The number of applicants for the .net section decreased from 500 (last year) to 250 this year. The judge of the .net section thinks one of the reasons is because the .com business has been active, many artists has moved that way and they’ve lost interests in creating something. It might be true. David Sinden who is the representative of the educational project at Lux Center in London also said that ‘Many artists have moved to the interactive/interface design business and real net artists have decreased sharply these past 2 years’. This is a convincing opinion, but I think there’s still another reason.

ast year, the Golden Nica (Grand Prize) went to Linus Torvalds, the founder of Linux, and the Award of Distinction went to ‘Res Rocket’, a software that enables musicians to play together on the Internet. I doubt that even if many people submit their works to the .net section, whether they can be duly evaluated; it entirely depends on how the judge decides. This year’s Golden Nica went to writer Neal Stephenson and the Award of Distinction went to ‘Telezone’ displayed in the first floor at Ars Electronica Center, and this made my doubt deepen. I hope the applicants won’t be reduced by half in the future.

The awards of interactive art section demonstrated that there were some artworks that make us emotional without any technological tricks.

“Interactive art should not be stuffed into a museum. It should be together with society. Therefore, we chose those artworks that cannot be displayed in museums, but it’s not because of our favoritism. This is what interactive art is.”, one of the judges, Dr. Joachim Sauter (the president of Art+Com) said. Like he said, each artwork showed us the possibility of media art as an art form that has power to move the society.