CYFEST Artist ::vtol:: Receives Honorary Mention from ARS ELECTRONICA

CYFEST artist and CYLAND Audio Archive resident Dmitry ::vtol:: Morozov receives Honorary Mention from ARS ELECTRONICA 2015 in Sound Art and Electronic Music category for the ‘oil’ project.

The main idea of this project is to present exhibition visitors with the chance to destroy any object that might happen to be on their person, in order to transform it into a unique sound composition. The installation consists of five hydraulic presses, capable of crushing practically any object (a mobile telephone, pair of glasses, headphones or whatever). In the process of destruction, a special microphone records the sounds made as the object undergoes deformation, and in just a few minutes, a computer algorithm transforms them into a 20 minutes album.

The project is intended to provoke visitors into spontaneously ridding themselves of material consumer objects for the sake of creating their own individual work of art via deprivation, divestment and destruction. Sound has been taken as the chief medium here with good reason, since sound art is perhaps the least material and most abstract of all genres in art. The technological aesthetic involved constitutes an ironic attempt to make the process of art production into a technological process, but the result, unlike that of mass production, demonstrates a contrary phenomenon – this is a work involving programming and code in the context of generative art, with the potential to broaden the range of instruments at art’s disposal. At the end of the process, the sound production is automatically recorded onto an audio CD and handed over to the participant, completing the process of exchange.

Ars Electronica, an Austrian cultural, educational and scientific institute active in the field of new media art, founded in 1979, is now considering submissions for its Prix Ars Electronica 2015 award. The Prix Ars Electronica is one of the most important yearly prizes in the field of electronic and interactive art, computer animation, digital culture and music.