"competition" "art" "must use google technologies"
wtf is going on here?
This sounds like a huge advertisement for google under the premise that "if we put your stuff in a gallery, you will be an artist." One that the public in another country will pay (the gallery) to see.
> "Sometimes we just need some inspiration and an outlet."
Folks, your outlet for your art is the entire world around you. It is your friends and family and co-workers and meetups. Art isn't a competition requiring $company's products. It's a way of communicating, not a class that you enter by adhering to corporate rules. I'm not saying, "don't do this," but I am saying, understand the power imbalance you're entering into, how they're benefiting and how they're feeding your ego to pull it off.
It may be just some of bitterness from my grad school years, but I showed stuff around the world for a few years, and like my advisor used to say about most of the projects in the world of "fill-a-gallery with computers and LCD screens and sensors" which faddish curators have been building the last decade, "Oh look, it's geeks!"
Producing art is a lot like a startup - you won't get any traction by impressing customers with your skills. You have to deliver. In business, you have to make your customers look good to others and in the art world, you have to communicate an insight and perspective and you have to make yourself vulnerable. Even if you just write code, you will probably get dirty.
Very few of you who do this will be compensated for your work. Most of your work will be shown and used to attract people, benefit the gallery owners financially and co-produce some kind of message about "google supports the arts." The works will be selected not on the basis of improving the world, but for supporting the message of the event's organizers.
Your contribution of free labor to the established wealthy may make some visistors laugh and cry, but it won't amount to anything except a diversion. They won't remember you and the world will be just a little bit more out of your control because you relied on someone else's validation and permission to communicate your message. Look, it's not about art, because they've already filtered out works which don't meet their corporation's criteria.
If you don't want to just be a freakshow participant for the benefit of a company's and gallery's bottom line, begin with an idea, not with a code editor. All of that "make a pretty pattern stuff" and "hook up a sensor to a pattern generator" stuff was actually done waaaaay back in the 1960s. The only people you impress will be those who don't know any better and you won't be communicating anything, but mollifying them with shiny objects. And for God's sake, don't limit yourself to showing your work in this one gallery or to using google technologies.
They're using celebrity to impress you. They're presenting a group of people as celebrity artists drawing pretty patterns on the screen and with blinking LEDs and implying that people get something out of it. But those are patron artists who benefit those for whom they are employed, not folks who communicate ideas through art that benefit the species.
It's as Alexander Solzhenitsyn said, "Too much art is like candy and not bread."
It's one thing if Google was being dishonest about the opportunity on offer. That it sounds like a premise you particularly dread hardly makes it actually operate under said premise.
In the face of a profession that worships craft-as-opposed-to-art, Google sounds an encouraging note: that code can be/can produce art and that it wants to promote that idea, and show off those who avail themselves of that idea.
Are you under the impression that artists in this sphere are in it for the money?--and that Google is therefore somehow swindling aspiring participants? We could do worse than have an online art hack month. The modest constraint of using a single Google product in exchange for participating a well-supported competition seems reasonable for most. And that will hardly, "for God's sake", "limit [them] to showing [their] work in this one gallery." Like game jams, this is about kickstarting creativity.
You decry mercenary motives and then evaluate this opportunity purely in terms of profit. You can't have your urinal cake and eat it too.
I think art is all about constraints. It is a challenge to say "I'm going to make this next piece using only this one shade of blue and sponge instead of a paint brush", and I think the same goes for "I'm going to make this next piece only using Google technology." In fact, my project Layer Synthesis Device was a direct result of me challenging myself to make a VJ app using only HTML5, and it must work on my phone (a bigger feat at the time since HTML5 was in its infancy.)
Was what I made art? Maybe not. But it was a great creative exercise: the less you have to work with, the more you do with what you have. Sure the cash prize and the free marketing Google is using you for is sketchy, but it's giving people a challenge, which is where great things come from.
As some of the other comments explained it is one of any in the entire list. It was pretty hard to phrase it correctly and keep it concise (sorry on my part)
We don't say that, you can use anything you want with the constraint that it needs to use one google tech... For example if it is hosted on Compute Engine that it is a valid entry.
I'm not a participant in the Demoscene, but I admire both the technical and artistic creativity of what sceners produce.
Here are a couple sites for anyone who might be interested:
http://www.pouet.net/ http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?order=release https://www.scene.org/