Herbert W. Franke — Prix Ars Electronica — founding and jury

1987

Artists: Herbert W. Franke · Year: 1987 · Medium: Curatorial / institutional · Substrate: Annual juried prize within the Ars Electronica festival · Place: Linz, Austria · Institution: Ars Electronica / ORF Upper Austria Franke co-founded Ars Electronica in September 1979 with Hannes Leopoldseder, Hubert Bognermayr, and Ulrich (Ulli) Rützel. In 1987, eight years into the festival's life, Leopoldseder initiated the Prix Ars Electronica — a juried prize structure that gave computer art and electronic music their first major international cash award. The Prix's golden Nica statuette would, through the 1990s and 2000s, become the closest thing computer art had to a Nobel. Franke chaired or sat on the Computer Graphics jury for many of the following years and was the dominant editorial voice in shaping what got recognized. Early Nica recipients included John Lasseter and the Pixar team (1987, for Luxo Jr.), Karl Sims (1991, for Particle Dreams), Roman Verostko, Larry Cuba, Karl Gerstner, and dozens of others; the Net Vision and Interactive Art categories added in the 1990s tracked the field's expansion into the network era. Franke's editorial taste — for algorithmic rigor, for mathematical beauty, for the artist-as-researcher — set the field's center of gravity for a generation. He pushed, from the founding, for two principles that held: that the jury be composed of practicing artists rather than curators or critics, and that the categories preserve the distinction between animation, interactive art, computer graphics, and electronic music against early proposals to fold them into a single "media art" prize. The category structure he won, with refinements, is roughly what the festival still uses in 2026. He stepped back from active jury work in the 2010s as the festival broadened into AI and biotechnology, but the framework he and Leopoldseder built remained the canonical filter. The Prix is the institutional reason that the line from Nake and Nees through Verostko and Reas through Anadol and Klingemann is, in the eyes of the field itself, a single continuous lineage. Without it, computer art would have been canonized by the contemporary-art market on the market's terms. With it, the field canonized itself. Lore Franke insisted from the founding that the Prix be juried by practicing artists rather than curators or critics — the rule held for thirty years. He also championed the separate category structure against the consolidation pressure of curatorial fashion. Franke is documented on the 1988 Prix Ars Electronica Computer Graphics and Computer Animation juries, listed as "Munich, Artist and Scientist." Several Nica winners — Roman Verostko among them — have said in interviews that Franke encouraged them personally by letter long before their prize, sometimes years before, and that the letters were detailed, technical, and warm. Sources • Ars Electronica — official festival history (founders: Leopoldseder, Bognermayr, Franke, Rützel, September 1979) • Prix Ars Electronica 1988 — jury roster (Franke, Computer Graphics and Computer Animation) • Leopoldseder, Hannes & Schöpf, Christine — Prix Ars Electronica annual yearbooks (Springer / Hatje Cantz, 1987–present) • art meets science – Foundation Herbert W. Franke — Franke curatorial correspondence