Dead Drops: Honorary Mention – Prix Ars Electronica

I am very pleased to announce that Dead Drops won an Honorary Mention at Prix Ars Electronica 2011!
A look at how our online practices leave a trace and shape our rights. Drawing on the Charter of Digital Rights (2021), the exhibition explores seven key areas with humour and everyday examples. Framed within the Observatory of Digital Rights and curated by Fundación Telefónica and Domestic Data Streamers, the show encourages reflection and debate around the safe, responsible, critical, and creative use of technology.
We accept cookies as if they were freshly baked biscuits, without having the slightest idea of what ingredients they contain. We share photos of our children’s birthdays or family trips as if they were WhatsApp stickers, without knowing where they might end up. We use the same password for our bank account and our grocery app (spoiler: not a good idea). We check a website to see if it’s going to rain, only to give away our data like candy on Halloween.
The exhibition Today Is a Good Day to Discuss Digital Rights seeks to raise awareness about the rights and duties that citizens exercise and develop in the digital sphere. Moreover, the show invites us to keep debating and building a system of guarantees around the digital ecosystem — a kind of ethical guide that helps us understand what digital rights and duties are, what they imply, and the opportunities the technological environment offers citizens.
Framed within the initiative of the Observatory of Digital Rights and curated by Fundación Telefónicatogether with the artistic collective Domestic Data Streamers — which presents six installations —, the exhibition features works by contemporary artists such as United Visual Artists, Eva & Franco Mattes, Paolo Cirio, Noemí Iglesias Barrios, Theresa Reiwer, Hasan Elahi, and Aram Bartholl, among others. Their works challenge visitors, help them understand, and encourage reflection on our actions as digital beings. A much-needed exhibition, it fuels the debate around digital rights and duties, and calls for a safe, responsible, critical, and creative use of technology. Because today is a good day to discuss Digital Rights.
By occupying nearly a third of our waking hours, screens are profoundly reshaping the contours of our relationships with others. In response, numerous journalistic and academic discourses echo concerns about the digital migration of our social lives: the idea frequently arises that the socio-technical systems at work in this migration are making us more resistant to diversity.
Our intention is to nuance this concern by acknowledging a foundational aspect of the internet—its original design to facilitate the virtuous and unprecedented emergence of communities of specific interests, often far more specialized than what our traditional offline social circles can accommodate. This utopia inevitably carries a tension between, on the one hand, the benefits of more efficient and far-reaching sociability, and on the other, the widely discussed risks of a social life limited to alters who are most similar to ourselves.
Curated by Aurélie Clémente-Ruiz, director of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, and Camille Roth, a researcher at CNRS in social sciences.
With: Nicolas Bailleul, Aram Bartholl, Léa Belloousovitch, Neïl Beloufa, Sophie Calle, Paola Ciarska, Laurent Grasso, Juliette Green, Ben Grosser, Özgür Kar, Béatrice Lartigue, Lauren Lee MacCarthy, Katherine Longly, Randa Maroufi, Magalie Mobetie, Martine Neddam, Philippe Parreno, Françoise Pétrovitch, Valentina Peri, Marilou Poncin, Jeanne Suspuglas
GOGBOT 2025
SCROLL PANIC REPEAT
18-21 september @ ENSCHEDE
festival for art music technology
Fundraiser event I participated in:
„Join us on Saturday, September 13, 2025, 13–20h at Engeldamm 64, 10179 Berlin (Kreuzberg).
Solidarity Fundraiser for the
Gaza Biennale –- Berlin Pavilion
Works by 100+ Berlin artists
Each work €50
Over 120 Berlin-based artists have already donated works on paper in solidarity with colleagues in Palestine. The fundraiser will make the Berlin Pavilion possible: It will support the participating artists in Gaza by paying them artist fees, reproducing works that cannot leave Gaza under the siege, and expanding the ecosystem of the Biennale that allows the public to engage with their work.
If you are a Berlin-based artist and would like to contribute works on paper to the fundraiser, please email fundraising@gazabiennaleberlin.com for more information.“
Join us live-in-studio with season two of the Radio Spaetkauf x Europäische Akademie Berlin podcast collaboration. This year we focus on CULTURE. Each episode features fresh voices and perspectives representing a wide array of backgrounds, expertise and disciplines. Host Daniel Stern is joined by researchers, academics, independent artists, journalists and community leaders with unique insights into our evolving cultural interactions.
September 13th: Museums are more than just buildings that house objects. They are sites of memory, meaning, and power – spaces where stories are told, preserved, and sometimes contested. But who decides what’s worth keeping? And how do museums evolve in response to the cultures and technologies of their time?
As boundaries blur between archive and activism, exhibition and experience, we ask: What is a museum today? And what should it be? Together we explore the shifting roles of museums in shaping public understanding, identity, and imagination.
Guests include:
Michael Soltau – Synthesizer Museum Berlin
Aram Bartholl – Media and concept artist
Lilja-Ruben Vowe – PhD in cultural history, curator and inclusive mediator
Dr. Wenke Wegner – Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation
Host: Dan Stern
The festival brings artistic short films into public space – presented in a mobile, seemingly improvised exhibition object: a transport cart with pneumatic tires, stacked with various boxes, crates and bags, all secured with colorful tension straps. Through peepholes in these containers, passersby can watch the films on hidden tablets or smartphones. The route leads through five locations in the district (Goslaer Platz, Mierendorffplatz, Österreichpark, Schustehruspark, Lietzenseepark). At each stop, the “mini-museum” stays for about one hour. The project is accompanied throughout the day by the two artists and curators Marian Luft and Moritz Frei, who will be present to assist and engage with the audience.
Curated by Marian Luft & Moritz Frei
With:
Iván Argote, Sophia Süßmilch, Björn Melhus, Hansol Kim, Barış Çavuşoğlu, Lorna Mills, Andrew Birk, Peng Li

I am very pleased to announce that Dead Drops won an Honorary Mention at Prix Ars Electronica 2011!
TELE-INTERNET from Aram Bartholl on Vimeo.
more documentation on http://datenform.de/teleinternet/documentation/
bit.ly/teleinternet
#TELEINTERNET bit.ly/teleinternet at Ars Electronica last weekend was awesome! Thanks to everyone for participating and thx to the As team for support! Most popular ‚piece‘ in the show was our coinopperated coffee machine 🙂
Stay tuned for more documentation …
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„A new cultural economy“ was the title of the symposium curated by Joichi Ito at Ars Electronica a week ago. I enjoyed a lot the brillant speakers most of them from the US and Jonah did write a good abstract on the presentations for Rhizome.
Buzz word collection: Intellectual property, copyright, creative commons, sience commons, GPL, open source, closed, amateur, creativity, remixing, sharing, crowd sourcing/computing, citizen journalism, lost authority, chaos, noise, truth, fear ….. and again and again the big examples: Music, Film and Wikipedia.
Sure we are talking about cultural economy and the example of the music economy development in last decade or the success of Wikipedia shows very well what’s going on. But in retrospective I ‚ve been missing some crucial questions:
– How will/can this whole development affect economy in general?
– What is the role of DIY (Do it yourself) and the free instructions culture development?
– In wich way will physical objcts/products be involved? (Just think of the upcoming rapid prototyping era.)
– Are we only talking about cultural/intellectual property?
– Is there a reason to wait for companies to come up with great new products like a green car, alternative energy sources or just day to day life simplicity?
– Where is the DIY mobile medicin prototyping lab kit for the 3rd world? And will medical industry do the same faults like spoiled music people?
Podcasts of all talks
Unfortunately there are no videos, but I can recommend the talk of Yochai Benkler.
Picture:
Watering cans on a graveyard in Berlin. Instead of having a few public cans everybody has its own one looked to a stand. A very good symbol on a current mindset of property in society. (with a maybe typical german twist.)

The Image Fulgurator by Julius von Bismarck (winner of a Golden Nica) was of course my favorite piece at Ars Electronica. In addition to the groundbreaking idea he did a really good job in documenting his latest interventions for the Cyberarts show at Ars Electronica. Besides a crucifix he added to Obamas speakers desk during the Berlin speech he traveled to Beijing and manipulated the most symbolic place of official China. He projected a pigeon related to the Magritte’s painting „L’Homme au Chapeau Melon“ on top of Mao’s face which was then only visible to chinese tourists with digi cams. Wow! A very good way of showing the Image Fulgurator’s power. I hope that he will release that beautiful video documentation online.

A very simple, again paper based and fun interactive project by Richard The » Gunnar Green » Frédéric Eyl » Willy Sengewald got an honary mention and was exhibited at Ars Electronica this year. It reminded me of a picture of an ‚interactive‘ facade I posted a while ago.
Appeel is a virus spreading through interacting individuals. Surfaces are covered by thousands of colored stickers laid out in a grid. Peeling a sticker off leaves a white spot in the grid, hence people start individually and collectively changing its appearance. Once off the wall, the stickers ask to be stuck somewhere: people begin putting them on objects, walls, people; they collect them, they compose new images, they write messages. Slowly, the little stickers spread, appearing further away from their source and occupying space.
Prix Ars Electronica 2008, Honorary Mention Interactive Art

Ars Electronica announced golden nica winners for 2008! In the category INTERACTIVE ART Julius von Bismarck got a golden nica for the Image Fulgurator. This piece is just awesome. Congrats Julius! Good job, jury!
The Image Fulgurator is a kind of inverted photo camera physically manipulating other peoples pictures in realtime. The exact moment someone takes a picture the Fulgurator does a flash projection onto the photographed object. A sensor detects other camera flashes and synchronizes the flash projection to them. In case of the movie below tourists end up having weird text messages in their pictures. A Checkpoint Charlie sign has an additional message on it but you can’t see it in real. This is a good picture explaining the setup.
Wow! I really like this piece a lot. Just imagine what you could do with this technology. (That’s why he is going for patent.)

I finally managed to put together a documentation about Second City Ars Electronica 2007. The festival invited me to make a design for Marienstrasse, to show my work and to involve other artists in collaboration for the Second City all relating to metavers and Second Life.
Pics info and more on the project page.
I had a great team! Thx to everybody!

A forest, half virtual, half real, on Marienstraße, Second City, Ars Electronica 2007. As in most computer games and 3D worlds, objects from the real world are “copied” or simulated in simplified form and in accordance with programming constraints. Textures are applied to 3D structures and, depending on lighting conditions, the images making up the virtual scenery are computed in real time during the game. Most trees are constructed out of two interlocking surfaces, each of which is covered with the same tree-view texture. The transparency of the gaps between the leaves and branches is provided by a so-called alpha channel in the graphics file. From a certain distance and the corresponding perspective, this abstracted form of a tree in virtual space doesn’t stand out as a simplification.
…read on & more pics on project page