Some minor issues

(first appeared @ These Days Blog – hence the English)

Last Saturday I went to “de Warande” in Turnhout. It was the final of Kunstbende, a contest for youngsters in different categories. I was member of the jury in the category “new media”, together with Astrid Wittebolle (a new media writer, known from de Morgen and Stu Bru back in the days), Angelo Vermeulen (new media artist) and Benjamien Lycke (winner last year). It was wonderful to meet these people, and we had some very interesting chats about new media in general.

It was amazing to see the passion and energy in these young people. They really stood up for what they were doing. I’m convinced a lot of the talent that was shown will develop in the next couple of year, we’ll hear from them!

Although it was clear the new media category itself was some kind of an outsider in the competition. Quite a pity. It was clear because there weren’t that much inscriptions in the category, there wasn’t that much audience and the overall quality of the work was a bit lower then the other categories. We figured out it was due to some reasons:

• The category is almost automatically narrowed down to websites. This is not a specification, but for some reasons only websites are subscribed. This might be a communication problem. People have to know all multi media/new media experiments are more then welcome
• It might be a self perception problem. The competitors in new media don’t seem to see themselves as artists, and therefore are less eager to compete.
• …

Anyway, I hope the category will evolve in the future because I know there is a lot of potential in nowadays youth in new media as well.

But off course it wasn’t all bad, in fact it wasn’t bad at all. I was just a little bit disappointed in the attendance in the category, but we all know it’s an evolving story.

So, who did we choose as winners (you can see the list of competitors here)

3/ A message to Everyone by Tom Swinnen (pity he wasn’t there to defend his work)
2/ Het gedachtenbordeel by Simon and Wim
1/ Life is not a fairy tale by Carine Yu. She worked out a complete interactive fairy tale, completely animated and illustrated. We thought she was the best all-round candidate, making best use of the medium internet. By the way, whatever you try, the tale will and bad, like real life according to Carine. I guess she was wrong this time.

A big hurray to all winners, and a big thank you to all competitors. It was a very interesting day and nothing but respect to Villanella for organizing such a fabulous event.