An all-star jury composed of Arduino inventor Massimo Canzi, Arthur C Clarke Center director Sheldon Brown, tech artist Motor Comino, activist Jasmina Tesanovic and OG Cyberpunk Bruce Sterling are judging the Artmaker prize for the tenth annual Share Festival: this year's theme is "Sincerity" and the prize goes to "art works with the virtues of lucidity, honesty and clarity. Our theme for 2017 asks for self-evident truth and heartfelt emotion, and scorns all slyness, demagoguery and deceit."
You've got one week left to enter!
Our electronic network society has many virtues, but opacity, deceit and obscurantism are among its vices. For 2017, Share Festival raises its lantern of Diogenes to search for technical artworks that are honest.
How can a work be technically accomplished, yet also lucid, clear and trustworthy? How can art works gracefully remove the smoke-and-mirrors of mystification and make an art of explaining themselves? How can technology art treat the audience with justice, fairness and respect for their civilized intelligence? Who has the emotional courage to privilege the heartfelt confession over the domination of digital craft?
We sincerely invite you to enter your art work for this year's theme of 'Sincerity'.
Our stellar jury of international experts is searching for art works with the virtues of lucidity, honesty and clarity. Our theme for 2017 asks for self-evident truth and heartfelt emotion, and scorns all slyness, demagoguery and deceit.
On March 31, we will put our imaginary ideas to a pragmatic test with the new Share 'Artmaker' portable tool kit. This event will be a seminar in which some of Italy's best-known technology artists gather at the Torino Fab Lab to get hands-on with our new creative toolbox.
Why the 'Artmaker' tool set? Because standard, everyday art-supply stores never have the proper tools that the contemporary creative needs for creating machine art, kinetic art, device art, media installations and net.art. The modern tech-artist is a mobile person, and therefore needs lightweight, agile, durable road-equipment, so as to maintain or repair art-devices created in the heavy machine-shop, fab-lab or tech atelier.
Share Festival has therefore assembled the portable 'Artmaker' set, the first toolkit ever specifically curated for the pressing needs of today's technology-artists. These chosen hand-tools are beautiful, elegant, and well-designed, because most of them are manufactured in Italy. The entire set is so portable and lightweight that even a humanities graduate can lift it, and yet it is so intrinsically meaningful, so endowed with creative purpose that you, the artist, will immediately feel the urge to build something complicated with it. We sincerely promise that these tools will efficiently and usefully perform artistic functions!
The Artmaker toolkit is also supposed to be (a) affordable and (b) safe, and here we should frankly admit that our Share Festival Artmaker has some issues. These tools are gorgeous, but they cost a fortune and could easily kill you. So we will be publicly gathering our well-chosen Italian experts to confront the Artmaker set, to figure out whether its artist-users might be wounded or perhaps arrested in airports.
To accomplish this end, our brave volunteers will rehearse making some prototype art objects with the Artmaker's various blades, pliers, wires, vices, hammer, LED lights, Arduino board and its many other elegant yet ominous components. This March 31event will be the first time that the Share 'Artmaker' set has ever been used by people who know what they are doing. The audience will not participate in this seminar (because we lack the legal safety clearances), but it will probably be a lot of fun to watch.
