Leonardo/OLATS Awards the Leonardo-EMS Award for Excellence to criticalartware

We are pleased to announce that Leonardo/OLATS and the Electroacoustic Music Studies Network (EMS Network) have awarded the Leonardo-EMS Award for Excellence to criticalartware (Jon Cates, Ben Syverson and Jon Satrom) for their paper “likn: A Flexible Platform for Information and Metadata Exchange” which they presented at the Electroacoustic Music Studies Conference in Beijing, October 2006.

The project by criticalartware likn is an artware application that addresses the nature of knowledge, ideas and language in the era of globalization. More specifically, likn is a functional online collaborative environment which wages a persistent critique of the desire to standardize and universalize meaning, and offers an alternative by applying postmodern and postcolonial theories to the challenge of organizing discourse and media. The paper can be accessed online at www.leonardo.info.

The Leonardo-EMS jury convened on Thursday, October 26 after the official closure of the third Electroacoustic Music Studies Conference. The Leonardo-EMS jury consisting of Marc Battier, Kenneth Fields and Ricardo dal Farra, was thrilled at the high quality of presentations by young researchers during the Beijing event and the final decision was difficult to reach.

The EMS Network has been organized to fill an important gap in terms of electroacoustic music, namely focusing on the better understanding of the various manifestations of electroacoustic music. Areas related to the study of electroacoustic music range from the musicological to more interdisciplinary approaches, from studies concerning the impact of technology on musical creativity to the investigation of the ubiquitous nature of electroacoustic sounds today. The choice of the word, “network” is of fundamental importance as one of the goals of the EMS Network is to make relevant initiatives more widely available. More about the Electroacoustic Music Studies Network can be found at http://www.ems-network.org.

Leonardo/OLATS has established a collaboration with the EMS network through which annual Leonardo-EMS Awards for Excellence will be made for the best contribution to the EMS symposium by a young researcher as decided by a joint jury.

Read a revised version of the article online: Meaning without Borders: likn and Distributed Knowledge by Ben Syversson