ars electronica 03 .:. code ::: blah3 min read

bloody crude austria: on the radio i heard about a party in linz, where people will prepare bloodsausage from their own blood and then eat it.
what should we call this? auto-canibalism?
i am still barfing at the thought, but this does sum up austria rather nicely.
day four of the symposium, subject matters are getting more and more concrete, the theme of the last two days: software & art, things are taken over by a new generation of coders/artists. young smart sexy talented new york. ben fry. casey reas. alex galloway.
with casey reas we were finally allowed to enjoy a moderator, that did not primarily show off a narcisistic self-portrayal.
it all looked really cool and smoothe. but what were these guys actually saying?
one of the key features of babyboomers has always been, that they are a highly opinionated bunch; and as that they are at least easy to understand and to go into oposition against.
this new generation seemed rather vague. their statements all sounded very good, but once you start to think about them they did not go very deep.
[yet another clichee about the “nintendo generation” was confirmed by the fact, that two of the presented works were about super mario bros…]
so in a way we have a very typical situation here at ars electronica. over the course of the last few days the babyboomers were presenting the opinionated theoretical backdrop, while the “nintendo generation” are doing the actual work and taking it to the next level – and not talking about it!
alex galloway of rhizome.org in his unique and somewhat bolemic style talked about code being executable. thanks to that feature code is the only language that actually does what it is saying. so that was quite a snappy definition of what code is. [we add that to our running definition: code does what it is saying. you can read code, write it, but not speak it.]
golan levin – mesa di voce [he was not young nor sexy, but very smart and very very new york]: “writing code sucks, you sit for hours staring into a screen, you gain weight, you get terrible backaches. i certainly hope i won’t be doing this in 10 years. although i probably will…”
in the afternoon the prix ars electronica winners in the categories music and interactive art gave their presentations. maywa denki was incredibly funny with his business/art project tsukuba series, huge on CI, managerial talk and wit. the business model for his onefive-person factory, where he produces “very dangerous nonsense machines”, is abcdefg = art book cd entertainment fun good expo fashion goods. maywa denki wears a turquoise over-all similar to japanese enterprise uniforms from the 70’s at all times and he has some guy videotaped him at all times, even if he just sits there for 45 minutes listening to someone else speak.
later: i have spoken with his translator and she said that for maywa denki his way of presenting his company is not meant ironically. he is quite serious with this. it’s funny how i immidiatly read irony into it from my western bias.