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Chunky Move was announced yesterday as recipient of an ‘Honourable Mention – Hybrid Art’ in the Prix Ars Electronica for its work Mortal Engine. The company, who entered the awards for the first time this year, are thrilled to be acknowledged for this work.

The Prix Ars Electronica is widely regarded as the most important international award for creativity and pioneering spirit in the field of digital media. It serves as an interdisciplinary platform for everyone who uses the computer as a universal medium for implementing and designing their creative projects at the interface of art, technology and society.

Mortal Engine was one of 97 award winners, selected from the 3017 entries received from 68 countries in 2009.

Mortal Engine is a work created by Chunky Move under the direction of Artistic Director Gideon Obarzanek, together with the creative team Frieder Weiss (Interactive System Design), Robin Fox (Laser and Sound Artist), Ben Frost (Composer) and Paula Levis (Costume Design).

It is not a dance work, nor is it a piece of theatre, or a piece of digital music, an interactive work nor a synaesthetic experience. In essence, it is all of these things melded together to create a coalescence of human and technological forms. Mortal Engine is truly ‘live’ each night; it has no pre-rendered video, light or laser images. Similarly the music mix is open allowing various sounds to be completely generated from movement data. In addition, precomposed phrases are triggered by the dancers’ motion or by the operator in relation to where the performers are in any given sequence. This essentially means that there are no fixed timelines and the production flexes according to the rhythm of the performers as they create a shimmering illusory world where light and shade represent the most perfect or the most sinister of souls.

The development of Mortal Engine engaged a team of outstanding artists working in areas that already placed interdisciplinarity at the core of their creative processes. Obarzanek has an outstanding reputation as a choreographer prepared to extend dance into technologically mediated space. Frieder Weiss is an artist/engineer working on the development of finely tuneable interactive systems that he employs across performance, installation and video art. Robin Fox works in the realm of synaesthetic audio-visual performance, attempting to re-combine the senses at the level of electronic signal. Ben Frost works across all genres of music engaging with both Weiss and Fox in the creation of directly interactive sound design. It was in the bringing of these people and their tangled fields together that produced an unclassifiable work that is, by necessity, greater than the sum of its parts.

Mortal Engine’s world premiere was at the 2008 Sydney Festival and has since been performed at the Edinburgh International Festival, Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre, Tanzhaus Dusseldorf, Festival de Mexico, and International Festival of the Arts in Spain. It was awarded the 2008 Helpmann Award for Best Visual or Physical Theatre production.

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