not find an outstanding nominee for the first prize in an international competition.

By awarding two second prizes we recognize these two works as the most interesting ones. Futhermore, we want to encourage these artists to continue their artictic endeavors in the field of new media.

We are aware that there are powerful and artistically outstanding works, and combining our forces, interest and enthusiasm we will find these videos in the next festival.

But now we award the third prize in this category to Julie-Christine Fortier for the Canadian / French production "Mechanical Rodeo" for its minimalism and humour within new media.

We are very happy to award the second prize ex aequo to the Russian artist Olga Stolpovskaya for "Abonents". In "Abonents", we appreciate the well-constructed composition of the narrative and its intense reflection on human relations in modern society.

The second part of the second prize goes to Andrej Velikanov from Russian for "Virtual Body of God". It is a contemporary prayer and an ironic approach to the faith in commercials which seemingly release us from our human profanity.

Susanne Jaschko.