Prof. Paul Vanouse was awarded the sec­ond prize of VIDA 5.0: Art & Ar­ti­fi­cial Life In­ter­na­tional Com­pe­ti­tion (2002) for his pro­ject Rel­a­tive Ve­loc­ity In­scrip­tion De­vice. He is an artist who works in Emerg­ing Media forms.  Rad­i­cal in­ter-dis­ci­pli­nar­ity and im­pas­sioned am­a­teurism guide his prac­tice. Since the early 1990s his art­work has ad­dressed com­plex is­sues raised by var­ied new techno-sci­ences using these very techno-sci­ences as his media. His art­works have in­cluded data col­lec­tion de­vices that ex­am­ine the ram­i­fi­ca­tions of polling and cat­e­go­riza­tion, ge­netic ex­per­i­ments that un­der­mine sci­en­tific con­struc­tions of race and iden­tity, and tem­po­rary or­ga­ni­za­tions that play­fully cri­tique in­sti­tu­tion­al­iza­tion and cor­po­ra­ti­za­tion. These Op­er­a­tional Fic­tions are hy­brid en­ti­ties – si­mul­ta­ne­ously real things and fan­ci­ful rep­re­sen­ta­tions – in­tended to res­onate in the equally hy­per-real con­text of the con­tem­po­rary elec­tronic land­scape.