ZKM AppArtAward 2017

Table of content

Preface

In the artistic design of apps new tendencies emerge in rapid succession. To follow these aesthetic and technical developments and to award prizes for the best apps is the mission of the AppArtAward competition, now in its seventh year. Besides the principal categories “Game Art” and “Sound Art,” this year’s competition features for the rst time the category “AppARTivism.” By combining activism and art, we are keeping abreast of the numerous recent developments in which new media are being utilized in the arts for social or political concerns. For example, in his web app »Polluted Selfie«, David Colombini uses narcissistic sel es as agents combatting environmental pollution, and thus provides a critical approach which underlines the fact that every single individual contributes to the catastrophe of climate change. Synaesthetic components, which already characterized the art of the entire twentieth century, also lead time and again to artistic and technical surprises in new app creations. In the category “Sound Art,” this year the jury has given the award to two apps (»Mazetools Soniface by Jako Gruhl and Stephan Kloß, »Visual Beat« by Max Mörtl), which in different ways both demonstrate the topicality of the genre. Computer games are classic products of digital technologies, and computer game applications on mobile devices offer an inexhaustible source of artistic inspiration. »Glitchskier« by Shelly Robin Alon is the award-winning app in the category “Game Art” from a host of outstanding entries. To give an impression of the vivid variety of AppArt, in addition to this year’s award winners the ve highlight apps of 2017 plus a best-of from the history of the AppArtAward are presented on the following pages.

In 2016, already there were more mobile communication connections than people on the globe. Since some years, thus, the smartphone has been far more than just an ordinary tool and artistic medium. It has be- come a symbol of all communication. Language is a symbolic code, just as music and images are symbolic codes. Mobile devices, especially the omnipresent smartphone, bring all these forms of symbolic codes together. They open access to a new horizon, the horizon of the open codes of media convergence. The ZKM | Karlsruhe will devote a major exhibition to the subject of »Open Codes. Living in Digital Worlds« as of October 20, 2017. Utilizing newest digital technologies the exhibition will be a mixture of laboratory and lounge, that tries a new exhibition format appropriate to the public of the rising sharing society, the knowledge society of the digital 21st century.