Jury decision, Punch Prize – ‘Förderpreis ZHdK, Diplomjahr 2003’
for Loogie.net TV by Annette Schindler
Marc Lee’s work convinced the jury with two key aspects: firstly, Loogie.net generates TV programmes according to the custom-made principle, and secondly, it provides an intelligent and critical commentary on our media and information age.
On the television set in the good old parlour, users select the keywords or word combinations for which they want information – be it ‘Roger Federer’, ‘social cuts’ or ‘investment crisis’. Without delay, the famously slick newsreaders begin to praise the advantages of Loogie.net and lead seamlessly to direct telephone broadcasts from external correspondents, accompanied by a picture feature, or announce a video broadcast or an interview with an expert. The content of the news programme is searched for in real time on the Internet and seamlessly combined by the specially programmed software. The software selects the text content according to quality criteria and fits images, videos and interviews into the windows provided in such a way that they always fit into the sleek CNN style. The information itself oscillates between coherence, diversity and arbitrariness: Loogie.net imitates well-known news programmes and caricatures them at the same time.
The hyped interactivity of new media becomes ‘interpassivity’ at Loogie.net, because after the user has chosen his keyword, everything else, including editing and presentation, is delegated back to the machine – the user becomes an ordinary coach potato again.
The Loogie.net project appears to the jury to be exemplary and forward-looking in the way it uses and reflects on its resources and knows how to convey complex content in a clear way, both technically and visually. By honouring Loogie.net, the jury also wants to pay tribute to the new media field of study: Here, a field of study has been reinvented, so to speak, and has already proven with its first graduates how cleverly it is able to position itself in a cultural discourse that is of the utmost importance for the present and even more so for the future generation.