C98 Review: Ars Electronica

Top: Golan Levin: Dialtones: A Telesymphony; courtesy Sabine Starmayr/Ars Electronica Bottom: Hiroo Iwata: Floating Eye; courtesy Sabine Starmayr/Ars Electronica

Given the date of this year's Ars Electronica festival - memories of Kubrick's HAL - and the coincidental release of the Spielberg film, a great opportunity was lost this time around to focus on artificial intelligence. This is particularly so given the lack of the real thing these days, contributing to the terrible events in New York (which I hope nobody got caught up in on their way back from Linz to California or wherever).

Instead, the Symposium at the Danube-side Brucknerhaus was focused on the notion of 'Takeover', the belief that traditional art is being/will be supplanted by developments in science, new media and popular culture. A perfectly reasonable notion, but, at the Symposium at least, evidence for the thesis was thin, despite a consciously hip focus on game development (admittedly an underestimated cultural phenomenon). Going by this year's event, It is hard to avoid the belief that Ars Electronica has lost its way a bit. Evidence for this included the marginalisation of theory ("let art itself have its say!") and the absence of the usual intellectual controversies. There was much hype - and little evidence - concerning the new high-tech art that is going to sweep all the old stuff before it.

As usual, there was a heavy prevalence of biological art. Examples cited of the art of the future included the interventions of Eduardo Kac and Stuart Bunt/Oron Catts in the interface between art and science. Related installations at the Danube-side Brucknerhaus included Kac's The Eighth Day, an artwork which brings together bioluminescent (green-glowing) transgenic life forms and a biobot or biological robot. Another installation was Fish and Chips by Catts and Bunt (SymbioticA Research Group), an attempt to develop a "semi-living art entity" involving the operation of robotic arms. The entity is assembled from fish neurons grown over silicon chips (the software or 'wetware') and incorporating visual and audio output devices (the hardware). Elsewhere in the building (as if God's mice were not good enough) one could examine green-glowing mice. Political issues apart, this kind of thing may work as an exercise in applied science, but - if we could ever agree what art is - is it art?

Film-maker Nora Barry of the USA spoke interestingly about The Bit Screen, a lab for online cinematic storytelling. Her intriguingly-titled paper (Digital Shanachies) was about Web Cinema and its different forms: Interactive, Database Narrative, Pass Along, Shorts, Joke Film, Impressionistic Film, and Life Stories. Barry drew parallels between storytelling on the Web and the fluid medium of traditional story-telling, also between the 'framing story' of the interactive film and older devices like Boccaccio's Decameron or the 1,001 Nights. She noted that some successful internet films "literally lock the camera into place and have the actors move within the frame" and enthused about the possibilities of the web to reinvigorate the allegedly tired medium of cinema.

Char Davies - one of the few outstanding figures at the event - spoke at length about her ground-breaking art pieces, Osmose and éphémère, which deal with issues of ecology and humanity in the context of virtual reality, or immersivity as she prefers to call it. Issues of accelerated obsolescence arose - some of the hardware and software needed to run Osmose is no longer made. (VR is already entering the realm of antiquity, the future becoming the past before it is even the present.) In fact, it might be said that the work of Kac and Davies represents the two poles - post-nature and the re-valuation of nature - respectively. Prometheus versus Pan - at some stage maybe we're all going to have to take sides on this issue.

Top: Paul de Marinis: RainDance; courtesy the artist/Ars Electronica; Bottom: Kenneth Rinaldo/Emergent Systems: Autopoiesis; courtesy the artists/Ars Electronica

 

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer spoke impressively about his work in relation to architecture, and Benneton photographer Oliviero Toscani gave a riveting account of his forays into the advertising world, interspersed with technophobic barbs about Ars Electronica. There was also a concert (Dialtones: A Telesymphony by Golan Levin), utilising the audience's mobile phones which worked as a concept at least, if not so much as a musical experience.

But most of the interesting material at this year's Ars Electronica was to be found elsewhere than the Brucknerhaus - at the downtown OK Center exhibition area and the Ars Electronica Center. The most intriguing installation in the category of electronic art was Brainball, a Zen-type thought-operated game by a collaboration of artists, designers, engineers and scientists called Smart Studio. Two people sit at opposite ends of a table, each trying (or rather not trying) to move a ball through thought-control into the space of the other. A headband measures the brain-waves of each player, and the one who is most relaxed and least stressed is the winner - their state of calm causes the ball to move continually into the opponent's space. (I beat several people in succession, and may consider turning professional if the game catches on. Will telekinesis some day be a commonplace of daily life, and telepathy supplant e-mail and the mobile phone?)

Also fun in the area of interactive art - though more in theory than cumbersome practice - was Floating Eye by Hiroo Iwata, a head-mounted display attached to a camera on a balloon floating overhead, which allows you (fuzzily) to see yourself and surroundings as if you were hovering above your body. Raindance by Paul DeMarinis was a wonder: jets of water carry sound vibrations that are made audible by the listener's interception with a large umbrella, which becomes the loudspeaker - local children went delightfully mad to the water-borne sound of Strauss's Blue Danube Waltz (Linz is on the Danube and this is 2001 - get it?) Kenneth Rinaldo's Autopoiesis consisted of large suspended musical and robotic sculptures which developmentally interact both with the participant and with each other, inquisitively nuzzling the person wandering among them like large elephant trunks. The temptation to pat them was almost irresistible. (Personally, I'm much more comfortable with machines becoming animals than animals becoming machines.) These kinds of submissions in the area of interactive art were more absorbing than the winner, Polar, by Carsten Nicolai and Marko Peljhan. Apparently based on Tarkovsky's film Solaris, this was on display only in video format, and was impenetrable even with the aid of a written text.

The experience of interactive art is sometimes more reminiscent of the toyshop than the art gallery, bringing to mind Marcuse's attempt to mix aesthetics and the play-principle in a post-capitalist mélange. In this regard a notable feature of Ars Electronica this year was the Electrolobby, described as "a blend of dayclubbing, informal media conference and networked showroom." Here insomniac game-developers worked feverishly and unselfishly to share their projects with each other and the world. Some interesting sites in this connection: www.kerb.co.uk, www.teamcHmAn.com, www.moccu.com. Check out also the on-line teenage hangout Habbo Hotel (www.habbo.com) and Everything (www.everything2.org), described as a "collaborative real-time encyclopedia for the Digital Generation." (Watch out guys, generational tags can wilt - it used to be cool to be a baby boomer.) A sign of the times was the presence of a group of professional video game players.

In the area of virtual-reality development, some informative workshops took place in and around the Ars Electronica Center with big names like Paul Rajlich and Dan Sandin from the USA. A dominant notion at this year's Ars Electronica was that of gaming being the 'killer app' for virtual reality. Those fortunate enough to draw the right numbers (I wasn't one) got to play a VR version of Quake, which was spectacular even to watch. In the VR 'Cave' in the Ars Electronica Center one could interface in virtual reality with people in another room or another continent (or rather with their somewhat crude avatars). For the first time I had the impression of the potential annihilation of space, something that may become very useful - and profitable - if people's fear of flying becomes institutionalised due to the recent terrorist events. Already, video-conferencing companies have taken off on the stock market, but VR adds the crucial dimension of presence-to-hand. Check out www.aec.at/futurelab.

This year there were two categories for Net entries, entitled Net Vision and Net Excellence. The winner in the Net Vision section was Team cHmAn from France for the server/online game Banja (www.Banja.com) which develops the possibilities of Flash programming, while Joshua Davis from the USA won the Net Excellence award for Praystation. Praystation (www.praystation.com) involves neither religion nor mimicry of Japanese pronunciation, but is a website about the movement of time involving the 'gift-economy' mutual sharing of code-developments.

Winner of the computer animation section was Le Processus by Savier de l'Hermuzière and Phillippe Grammaticopoulos of France, a parable about individuality and conformity with echoes of Kafka and Orwell. An impressive runner-up in this section, also from France, was L'Enfant de la Haute Mer (Laetitia Gabrielli et al.), a haunting piece about a child living in an abandoned seaside town, which gave the impression of a series of Impressionist paintings come to life. In the Digital Musics section, the winner was Ryoji Ikeda of Japan for the composition Matrix, while the winner of the Cybergeneration section, open to Austrian under-19s, was Markus Triska for JIND, a game which enables users to try out the basics of programming (triskam.virtualave.net/jind.html). With 900 submissions in this section, the competition gives a huge impetus to skill-development at secondary-school level. The usual question - why on earth isn't this kind of thing being done in Ireland?

To sum up: cute machines, shaven heads, cool games, animal/machine combinations, disembodiment, the new altruism, the annihilation of space, even (ho-hum) the occasional DRI (deliberately recalcitrant interface). A break from the vapid posturings of Brit Art, certainly. But, at least on the evidence of this year's Ars Electronica Festival, the digital age has some way to go before it catches up with Picasso, Duchamp, Eisenstein, Buñuel et al. Pace Orson Welles in The Third Man, maybe a vibrant culture needs wars and revolutions to give it impetus. (So we may even get one, after all.)

Ars Electronica 2001, Linz, September 1-6, 2001

Paul O'Brien (obrien@ncad.ie) teaches aesthetics and cyberculture at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin.