The first “NEMart contest” was organised in 2010, on the occasion of the 2010 NEM Summit held in Barcelona, in order to foster innovation in the Networked Electronic Media area, through a stronger involvement of the Art community, inviting applications for real demonstrators/proof of concepts which clearly show the exciting opportunities which exist when technology and art/design conjoin: interactive entertainment experiences, new design-led applications for social well-being, novel ways of telling stories using digital media, etc.

In 2010, the NEMart awards have been granted to 5 candidates:

• THIG presenting “GreenNEM non anthropocentric social network”
• The Cut-up team presenting “Enthusiastic artist-scientist collaboration”
• mHashup presenting “Uniting civilizations through NEM”
• LIVECELL presenting “An interactive and convincing experience”
• Cinzia Vigna presenting The Art Lab Progetto Retica

In 2011, at the NEM Summit held in Turin, the winner was “Isabella – The Secret Recipes” designed and developed by Virva Emilia Auvinen who works at Nokia as a Visual and UX Designer, and created the entire project in her spare time.

The 2012 NEM Art Contest has firmly established the NEMart as a high profile fixture in the NEM Summit programme. The contest was launched (see the NEMart flyer) under the aegis of a NEMart Jury including:

• Asst. Prof. Ovgu Ozturk Ergun – Intelligent Multimedia Analysis Laboratory, Istanbul
• Elçin Mol – Turk Telekom
• Jovanka Adzic – Telecom Italia
• Jean-Dominique Meunier – Technicolor
• Roger Torrenti – Sigma Orionis
• Pierre-Yves Danet – Orange Labs
• Mevlut Dinc – Sobee
• Rowena Goldman – BBC
• Virva Emilia Auvinen – Nokia, Berlin
• Mehmet Turgut – Photographer, Turkey

Selected applications have been showcased in the exhibition area of the Summit. During the closing session, Rowena Goldman, announced that the NEMart Jury had decided to grant the 2012 award to Michela Magas and Christopher Rea for her Synaesthesia work on “Innovative music components for collaborating and creating music with objects in real space”. She received, in recognition for her work, a piece of art extracted from the Wiki-Art web site, launched on the occasion of the 2012 NEM Summit, and inviting Internet users from all over the world to take advantage for the collaborative production of artwork.

The Jury has also decided to grant an “encouraging” award to Jeni Maleshkova for her “Graffiti me” work “Emotional attitude presentation through graphical expression”.