Golden Calf nomination Best Digital Culture Production 2024

23 September 2024

During the festival programme Digital Culture: Storyspace Sessions: Artists, Performers, and Poets Unite, the three nominations have been announced for the Golden Calf for Best Digital Culture Production. The award will be presented at the EY Golden Calf Gala on Friday 27 September. The three nominees are part of Storyspace, the Netherlands Film Festival's exhibition at Bibliotheek Neude and De LiK, full of VR, AR and other multimedia installations.

Nominations Best Digital Culture Production 2024

The Jury, consisting of Abdo Hassan, Jacco Ouwerkerk, and Sasha Dees, have nominated the following three works:

Anouschka - Tamara Shogaolu (Ado Ato Pictures, Ado Ato Interactive Foundation)
Dance Dance Revolution (‘Dans Dans Revolutie’) - Lisa Weeda, BrotherTill (Theater Bellevue)
Emoticons Don't Have Wrinkles - Luna Maurer (Luna Maurer)

Discover the nominees

Anouschka

Emoticons Don't Have Wrinkles

Dans Dans Revolutie

Jury report Best Digital Culture Production 2024

The Golden Calf Competition for Best Digital Culture Production this year consists of nine productions that vary from installations, games, performance, VR, XR and AR productions. The overall production quality was high, and the level of storytelling and conceptualizing was advanced and strong.

The jury sees in the selection a reflection of the contemporary tendency, in which a re-evaluation of balance between the physical and the digital occurs: a certain transformation in the development of digital culture becomes visible.

Digital culture, much like digital space, is constantly evolving and iterating. In the conversation between form and function, medium and message, time and space, digital creators try to find new symbiotic relationships. In this selection, we see that the makers try to convey human vulnerability and imperfection, with their mission to reconcile the emergent human condition with the digital medium. Immersion, here, is an invitation to stay in touch not only with our senses, but with our surrounding ecosystem. It is also a collective process for harboring shared connection. Digital work interacts with a pre-existing web of histories, human relationships and social contexts. With digital culture, we see an explosion of possibility; new interdisciplinary collaborations, new formats, new vantage points and imaginaries.

In light of this, the jury judged the works based on the criteria of technological innovation, cultural relevance, storytelling, accessibility, immersion and authenticity. The works, in their essence, give the audience a license to co-create and imagine different futures.

After careful deliberation, Anouschka by Tamara Shogaolu, Emoticons don’t have Wrinkles by Luna Maurer and Dance Dance Revolution (‘Dans Dans Revolutie’) by Lisa Weeda en BrotherTill have been nominated.

: Anouschka is a mixed reality game that takes you to Amsterdam’s Bijlmermeer (Bijlmer) – the neighborhood of the black teenager Anouschka, who embarks on a journey to find her roots. Through animations and archival footage, you learn about the multicultural perspectives of those who have been fighting to preserve their identity for generations. To find her own song, Anouschka must rediscover the music of her ancestors.
The jury recognizes the urgency of the story and values the strong concept. The narrative is situated in a real context, the rich urban history of the Bijlmer, which makes it powerful and enables the spectator to experience it from a fresh vantage point. The carefully crafted artwork draws you in on an emotional level, interweaving history, culture, racial identity with lived experience.

: Dance Dance Revolution (‘Dans Dans Revolutie’) is an intimate theatrical installation about observing and looking away from war. Through TikTok, you follow the young blogger Anna, her baba Yara, and the mythological creature Notsjnik, which dances as a means for protection, from an increasingly (less) safe distance. A magical tale at the heart of current history, based on the second novel by Lisa Weeda of the same name.
The jury values the multilayered narrative in which the digital and the analog merge into an immersive and impressive experience. In the work, folk legends, ancestral wisdom and human solidarity collide with the social alienation of technology and the volatility of social media, to allow us to understand what truly leads to connection and hope. The performance shows how dance has the potential to connect us, despite social media fatigue.

: In a world saturated with seamless digital experiences, Luna Maurer advocates for embracing friction in her performance Emoticons Don’t Have Wrinkles. With her face painted like a yellow emoji and filmed by a self-developed camera-helmet, she calls on us to once again give human imperfection a place in technology.
The performance challenges the current status of immersion and digital culture, asking us how we should position ourselves within it. The strength of the manifesto is its focus on the word ‘friction’ – that things don't have to be perfect, and that it is important to occasionally be nudged onto different paths. The work is personal, urging viewers to break their patterns, de-automise and remain vulnerable. The performance is a strong plea to use friction to create real human connections.

back to

Share this page