Last month, Ars Electronica announced the winners of their annual Prix Ars Electronica, which awards art on the interface of technology, science and society.
The jury was tasked with narrowing down more than three thousand submissions from almost a hundred countries to a selection of Golden Nica award winners, Awards of Distinction and Honorary Mentions.
One of the oldest categories in the awards is “Digital Music and Sound Art”, which has been part of the competition since its launch in 1987. This year’s Golden Nica winner in the sound category was “A Tale of Two Seeds: Sound and Silence in Latin America’s Andean Plains”. Created by Atractor Estudio (Colombia) and Semantica Productions (UK), this sound installation tells the story of the complex relationship between two plants in Colombia.
Throughout Latin America, soy monocultures have taken over land that was previously much more biodiverse. In Colombia and other countries, one of the ways soy growers have kept their crops free of weeds is by using genetically modified soy that is resistant to the pesticide Roundup. That allowed them to treat the crops liberally, getting rid of weeds and keeping soy. One of the plants that was considered a “weed” in this context is amaranth, which is actually in itself a very useful plant that has been grown and used for a very long time by indigenous people.
However, some amaranth plants were more resilient against Roundup. These plants then passed on their natural resilience to pesticides to their offspring and now amaranth is gradually coming back and growing alongside soy.
The artists behind “A Tale of Two Seeds” saw this resilience of amaranth, and its persistence to grow among soy plants, as a symbolic protest against colonialism. “In this sonic interrogation of Colombian soils, we will highlight amaranth’s symbolic role in the resistance to modern forms of colonialism most strongly represented by genetic engineering, the privatization of seeds and land sovereignty,” the artists state.
To show this struggle between two plants, they recorded sounds from soil and plants, comparing the sound of soy monocultures with the richer sound of both crops growing together.
When the sound installation is on display at an exhibit, two video screens also accompany the sound installation, adding additional points of view. For example, one screen shows a programme that scrapes the internet for the genetic codes of native crops that businesses have tried to patent, and attempts to register them as Colombian intellectual property.
Other winners of Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica award include Ayoung Kim for New Animation Art, Winnie Soon for Artificial Intelligence & Life Art, and Sonja Höglinger in the Under 19 category. See all winners and honorary mentions on the Ars Electronica website.