Info

6th International Sound Basis Visual Art Festival / New Media Art Biennale
1997, April 30th – May 4th

The WRO festival had officially changed its name to WRO International Media Art Biennale.

That year’s edition, under the title of Geo/info-territory was devoted to new phenomena: the world being shaped by new technologies, the emerging of a new, contemporary cartography influenced by the free flow of information meeting the geographically and politically determined divisions. During the international participants’ speeches the terms Deep Europe and Deep Culture have used for the first time in Poland. Among others, lectures were given by Lev Manovich (future author of a seminal publication, the Language of New Media), Jaron Lanier (an artist, a visionary and an inventor, the creator of the term “virtual reality”), and Stelarc (a performer, and a pioneer of the art based on biotechnology). Lanier’s audiovisual concert with the use of virtual instruments (broadcasted by national television Channel 2) and Stelarc’s several hour long performance in the Apocalypse room of the Grotowski Institute have made history.

A television program about Stelarc produced in Wrocław has been broadcasted nationally a few months later and seen by over a million viewers. The curators of New York MoMA had presented a large selection of American performances, in Wrocław, for the first time in Europe. After the biennale the Museum of Modern Art in New York has shown a Polish video program for the first time in their history.

WRO 97 was the first artistic event in Poland to have its own, multimedia website and a CD-ROM with the festival’s documentation which 75000 copies of were distributed by a monthly magazine ‘CHIP’.

WRO 97 original website

COMPETITION & AWARDS

COMPETITION

44 works selected from almost 600 submissions were presented

JURY

Sally Berger (USA)
Gottfried Hattinger (AT)
Ryszard W. Kluszczyński (PL)
Muntadas (USA)
Tomás Waliczky (HU)

1st PRIZE

Text Videovoid, David Larcher (UK, 1996)
2nd PRIZE (ex aequo)
Scale, Irit Batsry (IL/USA, 1995)
Amen!, Nineveh, Istvan Kantor alias Monty Cantsin (CA, 1997)
Watch me, Piotr Wyrzykowski (PL, 1996)

SPECIAL AWARDS

Nagroda realizacyjna Programu 2 TVP S.A. – END OF THE WORLD, Christin Bolewski (DE)
TVP S.A. Channel 2 Special Award – IT?S ME, Joan Pueyo (ES)
Nagroda realizacyjna wrocławskiego ośrodka TVP S.A. – IN PROGRESS, Jacek Szeleszyński (PL)
Nagroda Gazety Wyborczej (Mouse in a Cage) – THE EYEWITNESS, Aleksander Davić (YU)