Lo! It’s the SWS23 shortlist!

Take a seat, there’s a lot to tell you today.

The big news is that the SWS Awards 2023 shortlist will be announced tomorrow. But, you can have a sneak peak, today. Check it out.

We’re very happy with the diverse list, and will tell you that our online jury rated a lot of pieces highly, meaning it was very crowded at the top.

This year’s shortlist contains 14 pieces, but 2 are out-of-competition; they can not win the coveted SWS Awards, this year.
You'll find some familiar names, including a previous winner, and some new faces. Curious? Head over to see the list before everyone else.

As we’ve moved into November, we’ve also passed the deadline for the Marŝarto Awards 2023. We had a flurry of submissions close to the cutoff date, resulting in about 60 eligible submissions, almost the exact same number as for the SWS Awards.
Our online jury is back at it, and by the beginning of December, we should have a shortlist for the Marŝarto Awards 2023, as well.

Remember that the prize money for these awards is directly related to how much support WLC receives from our community, you. Just two weeks ago, Echoes and Soundtrails became our first platinum supporters, and now we’re close to reaching the threshold for doubling the prize money for our award winners.
If you’re not yet a financial supporter of WLC, please consider becoming one now. Remember that the three of us, Geert, Andrew, and myself, have been volunteering on trying to make WLC, SWS, sound walking, and walking art in general, a success for five years now.

Meanwhile, the WLC website has seen some updates over the past weeks. After it was already possible to directly import your sound walks from Echoes and Guidemate, you can now also easily import your work from Storydive. To do so, start on the archive page for all our walking art, and add your own piece. Or go directly here.

We’ve also upgraded how links are accessible through the site. We now have a link directory, comprised of all links submitted by all our contributing members. A ‘link’, as opposed to ‘news’, has a more permanent character. 

One consequence of this change is that links can now also have an iCal (calendar) feed associated with them, which is a data standard for communicating event information programmatically. If you have such a feed, and the events in it are related to walking, we can automatically monitor them such that your events are immediately added to our events calendar.
The first with which we’re doing this is Street Wisdom. If you haven’t yet, you should consider joining them on one of their events, either online or offline.

Then, an upcoming event that will be worth attending for some of you is the masterclass Writing for Immersive Media, with Adrienne Mackay, of Swim Pony, the creators of TrailOff, which was shortlisted for the SWS Awards last year.

If you’re involved in creative work that goes beyond a single piece, you might also want to be aware of the November 10 deadline for this year’s World Summit Awards. If you are part of a project making a positive impact on society and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), consider contacting one of your country’s National Experts to submit what you're working on.
I’m on the jury for the category Culture & Heritage, and would love to see work submitted by you. Solutions I worked on in the past, Dérive app, The Museum of Yesterday, and Placecloud, are all past winners at the World Summit Awards, so, yes, walking art can reach the mainstream. Or perhaps the somewhat more mainstream.

Meanwhile, you might know that, besides attempting to occasionally make confusing artwork, I work with a bunch of journalists, predominantly in Brazil, getting their IT issues somewhat more sorted. Recently, I’ve been part of a team that has been introducing AI, artificial intelligence, into the newsroom, and we’re now up for a big prize, which requires me to head over to Thailand and fight it out with four other teams from the 'Global South'. 
If you happen to be in Bangkok, Chiang Mai, or around Rotterdam (a stopover on my way back home), give me a shout. We might be able to go for a walk.

Finally, that conflict in which Palestinians simply ‘die in explosions’, and Israelis are killed by Palestinian terrorists, rages on. You remember that, in my last mailing, I pointed to an article The Guardian published, just a week before Hamas’ incursion, highlighting artists in the Gaza Strip.
As I write this, and as far as I could confirm, the artists mentioned in that article, Shareef Serhan, Shireen Abdul Kareem, and Maryam Salah, are all still alive. But artists Heba Zagout and Muhammed Sami Qariqa, and an estimated 10000 additional Palestinians, are not. 
All death, let alone murder, is tragedy. But in the war crimes, and crimes against humanity,  perpetrated by the Israeli state, headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, most of the West’s politicians are complicit, not by letting them happen, but by actively supporting them. 
The blatant double standard presented by von der Leyen, and many, many, western politicians is sickening and, I fear, might prove that racism and the rise of the European right is not European fringe politics that can be ignored, but is at the core of the European model and colonialist mindset. At least for the majority of western politicians.
It’s deeply shameful. 

If we haven't destroyed the world in 20 years' time, our children's generation will look back in horror at what we are allowing to happen, now.

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