one year after the celebrations marking the 25 years of its existence ars electronica had slightly less visitors, but still managed to pull 33′000 visitors to witness the 453 participating artists, lecturers and panelists from 26 countries. this year the biggest media art festival in europe took on the theme “hybrid – living in paradox”, and developed this topic in conferences, performances and curated art exhibits in almost 20 different locations all around linz, austria. the prix ars electronica handed out golden nicas and awards of distinction to 20 projects in 6 categories including the 2 special jury prices; one to theo jansen and his project strandbeest in the interactive art category, the other to the filesharing software bittorrent in digital communities.

cockroach controlled mobile robot #2

“no more cockroach driven robots, please. try to give other bugs their turn next year”, is how one austrian newspaper jokingly commented the installation featuring cockroaches by garnet hertz [CA] shown in the lobby area of the ars electronica symposium. fortunately nobody called the cockroach liberation front so the piece was allowed to receive huge public attention daily. it was fascinating to watch people either go “ewwww” or observe in awe as the huge [!] cockroaches from madagaskar moved their three wheeled robot around the floor by walking on a ping pong ball that worked as a sort of tracking ball. i was in the “ewww” camp, but hey…

suspended engines party

the opening party is quite usually a highlight of the ars electronica festival, but this year it was particularly fantastic. suspended engines was held in the train assembly halls of the austrian national train company ÖBB amidst dramatically lit trains floating in midair. the party featuring, among others, a superb performance by marc leclair aka akufen with visuals by gabriel coutu-dumont kicked off the festival in style.

theo jansen strandbeest

theo jansen’s art is one of these things that you have to see in order to appreciate. the huge creatures were designed by jansen on his computer and then built on the beaches of delft using the cheapest possible materials; electrical tubes, some wood, some light metals and connecting it all with simple electrician brackets and wires. 180 tons of sand had been brought to the main square in linz to simulate the natural environment where “the beasts” usually “live”, a beach. “live” because yes, they do move. jansen has developed an ingenious mechanism employing wind and air to create energy that allows the beasts to move around in a clunky fashion. when i observed how kids react to the creatures and how theo deals with them i was in the bag. theo jansen was the undisputed star of this years ars electronica.

toshio iwai

another star was of course toshio iwai who was presenting tenori-on and electroplankton, a nintendo ds game with cute japano-style planktons as visual guides to all kinds of interactive music games. tenori-on is a collaboration with yamaha with the declared goal to create a digital music instrument that is equally stunning in shape, interface and sound. digital instruments quite generally do the opposite. they sound great, but they tend to ignore the design aspect of things as most come in ugly, black boxes with some knobs and switches attached. not so tenori-on – the stunningly beautiful object was presented as a beta version and basically it could be called a visual midi sequencer. it consists of an interface with 16 by 16 led buttons that light up to visualize the music. sound gets triggered by pushing those buttons which is so intuitive that within minutes amazing music can be created. after watching iwai and his assistant yu nishibori perform on the instruments, let us hope that this will move beyond beta version and be available in stores some time soon.

hybrid symposium

neil gershenfeld summed up this years symposium nicely when he said: “the only paradoxical thing is that nothing paradoxical has been said so far”. and eventhough this was said after the very first of four half-day sessions dedicated to the topic “hybrid – living in paradox” and hosted by derrick de kerckhove, sadly even after seeing all of the sessions not much can be added to the comment. yes, we do live on the cusp of time when more and more hybrid forms of life will start to dominate the landscape. yes, we are not cyborg yet but we are certainly moving there. the panel of speakers all seemed to agree on these points and very few warned. it has been a few years that the symposium has lacked steam and controversy, long gone are the heated debates from a few years ago. let us hope that next years symposium will be able to reignite the spark.

prix ars electronica

digital musics

the digital musics [yes, the -s is not a typo] category awarded musical projects in the very leftfield, experimental corner of electronic music. nothing unusual there and in a way this is a good thing, because specialized awards like this one do have their place and need to exist. unfortunately it also means that attending the musical performances of the winning artists is almost impossible to do without your face falling asleep. even john oswald, the true inventor of the mashup/bastard pop genre, was not given an award for his plunderphonics work, but for a newer piece that involves him clonking around on a piano.

net vision

the net vision category is set up to hounour extraordinary projects in the web art field. in recent years the jury had done an excellent job honouring projects that were representative of the recent trends. not so this year. all projects that got the honours, be it yugop.com, vote-auction.com and processing.org, seemed curiously outdated. all of them are brilliant pieces, no questions there, but it still seemed strange to honour three such pieces in a fast moving field like net art. vote-auction.com was launched in the year 2000, which means it is 5 years old, yugop.com very much feels like it is more of a life-time achievement award than an award for an innovative new thing, those flash interfaces are no longer very interesting, and finally processing.org was started in 2002 plus it had already received much attention at ars electronica when fry and raes had lectured on it 2 years ago.
so what has happend? i think it just goes to show that jurys are a very tricky institution. most jurys are simply no good to judge art because the resulting choices are more about group dynamics, alpha animals and colusions. and especially in a category like net vision a public voting should be decisive.
at least the awards in the category digital communities were spot on this year with the nica going to akshaya, a project attempting to get the poor indian state kerala online and thereby also fighting iliteracy. telestreet.it (award of distinction) was a brave choice because it is primary a pirate tv project, which meant a different technology than the internet got the honours. and not much needs to be said about the free software foundation, who won the second award of distinction and bittorrent – winner of the special price of the jury.

hotspot linz

the launch of hotspot linz was another underrated highlight of this years festival. this long-term project is a collaboration between the city of linz and the ars electronica organisation. the initial launch consists of 16 hotspots spread out all around linz; 37 will be online by the end of 2005. over the next few years the plan is to expand the wifi net further as the goal is to have citywide free wifi by 2008 – in time before linz will be the cultural capital of europe in 2009.
great no? it may not come as such a surprise that a city like linz hosting a radical media art festival like ars electronica is also determined to be on the forefront of free, wifi accessability. let us just hope that the wifi waves do not transform the local cockroaches to become the size of the ones from madagaskar that we saw and ewwed at this year. because who knows, we might not be aware of all the secondary effects of wifi yet, or are we?

after seeing toshio iwai and yu nishibori perform with these amazing instruments last night in linz i must fully have one!
end of discussion.
the only problem, it so far only exists in a beta version. so please, dear mr. yamaha, produce this and sell these in europe!
we need them.
i also fully volonteer to be a beta-tester. no really…

edit: tenori-on is a collaboration of toshio iwai with yamaha with the declared goal to create a digital music instrument that is equally stunning in shape, interface and sound. digital instruments do quite generally tend to be the opposite. they forget the design aspect as most come in fugly black boxes with knobs and switches. not so tenori-on. the stunningly beautiful instrument was presented here as a beta version. it is primarilly a visual midi sequencer, but it also consists of a 16 by 16 buttons led display that visualises the music. very intuitive and within minutes one can create amazing music.

web-stats:
hits/day: 523 000
page views/day: 125 000

next years festival: august 30. – september 5. 2006
theme: how to reconcile ourselves with the h-word? [just kidding. its a secret!]

stocker: “theo jansen was the hero of this years festival”
de kerckhove on the symposium: big challenge that turned into big discovery. thinks that more emphasis on theory was appreciated and that a new discourse was started.

i already moaned about the net vision prix winners. so that was about all i have to say about yesterday. the “mcluhan still dead? 25 years later” lecture by derrick de kerckhove was interesting, but i can’t say much else about it since i am neither a mcluhan expert nor was i awake the whole time. i wrote down exactly 2 things: “everybody lives in a global world but it’s more global for some than for others” and “move from analog to digital and now to wireless. the characteristics are …”. sorry. nothing else. oh wait one anecdote stuck with me, mcluhan was asked by a journalist why his stuff was so hard to understand, mcluhan answered, “don’t worry i don’t understand it either”. pheew. apparently he often just rambeled on, speaking from “the right hemisphere”, fully stream of conciousness, just letting the thoughts loose and watching where they went.

i loved the video that got shown – must get that for samples. mcluhan had this grand american 50’s/60’s voice, raspy and sharp as a razor. may or may not be a good thing to catch on stream. depending if you are into mcluhan and if very fast speaking canadians with thick french accents are your bag.

okay, here, i’ll spoil it for you, mcluhan is no longer dead. hah.

some of my favorite projects that i have not mentioned yet:

USED Clothing by martin maringer: RFID chips get sown into used clothing. some information about the owner the clothes gets stored in the chip. future owners of the clothes will be able to access that data. [read more at textually.org]

Bordergames by la fiambrera obrera, medialabmadrid: a video game where you slip into the skin of a young marroccan illegal immigrant and you have to find your way around madrid avoiding the police and finding work etc. socially concious gaming coming up!

ACTION HALF LIFE by AES+F: the radical photo works by this russian crew showing kids carrying huge guns is even more impressive when you see it big. somehow very hitleryouth.

TENORI-ON by toshio iwai, yu nishibori: fantastic visual sequencer/digital instrument that looks like great fun to play with. but i never got my turn… toshio iwai also released a nintendo ds game called electroplankton that would almost be an argument to buy that konsole). [read more at we-make-money]

more later. statistics from the press conference.

i must go through the list of submissions. i am sure much more relevant work has been submitted.

what is it about artists claiming that obviously political media art is NOT political? why is that? hans bernhard [ubermorgen.com] just did it in regards to his projects vote-auction and injunction generator… michelle teran did it a few days ago in regards to her piece life: a users manual.
why is that?

yesterday was my day of missing things. there is always one of those. can’t split myself in two. oh well.

the presentations of the prix ars electronica nica and award of distinction winners in the categories interactive art, digital musics [yeah plural!] and computer animation / visual effects were on the programm. i caught some of it, but i hear i missed the good bits. the artist lecture by theo jansen, the artist behind strandbeest, who won the special price of the jury. raphael roggenmoser [migros kultur%] later sweared that theo jansen was THE star of this years ars electronica. amazing presentation and standing ovation after his talk. and then in the afternoon i managed to miss john oswald, plunderphonics, who won an award of distinction in digital musics [!] and who of course is one of my all time heroes and the true inventor of cut&paste, mashup, bastard pop, whatever you want to call it, music. i might have to catch these talks online. which is silly. but hey. i also managed to miss parts of paula le dieu speaking at the diy-databasing! conference, because i thought i could swing over to the brucknerhaus in time to catch john oswald. who had already talked. and to then go back to aec was just too nuts. but. that. kind. of. thing. happens. @. ars. electronica. huge program! oh well again.

luckily i did not miss another much more important thing. during the artists presentations in the computer animation / visual effects category [gaelle denis the woman behind city paradise roolz] a woman sitting just in front of me started to choke. something got caught in her air tube, a piece of traubenzucker = dextrose as she later explained when she could again speak. she started to cough and turned to her friend gesturing with her hands that she was no longer able to breathe. her friend somehow did not catch onto the gravity of the situation, all she did was give her some friendly claps on the back to aid her coughing. but the woman was still gasping for air and quite some time had passed. i had observed the whole thing and clearly seen that it was a very grave situation. so i got up and performed my first ever heimlich manoeuvre on her. right there in the middle of the hall. during brad bird of pixar’s talk on the incredibles. we, nina [yup, thats her name] and i, both want to thank chuck palahniuk because his book choke is where i first read about the heimlich manoeuvre, and eddie izzard for doing an in equal parts hilarious and illustrative sketch on it. the interesting bits were of course what happened in our heads. here was this quite beautiful woman and i had to grab her from behind and knock her on her breastbone – hard – in front of a room full of people with puzzled expressions on their faces. at least nobody went “shhhhh”. and for nina what made things worse is that she did not dare to cough too loudly because she was in the hall and did not want to disturb people.

i can also confirm the other interesting fact from chuck’s great book. i do now harbour very protective and almost paternal feelings toward this woman who’s life “i saved”. it is true. she could ask me anything now. let’s hope she does not…

oh no. hybrid has become the h-word. at least for me.

it happened yesterday right around 14:30 when i listened to paula le dieu [w000t!] and roland alton-scheidl speak about CreativeCommons licenses at the electrolobby kitchen. roland said that CC was a hybrid license. which of course it is but uhm… he also managed to drop hybrid at a rate of about 2 to 3 times per sentence. right then and there, in my head, i went: h-word.

but of course i do not blame roland!

later i spoke with michelle terran [life: a user's manual, prix ars electronica honorary mention] and for some reason she said, that it would be sad if the h-word would transform itself into an un-word simply because it was the conference theme here. she added that she thought it was such a nice term originally. when i told her that for me it already had turned into a the h-word, michelle honestly seemed concerned. we then found an elegant way to avoid the h-word and talked about her brilliant piece instead. apparently the first of three of her performances went well. she is actually not playing a homeless person, but a nomadic person. i got that wrong. [she is performing tonite and tomorrow again: 19:00 o.k centrum]

we talked some about surveillance cams and their omnipresence. i was somewhat surprised to hear that she sees her project not as anti-surveillance-cam statement with a big brother bent. that would be too paranoid. she was much more interested in trying to understand why people put up these cameras everywhere. not only surveillance is a motivating force, but also the setting of boundaries, the claiming of space, and voyeuristic reasons.

as an aside: michelle also told me that derrick de kerckhove’s mcluhan institute in canada is some small office in some backyard… thought i’d pass that on.

so back to the h-word. it seems that after the two day symposium i should be able to say a smart thing or two now, but i’m not. in the end yes, i totally agree with almost everything that has been said. but i did not get that thrill of controvercy as in other years. what we heard during the two day symposium has mostly been consensual wordplay with highly intellectual, yet only subtle distinctions. which is kind of blah. as a result i am not shook up and can’t really say much more.

having said that, some people did express things in extremely nice ways: marco susani, ollivier dyens, marko ahitisaari, david weinberger. and of course i also liked the italians [carlo formenti, vinzenzo susca] boldly declaring the end of democracy. may communicracy take over!

however the most thought-provoking reflection for me came at the very end, when usman haque pointed out that if something is considered a hybrid it is assumed that two previously seperate parts have been brought together. but maybe the interesting think to ask ourselves was, at least in some cases, were they ever apart to begin with? now that’s post-post-modernism for you. not only can we mix and mash and create new from a cocktail of old, but by mixing and mashing we retro-actively bring together the ingredients because we understand that they were never seperate. but i am half-joking.

in a sense neil gershenfiled summed it all up at the end of the very first session when he said: “the only paradox is that nothing paradoxical was said this morning”. [he also said, "all the expressed points of view are expressing synthesis and synthesis per definition cannot be paradoxical", but i am still chewing on that one..]

it’s all been very babyboomer. and as we all know boomers can’t disagree. even if in fact they do. to watch boomers argue is kind of fun – because they avoid conflict and at best they agree to disagree – but also kind of boring. time for the [post-post-]punks to take over.

* melanie puff: author of: “Postmoderne und Hybridkultur”. reflections about what happens with identity and self in our mulitmedial, always connected world. how can the paradox of being outside the system and at the same time inside it be brought together? identity has to become hybridity. hybrid identity is borderline idenity. we become the self and the other. no continuity possible, sampling, remixing and patchworking define hybrid identity.

* ollivier dyens: we live in a world where everything is changing. fundamental issues of being human are being put into question. art is the sensitive questioning of metaphysics. digital art illustrates the questioning of the fundamental issues of being human. differentiation: biological reality, technical reality, hybrid reality. reality is a spectrum. biological reality defines the very fundamental questions: life death intelligence survival. universals are possible in that field. in technical reality things become unsettled and blurred. universals are no longer possible. hybrid reality is the intrusion of the technological reality into the biological reality – into domains we used to think of as exclusively human, the soul, the spirit, the self. the paradox of the hybrid world is about us living in an organic world but starting to distrust the biological reality. digital art is the production of hybrid reality. the bit has no physicality. digital art is without origin. digital image has no source. it is simulation. yet it is still in the hands of human beings.

* jens hauser: “bioart – taxonomy of an etymological monster” the dilemna: what should be qualified as bioart? or not? and is it art? and why call it bioart? bioart is a bizarre distintion. other art pieces are not labeled after their subject. dna11.com claims “we think that DNA makes great art”. distinctions between software and hardware habe become obsolete in the time of wetwork. bioart has evolved to include: rematerialisation, performativity, bodycenterdness, *and another thing that i missed*.

* carolin guertin: “if globalisation is the medium cosmopolitanism is the message” eric kaufmann. “queer agents in the contact zone.” [sorry, got sidetracked... and now i am teh lost] “we are contaminated by these unexpected spaces we have entered.”

* massimo canevacci: hybrid identity. hybrid still carries a stigma. but that stems from dualistic logic. only in recent years has hybrid become a different tune. “hypertext so far is used in dissapointing ways, it has stayed under its potential. non-linear narration could be possible.” the passage from a individual to a multi-vidual. [the guy sitting next to me just left muttering: bullshit] avatars is a symbol of the multiplicity of ego.

session 4:

* marko athissari: director of Design Strategy for Nokia. title: blogging over las vegas. why the title? flying was one of the last places where people could not get online. now that has changed we are truely always on. mobile phones. great notes paraphrasing his talk on marko’s blog.

* carmin karasic: net art activism now. linklist: carminka.net/ars2005. electronic disturbance theater in 1998 coined the term hacktivism. first project floodnet. 4 different types of hacktivism: 1. mass mobilisation 2. symbolic gesture 3. building tools of resistance 4. direct social improvements.

* robin meier / frederique voisin: 2 electroaccoustic musicians from france and switzerland who create music that is mostly piano but stil does not fit any of the classic categories in fact defies them. musical categories are very clearly man made an influenced by cultural and historical factors. they speak about their experiences as creators of hybrid art.

* marco susani: about hybrid mobile ecosystems. the network has the potential to be homogenous. and that can be quite boring. leads to a flat society. suggest a switch of the terms access “anywhere” “no-matter-where” to “here”. because of the small screen of the mobile phone it is less immersive than computers, a good thing. post-broadcasting: from “one-to-one” to “few-to-few” to “broadcast”. 9/11 was a first instance where loads of amateur video material was used in mainstream. in person to person communication we see a shift from personal to tribal to viral. suggests that we will see more networked things in the future.

* usman haque: haque.co.uk. is sceptical of the notion of hybridity, because it assumes a bring together two things. which is based on the assumption that the two things were clearly seperate at some point. the distance between things is never as big as when we tend to say oh look they come together. architectural artist. describes some of his projects.

please note: i don’t think i did a very good job here. i therefore have added my notes to the wiki, so if you feel like it please elaborate, correct, rephrase: Notes_From_The_Hybrid_Symposium

guys, i am a hybrid! part human – part blog/mysql database.

yeah. no. well. it’s true.

this is how i realised: i met cat mazza in the morning at our hotel, because she wore sort of pink shoes [don't ask]. later in the day we started to speak at brucknerhaus and as it turns out she is the woman behind microRevolt.org/knitPro, one of the projects that recieved a prix ars electronca honorary mention this year in the digital communities category. microrevolt.org is a rad knitting community website with a strong anti-sweatshop message and it is very much a hybrid project – digital patterns transformed into knitted output. as we were talking i had this vague memory that i had blogged her project at some point, but i could not recall it for sure. so i unpacked my unaspirational [you had to be there] laptop and using search i found the blog entry in question. it was in equal parts shocking as it was exhilirating to realise that i rely so heavily on my blog to remember certain things. and in front of someone! it happened a second time shortly after that when i tried to recall something someone had said earlier during the symposium and again i had to rely on my blog to remember it. it was actually cat who pointed this it out to me. and so it is a fact: part of my brain lives on this clunky computer, i knew that, but i also delegate a part of my memory onto some server in switzerland. gotta remember to do the mysql backups more often…
[btw. meeting cat was amazing on another level, it turns out that her uni tutor is nao bustamante, a very close and dear friend i had during my time in SF. small world we live in]

so there. i. am . hybrid. and at the same time i am not hybrid enough. i went to sleep around 11 pm last night. shortly after 1 am my hotel room neighbor got in and woke me up. he or she was not particularly nasty or anything, but i am such a light sleeper that it was enough to wake me. and i have been awake ever since – as i write this it is almost 4 am. if only i was more cyborg the first thing i would re-calibrate would be my sensitivity to noise.

but i try to avoid the real topic. after 2 of 4 sessions we are right at the midpoint of the hybrid symposium, and it usually does take a few days for me to fully sink in. but for some reason i am having a harder time to grasp the topic than in other years. i can’t seem to wrap my head around it.
i trust derrick de kerckhove that in the end they will all make perfect sense, but i am having trouble understanding some of the curational choices so far. i mean, what does aminiata traore’s very emotional and deeply moving rant have to do with the theme hybrid: living in paradox? she of course said all the right things, and i fully and 100% agree with her; africa needs to be left alone to regain its economic independance and to live off it’s own riches. the G8 africa aid gestures where pathetic attempts at veiling the underlying issues.
yet a.) traore is preaching to the already converted here at ars electronica and it could have been much more intersted to look at this same topic in a much more differentiated and less blameful way. and b.) i can’t seem to understand how it adds to the discourse re: hybrid and paradox.

in the evening, the big gala. all kinds of people materialised ties out of thin air. the uninvited [or the too-lazy-to-apply-for-a-ticket] went downstairs to the electrolobby. first we thought they were going to stream the gala ceremonies onto the screens downstairs, which would have been a cool little metaphor for the elite model that was evoked earlier. but as it turns out they only showed this years cyberarts dvd on a loop. the buffet was a riot.

before i run, let me back up a little and speak about delegating parts of my brain/memory onto this blog. please do excuse my sloppy notes from yesterdays symposium. it was an experiment and i am sure it pretty much failed. but i’m afraid there will be more notes today… just skip the gibberish.

ps. ruan will get exhibited again! success.

ps2. still looking for pink and yellow shoes. AND paula le dieu is in the house.

session 1

* derrick de kerckhove introduction: the subtitle of the theme, living in paradox, is what exites him. “the objective of a paradox is to reconcile its contradictions within a sigle loose perceptual environment”. a hybrid is the moment of an encounter of two seemingly unreconsilable things. key paradox: natural/artificial, local/global, self/other, body/mind, and machine, multicultural. he shows a photograph of ruan, the hybrid creature that recently created scandal in switzerland [quoting me for sending the photo to him ]. introduces the speakers to come…

* roger clarke: when is something a hybrid? a new instance, multiple inheritance, significant difference, fusion as the most general terms. comparing robot, coined by asimov in 1942, moved from art to engineering and cyborg that took the other route. wearcam.org. rc coined the term “the digital persona” in 1994.
- and then the wifi started to mess with me… – where will the money come from to develop future inventions in hybridity? sports organisations, the aging rich, the military. and that creates the potential that it will emphasise the devide between the rich and the poor. public digital persona means we need to start to fight for the right for anonymity.

* wen-jean hsueh: discovering the power within the chinese sign for danger also means opportunity. she works for creativity lab in taiwan. speaking about taiwan’s economy. industry needs more innovation, no, in their fields there is good enough innovation, but there needs to be more hybridity.

* neil gershenfeld [the center for bits and atoms M.I.T.] he greets “hello artists”. atoms to bits bits to atoms. speaks about internet 0. interdevice networking. trying to allow all kinds of devices using different protocols to interact with eachother. goal: everything can interact with everything. fab labs: trying to democratize acces to internet, but also the building of it. cba.mit.edu/~neilg.

* david weinberger: miscellanous order how do we organise stuff/knowledge? used to be by tree model. socrates: a is a – a is not not-a – a is either a or not-a. to have a large miscellanous category is a sign of failure in organising knowledge. when things get digitized there is a chance to reorganise everything. once everything is digital four priniciples: 1. a leaf on many branches, 2. messiness as a virtue, 3. unowned order, 4. users as contributors. open tagging and annotating. mentions flickr and del.icio.us. he subscribes to the term taxonomy, which means everyone in the world is doing his research for him. thanx to the internet the “tree model” loses importance, moving to “pile of leaves model”. example: bloggers have blogrolls which communicates “go away”. that little act of generosity builds the web. classic media does not do that. we always knew that there are different viewpoints out there, but now these are in conversation with eachother. “a is a” moves to “a is sort of a, and a is linked to b, and a and b are talking”. the “is” is put in question in teh equation. we are forced to deal with ambiguity every day.

ng: the only paradox is that nothing paradoxical was said this morning. most speaker spoke about synthesis. which is unparadoxical.
dw: the endless conversation that has no outcome [= internet] is not necessarily an example of synthesis.

session 2:

* vinzenzo susca: author of “tutto e berlusconi”. speaks in italian so this will be cryptic. symboli. according to st. augustinus god was the one being able to reconcile opposites. he suggest that thinking about power from the viewpoint of art can be very productive. since the invention of tv only politicians who are able to instrumentalise electronic media can suceed. the phenomenon bush is a last overidentification with an outmoded form of government, democracy.

* aminiata traore: speaks french. cryptic again. hybridisation implies exchange. there has not been an exchange with africa. the berlin wall has fallen but the wall of schengen has been built in its stead. the globalisation is a form of war, of total war. everybody wants to help africa in order to hide the failures of the system. even terrorism has been used to enforce the system of eurocentric supremacy. and nobody speaks of state terrorism. in africa gadgets like mobile phones are used to feel part of things. je telephone donc je suis. la globalisation au rabais. africa is undesired. africa is not poor, africa is rather a vicitim of its richness.

* donatella della ratta: east west stereotypes and anti-islamic sentiments are not new. cites a few examples from european historic figures. is arab media really anti-western? the first satelite channels in the arab world were western channels. most arab tv channels are sponsored by rich private persons. shows excerpts of an arabic survivor and superstar, a version of american idol. the first examples she shows are inspired by a very westernised view of tv culture. she then also shows an islamist coca cola add. brands selling their products any way that works. donatella expresses her hope that not only brands will be cultural ambassadors.

* farian sabahi: has studied how muslim families have integrated in various european countries. extreme example of muslim girls in belgium joining a rightwing xenophobic political party while still insisting on wearing their veil. interesting question: is identity linked to language? mostly in first generation families this is believed to be true. in later generations it gets looser. second generation muslim youth have to make choices daily if they want to live according to muslim laws or not, re: wearing clothes, drinking alcohol, etc.

* carlo formenti: [speaks italian, in very intellectual terminology that i don't really understand. as i am too tired to get a headphone i might have borked this one totally] i think cf asks, which political form is best equipped to respond to the widespread introduction of new media into society? a few points: a new class, the creative class, controls the field of conscience. blogs, with rankings and search engine results, are based on a model of elite. democracy is not equipped to face this challenge. interactive communication, feedback systems, bottom up models could be the outcome of us living in this conflict and trying to shift into this new model.

* marko ahtisaari, who will speak tomorrow, has a apple sticker on his ibm computer. i ask him, so is your laptop a fake mac? his answer: no, it’s an aspirational laptop. brilliant. he later explained that it was a way to distinguish his black laptop from all the others usually laying around.

vs: what will happen to the blogger elite when everybody will have a blog?
cf: the web is a machine of selection. which needs to be optimised.

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no more moaning necessary. the ars has me fully in it’s spell…

just trying to remember a few of the projects i saw yesterday morning at the o.k centrum für gegenwartskunst, where, like every year, some of the price winners of this years prix ars electronca get shown. milk followed from latvia to holland using gps devices. shooter game assuming the identity of david koresh to replay the tragedy in waco. flames in old birdcages triggering speeches by hitler, stalin, mussolini and roosevelt. information from orchid flowers fed into an xbox.

christine schöpf, co-director of ars electronica, had earlier said that this years submissions were darker and more political, and she had concluded that this was a sign of the times that we live in. in a way yes. but imho the work they do show is unspecifically dark and in that sense not a very clear comment on our times at all.

i have to be honest here. [oh oh, i will have to use this sentence at least one more time today]. i find most of the work quite boring this year. or boring might be the wrong word. who am i to call anything boring? there is just very little really sticking out for me this year. MILKproject by esther polak and ieva auzina [they followed the transport of milk from latvia to holland, from dairy farmer to cheese buyer, using gps devices] actually wins the golden nica in the interactive art category. it is a nice idea for a project [yeah project. smile. you], but what they do with the data is too obvious fro me – they just visualise the gps paths on screens and have the people who earlier wore the gps devices comment it – and the way they present their piece is just not that well done.

having said that. two pieces really do exite me: run motherfucker run [very much so] and life: a user’s manual.

run motherfucker run by marnix de nijs [NL] is big. it is loud. it rocks. and it is extremely well done technically. basically it consists of a huge runner belt that lets the user control a movie projected in front of him. the faster he runs the clearer the movie becomes and he can also pick a direction and thereby chose various paths. at some point it is as he enters a deserted city in slow motion. the music also picks up the movements.
basically, make me one of these as my home runner and even i will take up excersing…

life: a user’s manual is an interactive performance piece where video scanners are used to pick up signals from surveillance cameras in stores or elsewhere. these videofeeds get displayed on screens integrated on carts or in huge suitcases that people dressed as if homeless push around a city in question. michelle teran [CA] and her team have spent the last 2 weeks tracking down video signals so they can perform their work live, here in linz. 2. 4. 5. sept. 19:00 o.k.

campus has over the past few years invited art schools from various places, zurich, kyoto. i think this is a brilliant concept as these student works offer great insight into the latest trends in media art. campus this year is hosting an exhibit made by students from srishti school of art design and technology from bangalore. i was really looking forward to this, but i have to be honest here [i warned you], their exhibition is somewhat dissapointing. i think contentwise it is fine. they pride themselves that their work has a lot of soul. and it does, i happen to love kabir the great indian mystic poet on whom a lot of their work is based. but technically it simply does not live up to the standards that i think an exhibit at ars electronica should have.
“in that case no schoool from india will ever make it to ars”, manu, who i discussed this with, argued, “half of the time they don’t even have electricty in bangalore”. of course, but i don’t want to fall into that certainly much more politically correct mindset. most of the shown work had maybe a great idea behind it, but was built in such a clumsy way that the ideas were sometimes hard to even grasp. and good media art need not be geeky technical as much of the work shown at architekturform proves. i just hoped for more technical innovation. even manu, who helped them on this exhibit, agreed in the end that the work was maybe not quite “ripe” to be shown here as the srishti school had only two years ago added media art into its curriculum. i am also not sure how i should feel about the puja [opening ceremony/ritual with incense, chant and flowers] that was held before opening the show. i am usually very much in favor of rituals, but here it felt odd.

okay, gotta go look for someone wearing pink and yellow shoes. today is day one of the hybrid symposium hosted by derrick de kerckhove. should be interesting.

ars electronica
this is a sloppy mix a made during my looong trainride to linz and uploaded online from the new open wifi on linz hauptplatz [that was the plan at least ...]

music borrowed [with all due respect] from:

1. pieceocast intro: a loop from fingathing: reanimno, samples from deadwood s02 e03 and fred, the voice in my computer, says his bit, of course…
2. bob moog [r.i.p.] et al.: erdenklang symphony as performed @ ars electronica ‘82 [w. bits from musica electronica, mr.bungle:ars morendi]
3. ???: the internet is for porn [via i forgot where i saw this... ugh]

samples borrowed: interview with bob moog as used by thomas mayer, six feet under

the pieceocast can be accessed here:

this will pick up all the mp3’s i link to from my blog.

earlier pieceocasts:

to find the earlier pieceocasts please check this list with links and stuff.
or look directly in this folder.

a word about copyleft:

all music and audio is borrowed with the utmost respect for its creators. however, i do consider this to be fair use. this material is created purely for fun, to share with my online friends. there is no commercial transaction involved. as a long-time dj i own 5′000+ albums in vinyl and quite a few cd’s. all the music i use for these mixes, i either own a copy of or it was released under a CC-license to begin with.
i release all my work, the dj work as well as all my other coding and creating, under a creative commons license, hence i treat this material as if it was under CC license. i attribute it and i do not use it for commercial gain. don’t try to sue me, i am broke anyway.

they had me travel via munich!!! trains can’t pass the arlberg because of the floods so via munich it was. and that’s not only 2 hours longer, but it envolves munich. and munich and me definitely do not get along. but hey…

then in linz. on my 6th visit i finally booked a different hotel [i admit, not because i wanted to]. on their website it said it was a 10 minute walk from the train station, which i thought was a good thing. what it did not say, was that this was a 10 minute uphill walk. and with luguage on hobbly streets more like 20 minutes – of uphill walk. but hey…

the hotel is more expensive than sommerhaus, but also quite a bit nicer. i am staying at the LFI hotel, run by the “landwirtschafts-kammer”, which is located right next to the “bundesanstalt für leibeserziehung” and the “landessportschule”. and these names do sound scarier than they actually are. but hey…

but but but – and with that i almost conclude my moaning session – then i took my “10 minute walk” downtown [a 10 minute sprint might cut it] and as i crossed hauptplatz the ars electronica fever finally hit me. there, on the 180 tons of sand where theo jansen will create his striking Strandbeest [=beach beasts] sculptures, indian musicians from the srishti school of art design and technology in bangalore were rehearsing their piece the unstruck sound: anahat nad to be performed tonite. poems by the great kabir will get recited, relooped, received via radio equipment, remixed. something like that. but at any rate: it sounds teh beautiful!

a sandy beach on the main square. indian music. great art. here we go hybrid linz.

later at the hybrid creatures and paradox machines exhibit at architekturforum oberösterreich lots of great funky-lowtech-playful work, but one piece really stood out for me. watschendiskurs [=slapping discourse] by frank fietzek and uli winters [D] shows two scruffy puppets facing eachother having a conversation about language theory. they are taking turns reciting wittgenstein and russian proverbs. when one puppet got enough of it slaps the other in the face and takes over. so basically, i want one!

the flooded arlberg will also mean i have to leave a half day early. so i best get on with my festival. today the exhibits at O.K centrum für gegenwartskunst and lentos will open doors and in the evening there will be a huge party at a train assembly hall of the ÖBB, where akufen, among others, will play. so my task will be, how to stay awake that long. as usual.
i also can’t wait to see the student works at campus where this year the aforementioned srishti school of art design and technology, bangalore is invited.

ps: conversation overheard during the trainride:

scene: a train crew guy writes something down for an old lady

train crew guy: here you go, here’s all the information you need.
old lady: thank you. but i could not help but notice, that unlike me they did not re-educate you, you are still writing with your left hand. back in my time they forced me to switch.
tcg: believe me they tried. but i just would not have it.
ol: yeah, well you are in good company, you know. george bush,…
tcg: *interupts* now, that alone would be a reason for me to start writing with my right hand. or to stop writing altogether…
ol: no no, i agree, same here. same here.

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