Esther Hunziker
The jury honors Esther Hunziker with the Established Prize for her long-standing and consistent work with digital media. Since the early 2000s, she has regularly appeared with unique works and a distinctive visual language. She uses software in an original way, genuinely for her fictional narratives and visual inventions, and is one of the outstanding voices in the Swiss digital art scene.
Her projects are exciting explorations of software-based media. From the beginnings with HTML, JavaScript, Flash, and QuickTime to the latest AI tools, she continually utilizes the innovative digital means of her time. The interactive websites Nord from 2003 and the alphabet ltd.™ from 2005 (both in collaboration with Felix Zbinden) show early in her work how nonlinearity and interactivity can be used as important qualities for digital storytelling on the internet.
Thematically, the foreign and uncanny, as well as the flawed, run through Esther Hunziker's works. Whether it’s imperfect 3D data and mismatched mappings from Google Earth, which in Earth (A Space Odyssey/Oddity) from 2016 lead to new, surprising formations, or in Streamers from 2018 the emotional streams of YouTubers, which are uploaded into talking 3D stones. This discomfort is also found in her latest works like Cover. Take 1–176 from 2023/24, in which she replaces the facial area of portraits with AI-generated, sculptural interpretations of her prompts. Here too, something unsettling and uncontrollable breaks through the seemingly familiar and recognizable: her visual discoveries are 'uncanny' in the best sense of the word and reflect the tension between fascination and fearful delight that we repeatedly find ourselves entangled in when it comes to technological progress.