The Aqua Contest was the first public competition on Interface Art that I was curating. In cooperation with the German magazine Mac Life I was asking artists to hand in works made only out of the graphical user interface of Apple OS X. Currently I am setting up the Aero contest, doing the same with Windows

From the announcement:

Interface art is art made out of the graphical user interfaces of modern operating systems. And only of these. Interface artists combine, mis-match and remix existing elements of interfaces. They draw new pictures with the images we see everyday on our computer screen. Thus these brave artists offer a valuable different view on our everyday virtual environment.

Interface artists exploit the meaning of icons, they use the visual elements with their fixed purpose in a visionary way. Only as an interface artist you can use scrollbars without scrolling, you can put your background images to the front and open new horizons out of small elements originally not even meant to open a window. If you want to become an interface artist yourself you only have to stick to a small set of rules, create your artwork and hand it in to the Aqua Contest.

We are explicitly looking for artworks that re-use existing elements of the interface. The jury awaiting these artworks consists of the editors of chief from Mac Life David Andel and Mac Life Online Christiane Stanek as well as interface artist johannes p osterhoff.