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C110 review
Linz: Ars Electronica
Navel-gazing was the order
of the day at this year's Ars Electronica festival
in Linz, Austria, when twenty-five years of this event were reviewed
and analysed (specifically by Gerhard Dirmoser in his project
Memory theatre, available at www.servus.at/kontext/ars/).
A selection of exhibits from previous years was also on view in
the new Lentos exhibition centre, just across the river from the
Ars Electronica Center itself. This included Interactive plant
growing by Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, and Kazuhiko
Hachiya's Inter dis-communication machine, which forces
each participant to see as the other person sees.
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John Gerrard: Watchful portrait
(Caroline) (detail), 2004, medium: 3D model, custom
software, equipment: two PCs, two LCD screens, custom corian
plastic housing, tracking device; courtesy the artist
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This year's festival was notable for the intellectual
depth of the Symposium at the Danube-side Brucknerhaus and the
stature of the speakers and theorists featured, including Michael
Naimark, Myron Kruger, authors Sherry Turkle and Howard Rheingold,
Marvin Minsky (by video link from the US), and Lawrence Lessig,
US expert on copyright law. (The festival also featured an impressive
dance / media piece entitled Apparition by composer Klaus
Obermaier.)
For the first time in my recollection, an Irish dimension was evident at Ars Electronica. There was a Symposium contribution by Jonah Brucker-Cohen, a young American who has been a mainstay of digital culture in Dublin for some years. Irish artist John Gerrard displayed a couple of his interactive photography pieces at the Ars Electronica Center, while a number of contributors from Dublin's Media Lab Europe (Stefan Agamanolis, James Auger, Jimmy Loizeau) were runners-up in the interactive-art category for Iso-phone, a combination of telephone and floatation tank.
The winner in the interactive-art category was Listening post by Mark H. Hansen, which visually and aurally displays real-time data abstracted from on-line forums. Listening post raised an issue of definition - while there is certainly interaction involved in the work itself, the possibilities for interaction on the part of the viewer are nonexistent. Some more directly interactive works appeared in the runners-up, including the amusing Alert by Barbara Musil, which substitutes texts from popular music (Baby you can drive my car) and scriptural admonition (The eyes of the Lord are in every place) for the normal wail of a car's burglar alarm. Ken Rinaldo's Augmented fish reality allowed Siamese fighting fish to utilise computer technology to move their bowls. (Piscine empowerment perhaps, but again the possibilities for human interaction were limited.)
While Hansen's winning piece was arguably rather narrowly-defined, the winner of the Digital Musics section went in the opposite direction, exceeding aural boundaries to incorporate a visual element. Banlieu du vide by Thomas Koener combines music with internet-sourced images of empty, snow-covered roads. While ennui-inducing at one level, at another they evoke the video art of (for example) Bill Viola, with its focus on the passing of time.
No such issues of definition arose with regard to the winner
of the Computer Animation section. This was Chris Landreth's
Ryan, a mesmerising animated documentary on Ryan Larkin,
a Canadian pioneer of animation who has fallen on hard times in
recent years. The film makes ground-breaking use of CGI (Computer
Generated Imagery) to express emotive issues concerning the subject
- amd the film-maker - in direct visual terms ('metaphorical realism'
in Landreth's words). Landreth's previous Bingo, featured
in Ars Electronica a number of years ago, showed a disturbing
surrealist sensibility, but Ryan reveals a deep human empathy
as well.
The winner in the Net Vision category
was Creative Commons (creativecommons.org),
a 'copyleft' initiative which goes beyond the authoritarian-libertarian
tensions around copyright law to allow creators to specify which
rights they wish to retain and which they wish to concede. Among
the honourable mentions in this category was the very amusing
Bush in 30 seconds, a competition-forum for alternative
ads about the policies of President Bush (www.bushin30seconds.org). The on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia was joint winner in
the Digital Communities category. With a similar public
spirit to that of Creative Commons, the founders of Wikipedia
have come up with an encyclopedia that users can write themselves
(www.wikipedia.org).
Sharing the prize in this category was The world starts with
me, a digital learning environment for young people in Uganda.
Since its initiation in 1979, Ars Electronica has developed not just as a forum for technological and aesthetic issues, but also for values of freedom, creative initiative, cooperation and social concern that seem to have disappeared from large swathes of society elsewhere. Commendably, the city of Linz values not just the economic benefits of the new digital culture - which it has certainly reaped via the Ars Electronica Center and the Festival itself - but the human and cultural gains as well.
Paul O'Brien (obrienp@ncad.ie)
teaches at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin.
Ars Electronica, Linz, September 2004
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