Telecom Italia, the Fondazione Romaeuropa and the Rome City Council today handed out prizes to four talented web artists who won the Romaeuropa WebFactory, a creative marathon held this year for the second time. Silvio Giordano, Claudia Casamassa, Giuseppe Laselva and Lilies on Mars (Lisa Masia and Marina Cristofalo) are the winners of REWF 2009-2010, a competition offering prizes of €5,000 for video art, writing, advertising creativity and music, four of the most commonly represented arts on the web.
The winners’ names were announced at the end of a seven-month long creative competition, at a prize giving ceremony attended by Franco Bernabè, CEO of Telecom Italia, Monique Veaute and Fabrizio Grifasi, respectively Deputy Chairman and Director of the Fondazione Romaeuropa, Umberto Croppi, Councillor for Culture at the Rome City Council, Luca Barbareschi, Deputy Chairman of the IX Commission at the Chamber of Deputies, and Pio Baldi, Chairman of the Fondazione MAXXI.
Also at the awards ceremony was Giovanni Pieraccini, Chairman of the Fondazione Romaeuropa, Gianluigi De Stefano, curator of Romaeuropa Webfactory, and Riccardo Luna, Editor-in-Chief of Wired Italia.
Romaeuropa Webfactory is the biggest creative workshop on the Italian-speaking web. Founded jointly by Telecom Italia and the Fondazione Romaeuropa, it is a virtual venue where established and emerging artists, critics and web denizens can meet and share the various modes of expression typical of the web.
The REWF 2010 competition attracted more than 1,000 entries from artists in four different categories: Videoart, Music@, 100words and Spot. Each category was mentored by leading e-guides Giuseppe La Spada, Christian Fennesz, Scuola Holden and Bruno Pellegrini, CEO of The Blog TV, who monitored the various phases of the competition and judged the works submitted.
The winning entries were chosen following a Popular Jury vote by 12,000 members of the Romaeuropa Webfactory community and the opinion of a Panel of Experts.
The SPOT category winner was Puglia-born creative Giuseppe Laselva with We Want REWF 2.0; the VIDEOART category winner was Tuscan-born Silvio Giordano with Water Monitor; the 100words category winner was copywriter Claudia Casamassa with Dinasty; the MUSIC@ category winner was the Lilies on Mars duo, Lisa Masia and Marina Cristofalo, with The Seventh String.
Each winning artist is awarded a prize of €5,000 in money tokens, and is invited to participate as a live performer at a Romaeuropa Festival 2010 event, as well as at many other events organized at venues, clubs and festivals across Italy.
Compared to the first time that the competition was run last year, the 2010 REWF has grown both in quantity (around 900 creative projects were submitted, and the community has more than 12,000 active members who shared their opinions and voted for the works in competition) and in the quality of the artists and works involved. The most significant new development at this year’s competition was the decision to accept web-inspired “remixes” and “mash-ups”, and to adopt new forms of copyright protection via the Creative Commons license.
Next year’s competition launches this autumn, and promises yet more new developments. A new category will be dedicated to photography, which evolves out of Telecom Italia’s Jpeggy photography project; the prestigious Wired magazine will take a lead role in a new writing competition which, in the wake of Twitter’s success, will be dedicated to new forms of creative writing in 140 characters. Finally, there will be a new category for creating Facebook and iPhone applications.
Rome, 24 May 2010