72.500 visitors – 800 Artists and Scientists from 31 Countries With more than 300 individual events, this year’s festival lineup was the most jam-packed in Ars Electronica’s history. This was made possible by 800 artists, scientists and scholars from 31 countries.
565 Media Outlet Representatives from 38 Countries 565 accredited journalists and bloggers from a total of 38 countries paid a visit to the 2009 festival. The figures by country are as follows: Austria (220), Germany (80), Italy (30), Slovenia (29), Japan (23), Poland (22), Slovakia (14), Spain (14), France (12), Denmark (12), the USA (12), England (9), Australia (6), Taiwan (6), Canada (4), the Philippines (3), South Korea (3), Chile (2) et al.
“We’re absolutely thrilled about the positive feedback this very special festival has gotten,” stated Ars Electronica Artistic Director Gerfried Stocker. “And ultimately, that’s the best 30th-anniversary present we could have received!”

mkay. good good. i am happy for you.

sadly i can’t say i agree. for me this was the worst ars electronica festival of the ten that i attended. maybe there was almost too much going on? it might just be me, but i did not meet as many people as in other years, the festival felt much more dispersed than in other years, it felt like it was all over the place, no real center, the topic of the festival, human nature, did not get treated in as serious a way as they usually do. most of all, i am not happy about the change the symposium went through. it was no longer a stand-alone symposium, but was turned into an extended version of the prix ars artist presentations; well, in two categories, hybrid art and interactive art. i hope this change will not persist.

after 10 visits in 10 years it is probably a good idea to take a break now. i will miss my yearly visits to this shitty (no offense) little city at the danube river. but before things get too sappy here, let me just break off with a quick: servus. twas great! kkthxbai.

juries… omg, where do i even start? i don’t trust them. they are a breeding ground for collusions and various forms of deal making. a friend of mine, who was a prix ars jury member in recent years in an unnamed category, actually told me some stories, that confirmed every suspicion i had. can’t tell, i am sworn to secrecy, webbed into the “great conspiracy of silence” surrounding the prix ars.

so if not decided by a jury, how can winners be determined in a competition like the prix ars?

i think there has to be some form of a crowd process envolved. but as christoph rightly pointed out online voting is out of the question. 4chan hackers are only the most public group who have been exploiting online votes.
but there is one model i heard about, that really has great potential. future everything, the media art festival/conference in manchester, has an online community in which every artist who ever visited the festival was asked to create an online profile. not sure, maybe even visitors can create such profiles. at any rate, it is this community that votes for the winners of the competition.

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best things last. most other prix ars categories this year were one huge heap of pointless blah to me, but all the winners in the digital communities category are really great and deserve to win. wikileaks.org allows journalists to upload sensitive documents in an anonymous way. piratebyran.org is the irc community that famously started the pirate bay in sweden. rasmus fleischer gave a really witty talk, pointing out the dangers that receiving 5000.- euro could represent for a group of online friends like piratebyran, ending his talk with: “i want to thank ars electronica for the 5000 euro and i promise it will not last long”. well, maybe, this would sound almost cynical to the winners, hiperbarrio.org, who could certainly use every penny to further their cause of bringing youth to blog in violence ridden medellin, columbia.

“The more they know about you, the less you exist” – de Kerckhove citing McLuhan

its sunday. feels abit like church, listening to schmidt-salomon, beyond good and evil. #ars09

lawrence malstaf, winner of the golden nica in interactive art, made a funny at the end of his presentation: two planets meet somewhere in the universe. one asks: how are you doing? the other says: not too good, i have homo sapiens. responds the first: oh, don’t worry, it will pass.

jens wunderling, winner of an award of distinction in the interactive art category for default to public, plays around with using twitter status messages in a different context, like printing them as stickers or projecting them in public spaces in the streets of berlin. he realised that some people were outraged at this, surprising in a sense, since it is out there on the internet and available to the public anyway.

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here’s a thought: how come everyone is blogging, twittering, flickring during these conferences yet as soon as the round table public discussions are about to start many get up and leave? sometimes it feels so autistic sitting here surrounded by people yet staring at this screen all the time.

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yesterday i happened to sit close by when derrick de kerckhove met his friends after the morning session, minutes after finishing his talk. he asked his friends, what did yo think? to go ahead and answer himself “ze german… he was … pheeww” big sigh, significant eye movement, letting the sentence trail off, clearly showing his admiration for, even intimidation by schmidt-salomon

it felt like i got a small glimpse beyond his public persona. here was this guy, considered to be one of the top intellectuals in the field, director of the mcluhan institute, eloquent speaker to boot etc. asf. yet even he gets insecure when he meets another man who seems to be smarter than himself.

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americans have this expression, if you cant make it, fake it. for them faking is nothing bad, for europeans faking something has a dishonest ring to it. but if you think about it, why should it? if you start faking something, you start to do it. and practice makes perfect, would be another saying that fits here.

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interesting moment when the jury member asks the winner of the golden nica in the category interactive art, so, what is interactive about your piece? exactly my question. because the answer that lawrence malstaf gave did not satisfy me; all art should hopefully interact with mental processes in the onlooker, that does not make it interactive art.

Cloud – the sample is from the richard linklater movie SubUrbia; we are hearing steve zahn and i believe parker posey.

#arscloud – twitter messages from the listeners in the room are projected onto a screen. not to be confused with #arschloud.

lets see if the cloud can solve my sleep situation

david sasaki @Oso: My slides from #arscloud at http://www.slideshare.net/oso/cloud-intelligence Sources of stats from “Social Media Revolution” video here: http://bit.ly/8yO9H #ars09

davis sasaki preview of todays cloud intelligence symposium

evgeny morozov’s talk on slacktivism

kristen taylor mentioned this article by cory doctorow on cloud computing during her talk: Not every cloud has a silver lining – There’s something you won’t see mentioned by too many advocates of cloud computing – the main attraction is making money from you

twitterfall.com #arscloud

a few thoughts on the cloud intelligence symposium

it was all good, i can’t disagree with any of the viewpoints expressed at todays cloud intelligence symposium. but as usual there is not much one can add to preaching-to-the-choir conferences. of course in countries like iran and china where censorship tries to dominate online communication, the power of the internet is undeniable as a tool to share information and to bring people together. but some of the blue eyed enthusiasm that mostly the american speakers expressed struck me as naive. evgeny morozov, who introduced himself as the one having to play the role of the bad cop, actually gave me the most food for thought. he introduced the concept of slacktivism, activism for slackers. clicking yes to join a few causes on facebook does not exactly make for efficient activism. he cited the example of a danish guy who started a bogus cause on facebook and within a few days was able to get 28’000 people to join, before divulging that the whole issue was made up.

one other thing that bothered me has to do with language. it seemed that many people have started to use the expression “cloud” very loosly to cover almost anything that happens online. while this is not too far a stretch content-wise, when used that way the expression “cloud” could get old faster than “web 2.0″ was.

after a first day at the symposium i am left with mixed feelings. it seems that the symposium has been repositioned closer to the prix ars and the exhibitions of the festival. the morning session was dedicated to hiroshi ishiguro, this years featured artist, the guy who has created geminoid HI-1, an android robot built after himself, his robotic twin really as the name would suggest (see image above). the afternoon session introduced eduardo kac, the winner of the golden nica in the hybrid art category.

i can imagine that this redesign of the symposium was intended to create a more unified festival experience. but for me it comes as a big loss. i used to really enjoy the symposium to be more stand-alone, a place for a more theoretical discourse, not necessarily connected to the art on show here. i personally never cared too much for the prix ars, as i have quite a few doubts about the jury process and i often found many projects much more deserving of golden nicas than the actual winners. zai from etoy just expressed a very similar point of view, he said, and i paraphrase, that he regrets to see the symposium getting moved more and more to the back burner of the festival, that he always came here to listen. and i would add to that, i came here to listen and get inspired.

later steve lambert was here to represent the many people that worked on the new york times – special edition, winner of an award of distinction in the hybrid art category. a pure delight! he said that much of the project was inspired by the book Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy by Stephen Duncombe, very tempted to order that book. click click click? hmm

More Links:
Interview with Hiroshi Ishiguro
Interview with Eduardo Kac

today i visited a bunch of art openings and trust me, i wanted to write about them. but so far nothing has really exited me. i am drawing an almost complete blank here. it’s probably me, i may just be going through a grumpy, jaded phase.

one project that did amuse me was Opera Calling
by swiss !Mediengruppe Bitnik (CH) and Sven König (DE), winner of an award of distinction i the category interactive art. i don’t think i am being chauvinistic here and just plugging my fellow citizens. it really is a fun, subversive idea. i guess that’s also where my problem lies with most other works, i tend to get exited mostly about politically subversive art these days. from the project website:

«Opera Calling» – is an artistic intervention into the cultural system of the Zurich Opera. By means of an unknown number of audio bugs placed within the auditorium of the local opera house, the outside public is given access to the performances on stage. The performances are retransmitted to the public not through broadcasting, but by telephoning each person individually.

the new ars electronica center is very impressive. it is exactly as a friend told me, i so would have enjoyed a museum like this nearby when i was a kid.

getting ready for my yearly trip to linz to visit ars electronica. this will be my last visit, my tenth in a row. in fact i already wanted to call it after my last visit, but since this year linz is also cultural capital of europe, i decided to add another year.

the conference theme, human nature, does not grab me instantly. i like the wordplay, switching human nature, an expression commonly used to describe behavior based on our human predicament, upside down to mean nature dominated by humans. but i am sure it will be very interesting. as usual i go there with an open mind to see what will inspire me. and i am sure there will be a ton of stuff. i want to keep this year blog posts less report-like, but do more small inputs. see how it goes.

in a bout of swine flu paranoia i booked myself a single room on the night train to linz. it cost me a bundle, but i will so enjoy having my own space and to be able to store the foldable bicycle in there. next input from linz.