Ars Electronica
2004––The Exhibitions
Linz, Austria;
September 2-7, 2004
Festival website: http://www.aec.at/en/festival/.
Reviewed by Maia Engeli
Planetary Collegium, University of Plymouth,
UK
University of Art+Design, Basel, Switzerland
maia@enge.li
Ars Electronica (ARS) celebrated its 25th
anniversary this year with the theme Timeshift–The
World in 25 years, reflecting upon
the past and looking into the future.
The festival has developed into a unique
event for artists, theorists, curators,
scientists, as well as for the city of
Linz. While the symposium is central to
the reflection of the yearly theme, the
exhibitions, concerts, performances, parties,
and the Linzer Klangwolke facilitate experiencing
the highlights of electronic arts on many
sensual levels. The Festival attracts
an audience from varying backgrounds.
The popularity and importance of ARS and
the Klangwolke is one of the main reasons
why Austria is making a proposal Linz
for become the European cultural capitol
in the year 2009. I am pointing this fact
out because it is a quite unique characteristic
of ARS that it happens in a rather small
and remote Austrian town, actively promotes
the interaction with the local population,
and positively influences the development
of the town. Institutions like the Ars
Electronica Center, the Ars Electronica
Future Lab, and the Lentos Museum for
Modern Art have been established. The
Art University, the Johannes Kepler University,
as well as other schools and institutes
profit from the international reputation
of the festival and have constituted eminent
roles in the innovative amalgamation of
art, science, and technology.
This year I decided to focus my review
on the more than ten exhibitions of the
Ars Electronica Festival. These range
from large to small, from fixed to temporary,
from indoor to outdoor, from the Sensory
Circus by Time’s Up in an underground
parking garage to an exhibition of images
composed from printer matrices of earlier
works by Johannes Deutsch dispersed in
a Catholic University.
The exhibition in the OK Center is devoted
to the winners of the Golden Nicas, the
award winners, and the honorary mentions
in the different categories of the prestigious
PRIX Ars Electronica. These pieces are
well-documented in the CyberArts 2004
book. While the pieces are interesting
in themselves, they also lead to interesting
questions and redefinitions of the categories
of the PRIX. In the category, Interactive
Arts, the notion of ‘passive interactivity’
has been discussed in earlier years, but
this year’s winner clearly exemplifies
it.
The project Listening Post by Mark
Hansen and Ben Rubin won the Golden Nica
in Interactive Arts. It reflects the activity
and interactivity of the web, but does
not provide interactive features for the
audience in the exhibition. This piece
has a stunning effect on the audience.
It dominates the space and, almost like
whispering displays, words on its huge
array of little screens accompanied by
clicking sounds and spoken words. It has
a shrine-like effect on everyone entering
the room and people sit down, lie down,
stand or slowly walk around, magnetized
by the seductiveness of the installation.
Ken Rinaldo’s Augmented Fish Reality,
a work "designed to explore inter-species
and trans-species communication" received
one of the two additional awards. Three
professionally designed robotic Plexiglas
tanks each contain an aggressive Siamese
fighting fish. The fish, which have very
good eyesight, react to other fish as
well as the visitors and trigger sensors
that put their tank in motion. This phenomenon
extends their physical reality. While
the installation was nice to look at,
the action was slow and difficult to either
understand or to just enjoy any emerging
motion patterns. The other award went
to Ah_Q, a shooter game modification
by Feng Membo, which also included a dance-pad
for interaction. The modification consisted
of all the players looking like Feng holding
a video camera and mirrors around the
game field, so that you can watch yourself
dying. It is probably most interesting
when the artist is performing himself
using the dance-pad for interaction. The
jury sees it as an important political
message in the context of Feng’s
past development. A remarkable piece is
1000 Deathclock in Paris, which
asks users to estimate their life expectancy.
Upon entering the number into the system
the countdown begins—second by second!
One of the awards in digital music went
to Janek Schaefer. The main aspect of
his project skate is the random
playing vinyl record. He went through
great lengths to have the disc with "sound
scars" produced and now uses it as part
of installations, where the sound results
from the disc and light installations
composed from simple light bulbs are also
activated by the sound.
The Ars Electronica Center has become
a well-established Museum in Linz. For
the festival it usually renews its exhibition.
I’ll only point out a few of the
works. Gulliver’s world is
not a new installation, but it got re-conceptualized
and extended. Unfortunately, it was partially
broken when I went there, and I did not
have time for the usual "at ARS you have
to see every exhibition twice". Gulliver’s
World consists of a number of interrelated
installations, each one letting the user
create or enhance his or her contribution
to the world in a different way. The multimodality
is fascinating and allows reality and
virtuality to merge into a fairytale realm.
Dog[Lab]01 shows a collection of
modified Aibo robot dogs and questions
in an ironic way the possibility of genetically
engineered ‘perfect’ pets. The
voice interface of Brum, brum––Commotion
asked the participants for loud "brumm
bruuuuuumm" to make the cars roll on the
racetrack. This piece makes people laugh
out loud, and it was as much fun watching
others playing as it was interacting with
it by yourself. For more information about
the exhibition at the Ars Electronica
Center see the website http://www.aec.at/en/center/museum.asp.
The 25th anniversary of ARS
was also commemorated with a number of
retrospective exhibitions. The Lentos
Museum of Modern Art showed the Digital
Avant-Garde / Prix Selection, a selection
of six works that received awards in Interactive
Arts since the establishment of this category
in 1990 and impressively demonstrates
how ARS has always been able to identify
excellence and important trends. Different
historical projects and an illustrated
timeline were displayed in the Brucknerhaus,
where the Symposium was held. There was,
for example, Joe Paradiso’s Modular
Synthesizer––"an homage
to analog sound effects" built between
1974 and 1988. One of the exhibitions
in the electrolobby was Artists did
it first, "many of the media formats
and modes of usage that are taken for
granted today were first tested, designed
and defined by artists"; this exhibition
provided wonderful evidence that it is
worth supporting artists and that scientists
should actually rush into collaborations
with them. Minimundus––Milestones
of 20th century media art showed
four important media art works as fully
functioning miniatures (http://gruendler.mur.at/minimundus/index.html).
The IAMAS exhibition in the premises of
the University of Art was a must to see
at this year’s ARS. IAMAS (International
Academy of Media Arts and Sciences and
the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and
Sciences) presented itself in a very professional
and friendly ‘Japanese’ way.
The works, in general, were aesthetically
and artistically excellent and many also
included a nice touch of irony. The website
(http://www.iamas.ac.jp/ars04/index.html.en)
gives access to minimal information about
the individual works; unfortunately links
to more comprehensive online documentations
are missing. In a small, remote location
there was another carefully installed,
professional, and friendly coached exhibition
by the Ravensbourne College of Design
Communication (UK) presenting "experiments
in interactivity and digital network projects"
(http://mazine.ws/mazine2004/archives/000171.html).
A second small exhibition was devoted
to two Australian Media Art Works. Fish-Bird
is a love story interactively enacted
by two auto-kinetic wheelchairs that will
also produce love-letters for visitors
interacting with them. Life signs
is an ambitious, interactive environment
in which meaning and language can be developed.
The main square of Linz is where ARS really
goes public. This year there was a popular,
nine meter high dais inviting people to
participate in the design of the city’s
future in a variety of different scenarios.
Homeless people and other curious townsfolk
mixed with foreigners on the steps and
wrote their wishes on the walls, took
pictures about future scenarios, read
weird prognoses, or looked back at the
life on the square below.
My personal favourite exhibition/installation
was the Sensory Circus by "the
crazy bastards of TIME’S UP". They
call it a "protocognitive system to move
along with"; I perceived it as an instantiation
of a cyberfiction novel, a mixed physical-virtual
reality of squeaking gears and provisional
scaffolding combined with high-tech interactions
and projections. The names of the components—Lightning
District, Reality Shift, Sonic Pong, Mood
Swings, Paranoia Engine, Cavity Resonator,
Gravitron, and Bar—are good indicators
for the distinctive, tinkered, underground
atmosphere created here.
Ten exhibitions are a lot; please understand
that I have omitted more than I have reviewed,
and check the website, http://www.aec.at/,
which offers a wealth of information about
past, current, and future events. The
festival and the prix are supported by
the City of Linz, the county of Oberösterreich,
the Austrian Bundeskanzleramt, SAP, Telekom
Austria, voestalpine and 27 further sponsors.
Gerfried Stocker pointed out, "That the
sponsors are very important for the festival
and do not interfere with it besides of
allowing it to take place thanks to their
financial support".
