2012 Share Prize Competition :: Piemonte Share is announcing the 8th Share Festival and the opening of the competition for the Share Prize, the award dedicated to art in the digital age. Deadline for submissions: *June 20th 2012*.

Share Prize 2012 : The competition jury will award a prize of euro 2,500.00 to the work (published or unpublished) which best represents experimentation between arts and new technologies. (Two thousand, five hundred euros, includes tax and social security withholdings.) The candidates for the prize (a short list of a maximum of 6 competitors) will be guests at the 8° edition of the Share Festival, taking place in Turin from October 30th to November 11th 2012.

Nomination of 6 candidates for the prize: by the end July, 2012. The announcement will be published on the following website: http://www.toshare.it :: The winner will be announced few days before the festival.

The Purpose : The aim of the Share Prize is to discover, promote and support contemporary art in the digital age. The competition this year will focus on the theme for the 8th Share Festival, entitled “Open Your City”. Open is meant in the sense of being in the making, of being unfinished, experimental, transparent and boundless. ‘Open’ gives the idea of a starting point, the perspective from which we see things, an inclusive vision founded on digital communication and active democracy. It is a hallmark of the quality of
an idea, a system, a group or an organization. It relinquishes copyright to give precedence to the sharing of knowledge, to open-source methodologies.

Your is meant as the direct participation of people who possess, own, use, occupy and command something that belongs to them. It identifies the person who plays a leading role in driving change someone who takes action, steps in and gets involved; someone who makes plans, collaborates, transforms, brings together and acts as part of a community. ‘Your’ means grass-roots democracy.
City is meant as the venue or theatre of action; it is the common good, the backdrop to changes underway. An urban space abuzz with social and technological ferment, made up of streets and roads, squares and parks and everyday locations. The city has become populated with new sites of social media where communication flows thick and fast-in the form of control, through video surveillance or the mapping of social graphs, though also in the form of participatory democracy, through augmented reality, smart architectures and wearable computing.