Walter-Fink-Award of the ZKM


	Awardees of the Giga-Hertz-Preis für Tanz und Medien 2012 are Kasper T. Toeplitz (composition) and Myriam Gourfink (choreography) from France. Their award-winning piece »Data_Noise« will première on November 30th, 2013 in the context of the Imatronic festival at the ZKM_Media Theatre. Innovations in composition often arise out of the combination of sound gesture and physical movement. Dance and contemporary music are examples for this since Igor Stravinsky's »Le sacre du printemps« or John Cage's works for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. But how can the relation between dance and contemporary music be defined seeing interactive media in our 21st century? The patron Walter Fink tried to find answers to this question by founding the »Walter-Fink-Award of the ZKM for Dance, Electronacoustic Music and Media« for the Institute for Music and Acoustics of the ZKM \| Center for Art and Media. Electronic and electroacoustic music, new media, dance and body should go into a symbiosis and bring together creature movements with advanced sound processing and performance techniques. Within this adjustment, the human body should be the creative element, which, through the choreography, controls and creates the art in the moment of the performance. The award had been advertised internationally in 2009 for the first time. The prize with a sum of 10,000 EUR went similarly to the group of artists, including composer, choreographer, media artists and represented the basis for a new yet to be realised project. In 2012, the Walter-Fink-Preis unfortunately had to be restructured to go under the name of »Giga-Hertz-Preis für Tanz und Medien«. It was not funded anymore by the patron Walter Fink, but exclusively by the ZKM \| Institute for Music and Acoustics, and no longer announced subsequently.

Awardees of the Giga-Hertz-Preis für Tanz und Medien 2012 are Kasper T. Toeplitz (composition) and Myriam Gourfink (choreography) from France. Their award-winning piece »Data_Noise« will première on November 30th, 2013 in the context of the Imatronic festival at the ZKM_Media Theatre.

Innovations in composition often arise out of the combination of sound gesture and physical movement. Dance and contemporary music are examples for this since Igor Stravinsky's »Le sacre du printemps« or John Cage's works for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. But how can the relation between dance and contemporary music be defined seeing interactive media in our 21st century?

The patron Walter Fink tried to find answers to this question by founding the »Walter-Fink-Award of the ZKM for Dance, Electronacoustic Music and Media« for the Institute for Music and Acoustics of the ZKM | Center for Art and Media. Electronic and electroacoustic music, new media, dance and body should go into a symbiosis and bring together creature movements with advanced sound processing and performance techniques. Within this adjustment, the human body should be the creative element, which, through the choreography, controls and creates the art in the moment of the performance.

The award had been advertised internationally in 2009 for the first time. The prize with a sum of 10,000 EUR went similarly to the group of artists, including composer, choreographer, media artists and represented the basis for a new yet to be realised project.

In 2012, the Walter-Fink-Preis unfortunately had to be restructured to go under the name of »Giga-Hertz-Preis für Tanz und Medien«. It was not funded anymore by the patron Walter Fink, but exclusively by the ZKM | Institute for Music and Acoustics, and no longer announced subsequently.