THE OPEN WALL- competition

The Open Wall, a 90 x 30 pixels resolution 201 inch LED screen.

ITovation, a project by the Faculty for Information Technology, Mathematics and Electrical Engineering, NTNU, and Trondheim Electronic Arts Centre, TEKS, invites you to an open art competition!

The Open Wall is a wall-mounted LED installation consisting of 96 circuit boards containing 25 orange LED lights each, 2400 in total, with 5 cm distance in all directions to the next light. The wall is 480 cm long and 180 cm high. One goal of the Open Wall project is to inspire reflection about Information and Communication Technology with focus on openness, copyrights, and authorship. The source code governing the Open Wall is available as an open source project on sourceforge.

Concept:

The artist perspective for the contest is to exploit the artistic potential of possible technologies that can be implemented in the The Open Wall. Boundaries between digital art expressions and computer gaming are vanishing. We will in particular ask the contesters to investigate in artistic concepts that applies to the wall being an interactive and “living” object.

We aim at raising awareness and curiosity about multidisciplinary issues at the intersection between art and technology. Artistic expressions for the contest may look into ways of establishing interactive dialogs between an audience at sight or/and remote located, and the LED wall.

Project contributions can be expressed as a combination of sensor and actuator technologies that by example reads data from sources like sound, movement, climate, GPS, social mapping etc., as well as other methods for fetching external data information. Actuators in addition to the LEDs, if you find that necessary for your project, can be anything from sound output to robotic technologies. Your imagination is the limit!

The suggested artistic concept and content will be the jury’s main factor to consider. This means that though the technical aspects are vital for realizing this project, the contest will focus on the artistic concepts and ideas. We are therefore accepting contributions where the techniques necessary for realizing your project aren’t fully developed or in detail described. The jury expects nevertheless all technologies suggested by the contesters to be technical realizable.

The Open Wall project provides an interface for exploring possibilities for further development of artistic expressions used for permanent public installations. This contest is part of Trondheim Electronic Arts Centre´s strategy for trying to develop permanent interactive installations in the public space of the Trondheim region. The Open Wall can therefore be considered as a fragment of a greater installation. As this is a concept competition, we accept contributions that aren’t limited in size to this particular physical wall as such.

Contesters will have the opportunity to start a dialog with Trondheim Electronic Arts Centre independently of the contest result for further development of projects.

Prizes:
The price award will take place at this year’s festival for art and technology in Trondheim, Trondheim Matchmaking, the 16th - 18th of October.

The contest is divided in two prize categories:
- The Open Wall open contest.
1st prize 2000 €, 2nd prize 1500 €, 3rd prize 1000 €.
- The Open Wall Student Contest.
3 prizes of 2000 NOK each.
The jury consist of five members:

* Stacey Spiegel, Artist, President of Parallel World Labs Inc
* Trine Eidsmo, Artist, Director of Trondheim Electronic Arts Centre
* Per Platou, Artist, Coordinator of The Production Network of Electronic Arts Norway
* Bjørn Alterhaug, professor, Department for Music, NTNU
* Letizia Jaccheri, professor, Department for Computer and Information Science, NTNU
Deadline:
Latest date for submissions is Monday the 15th of September 2008.

Content:
Contest submissions must contain a 2-300 words description of your project in addition to technical information, all formatted as PDF documents. Other necessary illustrative material of your choice are accepted. All material must be digital, and sent by email to thewall@list.stud.ntnu.no with “The Open Wall” as the subject.

In addition you can deliver software and other necessary files for running your project on the wall if you like. The technical documentation of the project is available. The source code governing the Open Wall is available as an open source project on sourceforge.
Contact information:
* e-mail: thewall@list.stud.ntnu.no.
All about the competition: http://org.ntnu.no/thewall
Other links:
http://prosjekt.idi.ntnu.no/sart
http://teks.no