The Mix and Mash 2011 competition winners were announced Monday afternoon, live on Twitter. The competition encourages the use of NZ digital content and data and demonstrates the cool things that can happen when organisations make their digital content available to the public.
Mix and Mash ran for six weeks between 4 August and 15 September 2011. This year more than 100 mashups and remixes were received from a huge range of people, from application developers to poets to an entire class of primary school students.
The winners of the $10,000 award for Supreme Data Mashup were Graham Jenson and Alex Gibson for ‘100 Companies’. Their website that aims to dispel the myths surrounding the ways in which New Zealand can become prosperous and asks the question “What should we invest our future in?”. Lead mashup judge, Nat Torkington, said the site was “a fantastic use of interactive technology and public data to make sense of a topical problem”.
The winner of the $5000 award for Supreme Creative Remix was Candy Elsmore for her video, ‘A Grand Mother’. Candy said: “I wanted to convey the feelings of pride and delight that my family felt when we discovered that our grandmother / great grandmother had signed the Suffrage Petition over 100 years ago. As the story is quite personal in nature I wanted the approach of the video to reflect that so I filmed it in one continuous take as though the viewer had popped around for a cuppa and was sitting at my table while I told them the story of Mary Edith.”
Helen Baxter, lead remix judge, said “this entry won over the judges with the engaging presentation style, and a story that deserves retelling to a modern audience”. Lawrence Lessig, political activist, law professor and early proponent of Creative Commons, judged this entry and commented that the video was "simple, clean, and unbelievably compelling”.
The $4000 award for Outstanding Data Mashup went to Gareth Bradley for ‘Lionel Vinyl’, a website that cleverly reveals the cultural investments made by New Zealand On Air over the past 20 years. The site displays information about how much funding artists received and a data visualisation of the viewing statistics for NZoA funded music videos on YouTube.
The winner of the Literature Remix category was a visually stunning scrolling web comic by Allan Xia. The work remixes Dylan Horrocks web comic ‘Siso’ with Renee Liang’s poem ‘Crossed Cultures’. The judges were unanimous in selecting this as the winning entry, with one judge commenting, “I loved the way Allan arranged his work for the screen. There's a lot of talk about how comics translate to the online environment, and I think Allan's work shows how successful a Webcomic can be. I loved floating up and down the piece.”
Other winning entries include a Christchurch-inspired photo remix that creatively incorporates 23 different photographs taken of Cathedral Square over different periods of the past, a mobile application that encourages people to explore New Zealand’s Great Walks (complete with native birdsong!), and an interactive infographic that makes the Consumer Price Index interesting! Check out all the winners on the Mix and Mash website.