Jury: Nancy Adajania, Timothy Druckrey, Shaheen Merali

“Abandon all Tiope, ye who enter the hell of images”
(Abel Gance, 1915)

The long spell of the ‘image’ continues to defy reduction. Despite a 20th century in which its efficacy alternated between witness and provocateur, between evidence and deceit, between revelation and desolation, the full implication of its persistence has yet to be fully realized. Despite several decades of convincing critical writing, the ‘image’ has sustained itself against a continuing effort to comprehend its devastating presence. What seems so necessary is a rethinking of the ‘image’ beyond the limited terms of its nostalgic or phenomenological status as a signifying system for some presumptive real, but rather as itself a deeply embedded process in which the ‘image’-no less 'reality'-is an aspect of a cognitive system representing far more than hard evidence for actuality (or its representations). Instead, reality, like subjectivity, becomes a variable, with the image its momentary transformation. Following Deleuze, the idea of the image-as-event extends its legitimacy as mere description by registering it in the realm of the experiential. Suddenly one might imagine the navigation of the image as more than the scrutiny of its indexed signifiers, but as a dynamic process in which the (in)stability of the moment itself is both registered and extended.

The Image jury was faced with a wide array of works that shattered the singularity of the momentary in forms that defied simple categorization. Indeed there was not a single image to be seen. Rather, the jury process persuasively revealed that the porous borders in the categorizations of ‘media art' are as much an acknowledgement of convenience as they are an admission of the slippery hangover from another time. In viewing and working with hundreds of works, it was plain that we are both riveted by the concept of the ‘image’ and humbled by its transformations.

Honorable Mentions
Deep Blue, Mark Boswell (us)
Stop Motion Studies, David Crawford (se)
Gravity, Dragan Espenschied (de)
19., Christopher Hills-Wright (ca)