International Jury of the 9th International Video Festival Videomedeja in 2005. with the following members: Ursula Wittmer from USA, Jan Schuijren from Netherlands, has made the following decisions:
The Sphinx Award for the best video:
Mike Stubbs, Cultural Quarter, 10:00, Color, Stereo, GB, 2003
A piece that raises ethical questions on social voyeurism as well as social behaviour. Looking at the surveillance-like images, edited in a very subtle yet very manipulative way, we stand perplex on the social interaction of an unspecified suburb community, witnessing what seems an almost common routine and leaving us with feelings of disconnection, despair, and an overall state o shock, of not understanding the reality that is presented in front of us. By registering a daily reality that we usually want to close our eyes for, Mike Stubbs confronts us with a meticulously detailed social drama and manages to open our eyes in a most powerful and sustaining way.
Bogdanka Poznanovic Award for the best Media Installation, Live piece, Software, URL:
Frank Theys, Zelfportret, video installation
A simple, basic, yet strong idea translated very well in this personal monitor work. Headlessly sitting in front of his computer monitor and his decapitated body walking back and forth from his desk to the window of his working space, Frank Theys confronts us with the role and position of the personal computer in our daily lives taking over our daily thinking process. With the heart still pumping blood in an attempt to nourish the brain, the blood comes squirting out of his body onto the monitor screen and the appartment window, blocking his view for what has become his reality. Presented here in Novi Sad, the work gets another connotation and meaning added onto Theys’s original intentions. Thinking of the Milosevic time here in Serbia-Montenegro, people were ‘headlessly’ believing everything that state television was letting them believe, letting the television take over their head and individual thinking, or as some Serbian festival visitors put it: ‘as if the streets were filled with people walking with television monitors on their body, instead of heads that are able to think – and act – for themselves’.
Special mention:
Li Hong Ting, Visible City, 05:00, Color, Stereo, HK, 2005
In the animated city of Hong Kong based artist Li Hong Ting, the wry atmosphere is expressed by the colourful balloons, tied around the neck of every person in the city, in order to keep their head up high. The combination of the joyful balloons and the sinister facial expressions on the heads they are lifting up, in a setting of an increasing and ‘uprising’ urban sprawl, makes a dark statement on this modern city, where the only way out seems to be found on the top of the building, as a springboard for a jump into liberty.
Special mention:
Corinna Schnitt, Living a Beautiful Life, 13:00, Color, Stereo
A subtle confrontation with the unbearable lightness of perfection, leaving us in a state where one can only yearn for sin.
Special mention:
Jean-Gabriel Périot, Dies Irae, 10:00, Color, Stereo
By taking us on a dense and multi-layered, beautiful travel through all the world’s infrastructure, Périot leaves us puzzled by ending on the dead-end street of a former world-war II concentration camp.
Special mention:
Jan Van Nuenen, Warning Petroleum Pipeline, 04:45, Color, Stereo
A computer animation that strikingly shows us the impact of an ever-increasing dependence on our energy- and production-based society.