The London based installation artist Stanza has won the SHARE PRIZE 2012 in Torino Italy for his work titled Capacities. The piece of work uses real time data of the city and captures the changes over time in the environment (city) and represents the changing life and complexity of space as an emergent artwork. Its an artwork about the internet of things, smart cities and connecting spaces. Stanza’s work can be seen on ArtLyst, Visit Gallery Here
The Jury Statement explains; “What is the role of art today, in this moment of social transition towards the city of the future? It was from this perspective that the artists interpreted the theme Open Your City, exploring the key concepts word by word. The short-list of the Jury reflects the reappearing artistic interpretation of the modern urban landscape as system, where the solid element is replaced by the message, the information and the database, a real, but dematerialized city. Artists have been short-listed by an international jury, consisting of Simona Lodi, Carlo Ratti, Bruce Sterling and Mirjam Struppek, on the basis of the artistic value of their work and its relevance to the Share Prize theme”.
Capacities: Real Time Complex – Connected Cities by Stanza is an installation dedicated to the complexity of life in an environment. Changes in each of the spaces are monitored in real time, as they give rise to constant tensions, highlighting the behaviour of complex systems and the emergent properties that appear. In this case the organism is the city and not the single individual; it is the entire urban habitat as a whole, revealing its nature as a multifaceted system. The installation is the real-time mirror image of everything that changes, gathering huge amounts of data that are transformed aesthetically into a physical copy of the city, made up of cables, lights and sensors that represent shifts in environmental parameters measured numerically. The obsessive focus is on the observation of environmental data by gathering measurement on temperature, light, atmospheric pressure, noise and the sounds of the city outside the museum. Gathering digital data on the environment has become an art, and art has become a data set rather than a collection of molecules. The short-list of the Jury reflects the reappearing artistic interpretation of the modern urban landscape as system, where the solid element is replaced by the message, theinformation and the database, a real, but dematerialized city.
The aim of the Share Prize is to discover, promote and support contemporary art in our global and digital age. The competition is open to all artists that explore issues concerning our society today, in which globalisation and the pervasive reach of technology and new media have become the object of artistic interest, against a backdrop of continuing, non-stop change. The Share Prize was launched in 2007 as a cornerstone of the Share Festival, held in Torino-Italy. The cultural intent of the Share Prize is to make the Share Festival open and accessible to all artists. A jury of experts is tasked each year with short-listing six finalist works and selecting the winner.