Award Winners

Esther Hunziker

The jury honors Esther Hunziker with the Established Prize for her long-standing and consistent work with digital media. Since the early 2000s, she has regularly appeared with unique works and a distinctive visual language. She uses software in an original way, genuinely for her fictional narratives and visual inventions, and is one of the outstanding voices in the Swiss digital art scene.

Her projects are exciting explorations of software-based media. From the beginnings with HTML, JavaScript, Flash, and QuickTime to the latest AI tools, she continually utilizes the innovative digital means of her time. The interactive websites Nord from 2003 and the alphabet ltd.™ from 2005 (both in collaboration with Felix Zbinden) show early in her work how nonlinearity and interactivity can be used as important qualities for digital storytelling on the internet.

Thematically, the foreign and uncanny, as well as the flawed, run through Esther Hunziker’s works. Whether it’s imperfect 3D data and mismatched mappings from Google Earth, which in Earth (A Space Odyssey/Oddity) from 2016 lead to new, surprising formations, or in Streamers from 2018 the emotional streams of YouTubers, which are uploaded into talking 3D stones. This discomfort is also found in her latest works like Cover. Take 1–176 from 2023/2024, in which she replaces the facial area of portraits with AI-generated, sculptural interpretations of her prompts. Here too, something unsettling and uncontrollable breaks through the seemingly familiar and recognizable: her visual discoveries are “uncanny” in the best sense of the word and reflect the tension between fascination and fearful delight that we repeatedly find ourselves entangled in when it comes to technological progress.

Selected Awards and Residencies

Basler Medienkunstpreis, Film und Medienkunst BS/BL, 2024, 2016 | Werkbeitrag für Bildende Kunst und Performance, Aargauer Kuratorium, 2018 | iaab, Austausch- und Atelierprogramm Region Basel, Berlin, 2011; Edinburgh, 2005; Helsinki, 1999 | Bundesamt für Kultur, sitemapping/mediaprojects. Projektbeitrag, 2008 | Kunst kredit Basel-Stadt, Projektbeitrag, 2007; 2004; 1996 | Viper – International Festival for Film Video and New Media 2004 | Auszeichnung Swiss Award, 2004 | Literatur.digital, 2003 | Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag dtv & t-online. Auszeichnung 1. Preis, 2004 | Pro Helvetia und Vereinigung Aspekt. Atelierstipendium, 1997

Selected Exhibitions

Alfatih

A Way Out of Time, 2024, Kinderwagen, Echtzeitvideo, Dauer variabel. Ausstellungsansicht Centre d’Art Contemporain, Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, Genf. Foto: Mathilda Olmi

If such a thing as signifying a removal is possible, Alfatih definitely strikes a remarkably elusive figure in the Swiss media art scene, or any other “scene” for that matter. Biographical information and artist statement are kept voluntarily scant, posing a sweet but stubborn refusal to play along that reflects his take on contemporary digital technology.

Emerging from – or dissolving into – seemingly mundane environments and props of daily life, Alfatih’s works lead us to characters we consider preverbal, human figures at an early stage of both freedom and dependency. Leaving the viewer in between double mirrors or at the helm of household utensils that signify a civilization of control, Alfatih leaves one in an ambivalent state with regards to these potentially innocent beings. We are both in a position of exerting the aforementioned control, and of submitting to the first ebbs and flows of a narrative with no human author in sight.

A Day in the Life, a commissioned CGI animation film that shows a day in the life of a “grown-up baby,” constituted Alfatih’s first U.S. solo show at Swiss Institute in New York in 2023. In it, a 24-hours narrative scripted by AI unfolds, steered by prompts from the artist and scored by musician and theorist Tapiwa Svosve. As the day unfolds and the baby performs adult rituals marked by time stamps and seems to seek approval from its watches, the quiet melancholy of a solitary, repetitive life quietly seeps through the fabric of time and language.

In A Way Out of Time (2024), shown as part of the 2024 edition of the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement at the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva, visitors take the reins of Victorian-style pram and, it is implied, of the infant being it supposedly carries. Movement across the gallery floor and institutional landscape, however, only activates a real-time artificial narrative, a ChatGPT-aided dérive through a desolate, AI-rendered landscape. As ritual movement is impressed upon the machine, viewers push the AI spawn and help it “plug the void with artificial memories” (Alice Bucknell in Mousse, February 2024).

Awards and Residencies

Pro Helvetia, Werkbeitrag (A Way Out of Time), 2023 | Residency KORA Contemporary Arts Center, Castrignano, 2022 | Residency ABA Air Berlin Alexander Platz, Berlin, 2021 – 2022 | Golden Award & Space Award, Bugnplay, 2019 | Awards for talent and creativity, Fondation Casino Barri.re de Montreux, 2018

Selected Exhibitions

Stefan Karrer

Stefan Karrer is endowed with a subtle sense of poetics and irony, which he uses to sharply critique contemporary digital and online culture. Beneath the seemingly mundane images and topics he examines lie significant social transformations shaped by current media technologies.

In Cool clouds that look like they should be spelling something, but they don’t (2016), Karrer creates an automated desktop performance that takes viewers through his archive of found images and captions from Flickr. By navigating user- added captions, a computer voice recites these online “crazy,” “cool,” or “lonely” clouds, confronting viewers with online phenomena that become increasingly detached from reality. In this context, nature becomes mediated, abstracted, and part of networked social communications.

Karrer further explores how truth and reality are shaped by online culture and communication in Calypso Cave (2021). In this work, the artist collects and compiles over ten years of Instagram images and their captions, documenting how users have shared pictures of the “wrong” Calypso Cave, which had been closed to the public after a partial collapse in 2010 – shortly after Instagram was launched.

Through strategies of appropriation and experimental writing, Karrer investigates the power of networked technologies, the politics and poetics of the internet, and our consumption of online media. The jury was impressed by the artist’s punctual ability to address social and political issues related to networked media, through his ironic and witty, yet delicate and poetic transformations of the source material.

Awards and Residencies

Recherchebeitrag Basel-Stadt, 2023 | Atelier Mondial, Johannesburg/Cape Town, 2019 | Pro Helvetia Werkbeiträge Kunst, 2017 | Fachausschuss Film und Medienkunst BS/BL, Basler Medienkunstpreis 2017 | Residenza Petrolio, amt_project, Puglia, 2017

Selected Exhibitions