Announcement / September 2022

CLTC Launches Third Annual Cybersecurity Arts Contest

The University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity (CLTC) is accepting applications for our third annual Cybersecurity Arts Contest. We seek work in any medium that engages substantively with cybersecurity in themes, topics, audience, and/or materials. Submissions must be formatted as a video (5 minutes or less in duration) accessible via a public URL. While the video will be the primary basis for judging submissions, the video may feature work in any medium.

The conceptual and practical aspects of the term “cybersecurity” are evolving rapidly, as what we mean by “cyber” and “security” is changing in ways that would have been almost unimaginable a few years ago. Contemporary tropes of security’s representation (e.g., the “hacker in the hoodie,” the “scrolling green code,” etc.) fail to capture the gravity, impact, and reach of security in daily life. As such, a transformative cybersecurity research program should grapple with security’s representation and discourse in the public sphere. Through this prize, CLTC hopes to expand public dialogue around — and awareness of — cybersecurity.

Among the questions the Cybersecurity Arts Contest seeks to explore are:

  • Who, outside of the popular imagination of “hackers in hoodies,” participates in digital security?
  • Who is responsible for digital security?
  • Whom does security affect?
  • What does security look and feel like to these different actors?
  • What are new ways of representing the human impacts of security’s failures?

GOALS

The primary goal of this prize is to expand and refine representations and portrayals of cybersecurity, broadly defined.

We encourage videos from cross-disciplinary teams.

CLTC will prioritize videos whose distribution has the potential to make a meaningful, longer-term impact on the representation of cybersecurity.

Prize amounts will be:

  • 1st place. $10,000
  • 2nd place. $5,000
  • 3rd place. $3,500

SELECTION PROCESS

Proposals will be reviewed by an interdisciplinary committee and judged for artistic merit, relevance, and potential impact. Impact encompasses potential downstream effects from the work (e.g., who might see this video, and what might they do after seeing it?).

Serving on this year’s panel of judges are: 

  • Mayola Charles (Lead, Social Impact Creator Partnerships, Meta),
  • Martin Rauchbauer (Cultural Diplomat & Technology Fellow, Berggruen Institute), and 
  • Allison Young (Assistant Professor of Art History, Louisiana State University).

Read about past winners of our first and second contests.

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS

CLTC seeks videos up to 5 minutes in length. We require videos to be publicly available for streaming via a URL for the indefinite future.

Note that award recipients must be individuals, rather than organizations.

Required submission elements:

  1. Please include a title for your video, a description of the work, including any current or future plans to distribute the work, and your intended audience for this work.
  2. Describe this work’s potential impact on its intended audience. How will this work influence viewers? How will it influence other artists?
  3. Video file (mp4) to be assessed by our judges.

LOGISTICS

Submit entries via this Google Form.

Submissions are due January 6, 2023 at 12:01 a.m. Pacific Standard Time.

We will begin processing awards in March 2023. We aim to have all awards disbursed by April 2023.

Prize winners will be invited to show and discuss their work in a CLTC-hosted public forum (virtual or in-person, to be decided in consultation with participants) in order to engage with the cybersecurity research community and arts community both at Berkeley and worldwide. Read about our past cybersecurity arts events here.

CONTACT

For more information, please contact cltc-arts@berkeley.edu.

Link for Submissions

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