19th ifva Awards - Interactive Media Category Jury Meeting Transcript

Jury Members: Bryan Chung (Chung), Henry Ma (Ma), Jane Prophet (Prophet), Eve Tam(Tam), Jason Chiu (Chiu)
ifva representatives: Teresa Kwong (Kwong), Kattie Fan (Fan), Wa Choi (Choi)

Kwong:

ifva is a platform to promote and nurture the next current of creative talents, bothin Hong Kong and Asia. The ifva Awards is an annual event. At the moment wehave five categories. The IM category is one of them and is the youngest, and is
now in its 9thyear. At the moment, this category is only open for Hong Kong

residents. The artists in this category would have experimented with thepossibilities of interactive media. At the same time, these are all independentworks, which means they are not commissioned by a commercial firm. For theawards, we highlight a work’s independent spirit and also creativity.

I need to give you more information about the awards themselves. For thiscategory, there will be three awards. The Gold Award winner will be entitled to a
$50,000 cash prize, one trophy, and he or she can also take a festival visit, either
to Ars Electronica in Austria or transmediale in Berlin. We will support the air
ticket, hotel stay and festival pass. The Silver Award winner will get a $30,000
cash prize and one trophy. Lastly there is a Special Mention, the winner of which
will get a certificate. The reason we have Special Mention is because ofsuggestions given by previous jury members. Some works’ overall standards may
not be as good as Gold or Silver Awards, but still there are some aspects that jury
members would like to highlight and give encouragement. If there are no further
questions we can start our discussion.

Chiu:

Just now when I looked at the exhibits, some works have artists there to explain
the works while others don’t. How do we, as jurors, adjust for this evaluation?
Should we only take into account what is communicated by the work itself?

Prophet:I personally think a work must stand or fall on its own, because you have publicdissemination where the artist is not there at all times, then that’s the way the
public receives the work. I think the work should function without that narrative,
and if the work needs a narrative, the narrative should have been put there on
paper or in some other way.

1

Ma:

Did you invite all the artists to stand by and explain their works to the jurors?

Choi:

It was the opening, so all the participants will attend this opening.

Kwong:

It’s not compulsory.

Ma:

They don’t know the jurors will be there?

Choi:

They don’t know the jurors would be there at that moment.

Kwong:In the first edition we had the artists explain their works to the jurors, but jury
members feel that the works would stand up on their own, so we cancelled themeet the artist session.

Chung:

I agree that the works should explain themselves. In the past we invited the artists
to be there in case we have some questions about the work, to provide additional
information about the works.

Kwong:

Just now Henry asked if the artists receive subsidies for their work. We don’t. We
just offer them space, and they have to pay for the set-up themselves. They only
get 5 days for the set-up.

Tam:

Before we start, are we going to discuss the criteria, or do we assess according towhat you have set down here?

Kwong:

Basically, this is our guideline, but maybe jury members will have their own set of
extra elements to consider.

Prophet:How do you normally do this? Do you go through each piece?

Kwong:

We can start talking about the works themselves. The first is A dream on
September 18.

Prophet:I think if there was not somebody in the room explaining what people have to do,
the interactive interface is not intuitive. The whole gallery rhetoric is “do not touch
the work”, so nobody wanted to touch it while I was in there. Finally people tried to
do it but couldn’t, and then two people managed to do it under instruction. I
thought it’s an interesting project. It worked better than I expected it to, for I
2

remembered thinking, “Wow, this is going to be hard.” Once you got over that
hurdle, it worked quite well, but it wasn’t intuitive.

Ma:

Yes, I totally agree. Even the set-up I feel a bit dangerous. The concrete is
attached to an alley for lifting up. I see the structure moving in a very unstable way.
I feel the whole set up is not totally fit, at this moment, at least, so improvement
should be made.

Chiu:

I totally agree. I don’t have anything to add. The experience is unique. I sort ofdidn’t know what to do, then I do it, and I don’t know what to feel afterwards. If thatis the objective, then it is one thing, but I looked at the artist statement, and it’s notwhat they intended for us.

Prophet:When I was reading the artist statement, I thought I was missing one of the pieces,because from this description, I didn’t know that it was that piece. There’s quite a
bit of mismatch.

Chung:To me I enjoyed the sensational elements of the work—the audio and visual, but itlacks the narrative that allows us to perform according to the instructions. Also thereward, after the heavy exercise with the wall, was the smoke and color images.
So what else in context about the dream?

Tam:

In general, I agree. I like to add that given the tablet is so heavy, it’s not quite
assessable to the audience.

Ma:

Especially if you’re talking about interactive media, we wish the audience would
participate in that kind of interaction, especially if I have to move by myself, I haveto stand in front of that concrete. The visual effect is on the other side so you can’t
see what happens behind you. If you turn your head to see the effect, you cannot
hold the concrete well.

Prophet:The positive thing about it is the work is very three dimensional. You go in andyou see something that’s almost two dimensional, and then if you interact with it,or, if you’re lazy like me, watch other people do it, then suddenly you get thiswhole 3-D experience.

Chiu:

If there are minor adjustments made, you can get very different results.

3

Kwong:Anything to add? If not, the second work is and other wish.

Prophet:I think it really failed to achieve its goals. It’s ambitious in the way it connected or
disconnected between two different levels—we saw that in the proposal. When
we looked at the proposal, we felt this is going to work if it’s really well-finished.
And it’s not really well-finished. The idea is a lovely idea, but I think the simpler
the idea, the better the finish has to be. And it’s just isn’t there.

Ma:

I have expectations about it, for it is a project that tries to capture the wishes ofpeople. But the installation does not really perform, especially I feel a bit worried
about people climbing up the stairs. I really tried, I almost hit my head. The
second issue is, the original design of this work is different. The audience on theupper floor should make a wish while the audience on the lower floor listen to thewishes. The piece should be connected between these 2 floors. The present
setting cannot show the relationship at all. (The present setting: The audienceson the upper floor listen to the wishes while the audiences make a wish on thelower floor. Two pieces of the installation are attached from the ceiling). And I
can’t hear my voice clearly when I tried to listen back to the recording.

Chiu:

Do you mean there’s supposed to be audio recording?

Prophet:It’s real time.

Ma:

If it’s real time, then it’s a disaster, because you can’t hear yourself.

Tam:

You hear the wishes of the others, not yourself.

Chiu:

You hear yourself mumbling.

Prophet:I didn’t get that at all.

Ma:

The audio system does not work well.

Tam:

In any case, I think it’s a very poetic idea, but the actual installation is not very
poetic. It comes down to a very simple and not very new idea at the end.

Prophet:

For me, the concept makes sense is just seeing somebody up the ladder with
their heads in the clouds. But putting your head in the cloud is not a very4

satisfying experience.

Chiu:

Why did they change? Because of the given environment? Why did they change
from the proposal to the installation?

Fan:

Usually we allow a certain amount of change from the proposal to the final work.
For this particular work, she decides to use this set-up because of the systemused to send the signal back to the two floors, she thinks the setting now is morefeasible for her to set up the concept. This is her idea. We allow the visualpresentation to be amended, but the original idea should be still presented.

Chung:For me, it cannot live up to the expectation set up in the proposal. What I guess it
lacks is some sort of physicality of something that carries the wishes. Now she’s
just using the voice or speaking to emptiness in order make a wish. A physicalform would be easier for us to relate making wish and getting wish in different
locations.

Prophet:Conceptually it’s problematic. I saw the top one, then I went downstairs and I
thought, “That’s the wrong way round.” With some minor adjustments, it could
fundamentally change the work.

Kwong:The next one is d’ AR uck.

Chiu:

I think it’s a great idea, I don’t know why it uses the duck. It could be a lot more
imaginative and it could capture a lot more imagination of the consumers. There
are merits in this work because it’s a stand-alone without someone to explain, andit’s very easy to understand because the set up itself shows you both the video
clip and the results, and you can download and send to yourself. One of theimportant things about interactive media work is taking advantage of interactive
media and letting users experience it. So downloading on your smart phoneallows people to experience it, and it’s not confined to a physical space. It’s
simple, easy to understand, and appeals to a lot of people. These are its good
points. The only drawback is that it confines itself to the duck, which I think is
unnecessary. It could start with the duck and change to something else. With theshort production time, the execution of the work is quite smooth.

Ma:

Not everybody can go to the harbor and take a close look at the duck, so after the
duck is gone, you still get a chance to see it, so that’s why he used it. The
5

installation cannot simulate the experience of using the app.

Prophet:When I used it, I thought there was quite tight control of the camera. Why isn’t thecamera pointing at a live basin of water, but instead the camera is just pointing at
the stairs. I like the duck in the bubble, spinning it.

Ma:

You don’t have any marker on the sea, so the only location reference is the GPS.
The camera uses GPS sensor.

Chiu:

Perhaps it‘s using level detection, technology, meaning if you put a pond in frontof the camera, it would still work.

Ma:The video shows the duck can be viewed three-dimensional even you are on themoving ferry, so it must use the location based technique, which is GPS.

Chung:

It is difficult to judge this piece with its gallery presentation. From the video, it’spretty smooth and fun to use because of the simplicity of the interaction. It doesn’t
need to have instructions and guidelines in order to work with it.

Tam:

As an app, it functions well, but I don’t see anything that can click with me. It’svery flat, in a way. The way that visitors could interact with the work, there is notmuch room for imagination for the user. It’s just an app; I don’t think it’s anartwork.

Chiu:

My earlier suggestion was to allow users to choose between different objects.
They have attempted to deal with it by allowing the duck to have a conversationby allowing the user to type in a message. In the execution it’s not included. The
planning and the execution itself have taken away that room for imagination.

Kwong:The next one is Idea of Amplitude.

Chiu:

Is the work meant for people with hearing impairment? That part I didn’t really
understand.

Ma:

The original idea is that deaf people cannot hear music, and the author wants touse vibrations to visualize all those notes to encourage people to share music.
You compose something and share it with deaf people.

6

Chiu:For those who do not have hearing impairment, will they enjoy it as much? It’s
actually just vibrations. The vibrations’ level is based on different music notes. I
have experienced and enjoyed it.

Tam:

The thing I like about this work is that it is just as meaningful to people who arenormal as people who have hearing difficulties. Apart from enjoying the piece, it isalso functional: it can actually help disabled people learn about music and playwith music. But I have some problems with the visual expression or presentation,
especially the symbols they use for notes. That part I do not quite like, but ingeneral the idea is ok.

Prophet:I don’t read music, so I wouldn’t know if the notes were wrong.

Ma:

When you talk about music, it has different elements like pitch, note, loudness
and the duration of the note. But in this set up there’s only volume. On the visualside it only shows certain symbols. The device gives you 5 buttons, but some of
the buttons are actually the same. So there’s a lot of room for improvement.

Chiu:

It fell short as a way to convey music, but it is some sort of a way to communicate
music notes.

Chung:To me it’s a little bit misleading in the visualization. I take it as some sort ofmusical score, only to find that it’s not. Also there are some concerns about thesymbols. I was confused about the use of the different symbols in relations to theloudness. What I anticipate is more challenging in the sense that whether thisdevice could convert our existing MP3 music into different forms of vibrations sothat deaf people can feel the rhythm and changes in the intensity of vibrations. It
is not a very common practice for non-musicians to compose a sequence as
opposed to downloading an MP3.

Prophet:

The expression is about composing. You can play something and perceive
something. It is the interesting point of this work.

Kwong:The next work is Integrated Branching City.

Prophet:The work is more interesting than the proposal, the way they did it was very
appealing. I watched somebody else using the system, and wondered what his
level of concentration was. I found it quite responsive. I tried to attend to it and7slow it all down, and it seemed to work, and then I tried being a bit agitated anddistracted saw what happened. I was quite impressed with it. I haven’t used EEG
myself as an input, so I don’t know whether I was imagining how successful it
was.

Ma:

I purposely looked at the transitions, it recorded all my brainwave and turned it
into a work. They recorded a lot of brain wave patterns. Could they utilize them forsome other purposes and make them become an artwork or not? There is room
for them to improve. The set-up achieves what they wish to do in the proposal.

Chiu:

I was hoping they would not use EEG of disease patients, but rather use it on
something totally opposite, something really happy. When I experienced it, I foundit a little hard to concentrate, because the images changes so rapidly, and there
were so many people around at the exhibition, so I didn’t know whether the EEG
is working.

Prophet:I thought that if you calmed down, I got the images to almost stop. Maybe for me,
I cannot recognize the people in the images (news clips). I didn’t get distracted by
it so much.

Ma:

The artists just want to show us some images and stimulate the audiences. And I
sthave agreed what Jason mentioned. In the 1 round meeting, we have a chat on
the use of the EEG data. It may not be appropriate to use the EEG pattern of thepatients with mental illness. In this setting, you do not have this kind of feeling.

Chung:

I think they have dropped this idea out for the presentation. And they didn’t use
the patients’ data. One thing I’d like to see is more in context about the images(news clips) they’re showing, and how the piece of work using those materials in
relations to our own attention, and now the brain wave information are arbitrarily
put together.

Tam:

I think it’s part of the idea. The artist is saying that we live in a city like this with allthese political issues that are so agitating, and which might interrupt your peaceof mind, so how can you concentrate? That is the context. To me the idea makes
sense and the work is quite complete.

Kwong:The next work is Iris.

8

Prophet:

I really like how retro this seemed, and like the whole black and white
presentation. When I was a kid and I had to get measured up for shoes, you havethis thing where you put your feet in, and you looked down through something
really similar and you saw the outline of your toes. I thought it is really lovely but I
couldn’t work out if or how it was responding to my hands. I love the look and feelof it, but I can make no sense of it. As far as I was concerned it could have been
completely arbitrary.

Ma:

I have tried to use some certain hand gesture, such as rock, paper, and scissors.
And the machine replied me with the hand gesture of “give me five”. However,half of the responses seem no relation to my hand gesture. It sometimes
generates the same responses even I have put different gestures. It looks
random. I don’t know whether it is interactive or not.

Chiu:

I have the same question in the back of my mind. It would be much better if there
were two modes, one is rule based in which it recognizes the shape and respond,
and the other is to learn as it goes, which would be quite confusing. A lot of people
would not have the patience to wait, they would just continuously move. I’ve seen
another person experiencing it, and it freezes for over a minute. But I agree thatthe work is attractive. It makes you want to do it.

Chung:For me, the current TV set is an attractive way to invite me to interact with thepiece. It would be better if it has a flat surface for display rather than two verticalmonitors stacked together. I find it confusing because I did not understand therules. I tried to guess by purposely freezing some of my actions and trying toanticipate what kind of response. I failed to make any sense out of thoseinteractions. I would like to see if the hands has some sort of character or
personality which invite me to interact with them, rather than waiting for my input.

Tam:

There is a lot of inadequacy in the presentation and concept, but I like it because I
like its human touch. Among all the works, it is one that arouses my curiosity.
Looking at the work, you can feel that it is trying to communicate with the hands.
Although it might have failed in some aspects, I appreciate the idea itself. I also
like the black and white old TV monitors.

Kwong:

Let’s go to Once There was an Artwork.

Prophet:I’m really interested to see what people who didn’t read about it thought. I have9gone through the finalist selection, so I don’t know what audiences view this workwithout knowing the concept.

Chiu:

It’s the kind of work that without someone explaining, you would not have gone
beyond the first step. There are too many steps and sequences. Every step isthoughtful, but it’s hard to really unlock it. But once explained, you go “aha!” It’squite thoughtful and tried to be interactive.

Tam:

One of the ideas of the work is to connect and disconnect, to locate and dislocate.
The details could be more direct; to me they seem gimmicky and unnecessary, ina way. I like the idea but I’m not sure.

Chung:

I would like this to be a performance involving the two artists on hijacking thevenues. At this point it seems that they want to fulfill the interactive art criteria tocreate this piece of work, but it seems they are not satisfied with it. They would
like to have more socially engaged practices within their whole piece of work, butthat part may not be very satisfactorily delivered at this time.

Prophet:I really like the original idea. I thought, wow, it’s a gallery piece. They made thiswhite cube version of the work, which I wasn’t expecting. But when I waswatching it, I felt that if I didn’t know what this was about, I wouldn’t know byvisiting it, and the richness of their intentions was lost. They made it look like itbelonged to a white cube gallery, instead of being socially engaged art. Maybe
they were being too careful about the venue, and doing what they thought were
expected of a white cube space. It should have worked really well, but in terms ofdelivering the content, it just didn’t happen.

Kwong:We go to The Mechanics of Shadows, Selva Days.

Prophet:Has this piece been made before?

Chung:At Oil Street in North Point. It’s already been shown before.

Prophet:Out of all the pieces, it’s the lowest risk for the artist, because he made andalready exhibited it, and if we want to reward people for creating work that is new
to them and taking a risk, then this work isn’t doing that. But as a finished piece I
thought it was sweet, I loved it. It would stand up to be shown in a lot of venues
internationally, it would hold its own. From the point of view of what works, this10piece hits all the targets, but at the same time, it didn’t come to us at the
beginning as an unresolved thing, whereas every other piece, the artists
developed it since they made their proposal.

Chiu:

Is there a requirement for the piece not being exhibited anywhere before theshow?

Kwong:No.

Chiu:

So after short-listing and before the final show, it could have been exhibited. So
my point is that it reduces the risk for the artist, but we should not unfairly punish
him.

Ma:

Previously I raised the issue of whether this piece really has an interactive
element. I listened closely to all the LPs, it’s not playing the LPs directly. It’s apiece of pre-recorded sound with certain mechanical movements generating
certain shadows on the wall.

Prophet:I thought it was playing the sound directly from the records.

Chiu:

I asked him directly, and he lifted up the needle and the music stopped. But I also
saw on one occasion where the needle was not on a playable section, so I think
there must be some sort of fall-backTam:

It is a very fine piece but I don’t see any interactivity.

Chung:

It doesn’t have any interactivity directly with the audience, but interaction among
the codes and recoding agents, it’s the artificial intelligence codes interacting
among themselves within the system.

Kwong:The next one is Touch me (not).

Prophet:

It worked, it did what is expected, I wish he hadn’t put those pebbles around it andturned it from a more conceptual artwork into a gardening thing. I wish he’d justput the plants there and not prettify it, because it ended up not being conceptual
nor decorative. It responded much faster than I expected, I thought it’d take 20
minutes for it to change back, but it was faster.

11

Ma:

Maybe he has to change all the plants within a day, because they may all bedead.

Chung:

I do not like the way of presentation, to put them all together. He proposed tomake a “touch screen” with those plants. I would like him to separate the pots in amore discrete sense to relate to the pixels.

Ma:

It should be mounted on a wall. It would give a totally different sensation.

Kwong:The last one is Wake.

Prophet:

For me this was a complete fail, because there is no sense of interactivity, and nosense of what the original proposal was about. As an object, it’s interesting for aminute. He had another version of it that worked, so he had a choice to show theother version, and in my opinion it would have been better to show the earlier
version that you could have interacted with.

Ma:

If they changed it into another project, are we going to accept them or not? That’sa philosophical issue.

Prophet:

For me, it depends on the connection between his application and the actual
piece. It allows certain amounts of changes. This piece is not the work shown in
the application in fact.

Chung:

I can’t judge anything from this art work.

Chiu:

I agreed with Bryan.

Kwong:

Now that we have discussed all the works, each of you can nominate 3 works thatyou like most.

12

[Voting]st[1 round voting: Juror had 3 votes to select their favourite works]
Integrated Branching City

4

Iris

5

The Mechanics of Shadows, Selva Days

4

Idea of Amplitude

2

A dream on September 18

0and other wish

0d’ AR uck0

Once There was an Artwork

0

Touch me (not)

0

Wake

0

nd

[2 round voting – Jurors nominated works for the Gold Award]
Integrated Branching City

2

Iris

1

The Mechanics of Shadows, Selva Days

2rd

[3 round voting – Jurors voted again for the Gold Award]
Integrated Branching City

2

The Mechanics of Shadows, Selva Days

3

Interactive Media Category Award Winners
Gold Award
The Mechanics of Shadows, Selva Days / Cedric Maridet
Silver Award
Integrated Branching City / Fung Wing-lam, Ngai Po-yiu, Kwok Wan-ting, Choi Ka-man
Special Mention
Iris / Cheuk Sze-wing Chloe, Wong Chi-chuen Kenny13