[Fellow News] Oksana Chepelyk's VR Collider receives Prix Ars Electronica

The Winners of the 2022 Prix Ars Electronica

With 2,338 projects submitted from 88 countries, the 2022 Prix Ars Electronica once again presents itself as a central hub in the global network of media art. Each of the winners receives a financial reward for the  “Golden Nicas” that have been awarded annually since 1987 by an international jury and a prominent appearance at the Ars Electronica Festival.

A short history of Ars Electronica

Since 1979 the Ars Electronica Festival is organized annually. More than 1,000 artists, scientists, developers, designers, entrepreneurs and activists gather in Linz, Austria, to address central questions of our future. For five days, everything revolves around groundbreaking ideas and grand visions, unusual prototypes and innovative collaborations, inspiring art and groundbreaking research, extraordinary performances and irritating interventions, touching sounds and rousing concerts.
 
Since 1987 the Prix Ars Electronica award extraordinary talents every year. With several competition categories, the prix searches for groundbreaking projects that revolve around questions of our digital society and rehearse the innovative use of technologies, promising strategies of collaboration and new forms of artistic expression. The best submissions receive a Golden Nica, considered by the global media art scene to be the most traditional and prestigious award ever.

In 2022, parallel to the Prix Ars Electronica, another competition was also initiated: Together with the Austrian Foreign Ministry, the “Ars Electronica Award for Digital Humanity“.

About VR COLLIDER (Oksana Chepelyk's Project)

VR COLLIDER works with time, public space & history. It examines the iconic places of C20-21 political history through idea of collisions. It deals with events in public spaces that influenced a subsequent historical development. A virtual environment built as a system of platforms: Pyramid, Collider, Double Moebius & Prypiat Room that fly over the planet Earth & capture the vibrations of time-space, presented by video panoramas, that are revolved with acceleration in an art collider, activating a mechanism of audio-visual jumps, where some fragments can be substituted by archival videos followed by visual transmutations. It is a visual narration about the political flashpoints. VR COLLIDER, working with the events that have formed out world raises the question: is a person a particle in the system of accelerators of global forces, or the energy of interaction investigating new values, new forms of thought & new ways of existence in the world, insisting that another world is possible?

Oksana Chepelyk's research project at the Institute for Advanced Study of Aix-Marseille University (IMERA)

Under the title “Analytical Instruments for Audio-Visual Translation of Metabolomics” merging genotype and environment regarding climate changes Oksana Chepelyk will pursue during her fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study of Aix-Marseille University (IMERA) eco-art and science-art projects within a broad experimentation at the crossroads of research and art practice, such as data-driven moving imagery, sonification, live cinema and data visualization in spatial structure, and modelling. This work derives from Oksana Chepelyk's former residency at IMERA.

Oksana Chepelyk’s approach in realization of the project consists of the methodical theoretical search using library, archival research, interviews, video documentation іnvestigating: neomateriality and post-digital aesthetics; data visualization and immersive environments; techno-ecological perspective.

The science-art will be researched as a contemporary art trend with focus on sonification and visual representation of scientific data of metabolomics. Historical reference from Varese and Xenakis’ approach in the musical tradition, from Leonardo to Xenakis in the visual direction toward our time with the help of AI machine learning technology will be taken as a starting point of research.

Using characteristics of NMR - Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy and mass spectrometry methodology a different spin on NMR the project could approach audio-visual representation, but the technique doesn’t make most chemists think of music, or colors.
Molecular Sonification, namely the encoding of molecules as music, is particularly intriguing since the multiple dimensions of music can allow encoding of many molecular properties.

An explosion of AI methods in the study and creation leads to the prospects of merging modern chemistry machine learning (ML) techniques with recent ML techniques for visual and ML techniques for music.

More information about her research project can be found here.

More information about VR COLLIDER's Prix Ars Electronica can be found here.