Netarts.org (aka Art on the Net) run by the Art on the Net steering committee and the Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts has awarded VisitorsStudio the Grand Prize 2009.

VisitorsStudio is a real-time, multi-user, online arena for creative ‘many to many’ dialogue, interviews, networked performance and collaborative polemic. Through simple and accessible facilities, the VisitorsStudio web-based interface allows users to upload, manipulate and collage their own audio-visual files with others’, to remix existing media. Providing a platform for the exploration of collective creativity for both emergent and established artists from a diverse array of geographical locations and social contexts. Designed so anyone in the world can access it from a 56k modem. Participants upload sound files and still/moving images (jpg, png, mp3, flv, swf) to a shared database, mixing and responding to each other’s compositions in real-time. Individuals can also chat with each other and are located in the interface by their own dancing-cursors.

As John Hopkins, a member of the Netorg jury, remarked in his comments on the site: The interface is intuitive and straight forward, and without a steep learning curve, anyone can playfully create works in no time.

About Furtherfield: Furtherfield.org believes that through creative and critical engagement with practices in art and technology people are inspired and enabled to become active co-creators of their cultures and societies. Providing platforms for creating, viewing, discussing and learning about experimental practices at the intersections of art, technology and social change.