{"id":2128,"date":"2016-05-24T11:27:42","date_gmt":"2016-05-24T11:27:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.doc.gold.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=2128"},"modified":"2016-06-06T14:39:24","modified_gmt":"2016-06-06T14:39:24","slug":"computational-arts-graduate-wins-5000-aspen-online-art-award-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.doc.gold.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=2128","title":{"rendered":"Computational Arts graduate wins \u00a35,000 Aspen Online Art Award 2016"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"final1.103537\"<\/p>\n

Goldsmiths alumna\u00a0Matilda Skelton Mace has been announced as the winner of the Aspen Online Art Award 2016.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Matilda Skelton Mace<\/a> graduated from Goldsmiths’\u00a0MA\/MFA Computational Arts<\/a> programme in 2015. She is a London-based artist and designer, working with the building blocks of reality- space, light, and geometric form. She is interested in the \u2018in between\u2019, exploring ideas of implied, imagined and virtual space, the dissonance that can arise between real and virtual and the way we perceive it.<\/p>\n

Last year she was shortlisted for the HIX Award<\/a> and has exhibited installations at galleries, nightclubs and festivals. This year her work is centred on providing visuals for music events by promoters including Gottwood festival, Inverted Audio and Blueprint Records.<\/p>\n

\"'Party<\/a>
‘Party at our place’. Matilda Skelton Mace, 2015. Projection mapping and sculpture.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As winner of the Aspen Online Art Award<\/a>, Matilda\u00a0has been commissioned to\u00a0create a virtual world based on the unique digital \u2018fingerprints\u2019 of visitors to their website.<\/p>\n

Drawing on the phenomenon of \u2018Sky Islands\u2019 \u2013 mountains with unique flora and fauna caused by climatic isolation from the surrounding lowland \u2013 users\u2019 metadata are used to create particular landforms with their own plants and weather systems.\u00a0Visitors with matching characteristics (for example using the same hardware or operating system) generate landforms in a similar location to eventually build up a mountain range corresponding to correlations in metadata. Their weather and plant life reflects the geographical location of the user.\u00a0Visitors can explore this expanding world and a visual representation of metadata profiling emerges, with its implications for anonymity rights and freedom of expression.<\/p>\n

Launched in 2014 by Aspen Insurance Holdings in association with the Contemporary Art Society, the Aspen Online Art Award is the first of its kind in the UK.<\/p>\n

The judges, who included Attilia Fattori Franchini<\/a>, Curator, and the Aspen Art Committee, selected Skelton Mace from a shortlist of seven artists to win a commissioning prize of \u00a35,000 and the opportunity to create a new online-based work for Aspen’s renowned art collection.<\/p>\n

Attilia Fattori Franchini said: \u201cThis award is a fantastic opportunity for an emerging artist and the strength of Matilda\u2019s proposal shows that she is one to watch. It will also sit particularly well within Aspen\u2019s collection as her ideas around data privacy and cyber risk are particularly pertinent to our contemporary culture.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lanny Walker, Art Consultant at the Contemporary Art Society<\/a>, said: \u201cMatilda\u2019s artwork explores many themes relevant to current debates within contemporary art and beyond, where identity, data privacy and our virtual footprint are continuous concerns. In this she follows in the footsteps of artists including Hito Steyerl<\/a>, Oliver Laric<\/a> and Heath Bunting<\/a>, who touch upon these issues in their own practices.\u201d<\/p>\n

This year’s shortlist\u00a0was dominated by Goldsmiths’\u00a02015 Computational Arts\u00a0graduates, with\u00a0Lior Ben Gai<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Angie Fang<\/a>\u00a0also nominated.<\/p>\n

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