ok, so the symposium was boring, most of the exhibits not very good (especially the ok center), the festival lacking focus spread out as it was all over the city without a central hub and the weather absolute crap… but as regine rightfully told me, we might bitch and moan, or maybe silently mumble insults under our breath, but ars electronica is still amazing each and every year giving us so much inspiration. that’s why we keep coming back.

my highlights were:

- manu luksch’s film faceless (i R proud owner of a copy)
- the campus2.0 exhibit neoanalog (incidentally organised by hyperwerk basel, a school for Postindustrial Design, hmmm)
- dr. whippy
- drumcorps (US) live!!! (he fcukin Rawkkssssssssss!)

most notably, i rediscovered radical, urban, anarchistic performance art through the work of lottie child that she calls street training. her approach first reminded me and then made me want to reconnect with keith hennessy, jules beckman (he lives in marseille now!) and all the contraband crowd, the guys i was lucky enough to hang out with during my san francisco days.

but i also discovered (yeh, i R noob) the two mail artists, ray johnson (the documentary how to draw a bunny is ordered) and on kawara and found me a new motto: i am still alive.

in that sense, i can’t wait till next year in linz. cuu all soon

festivals are cruel, you run around trying to catch everything, but, it’s inevitable really, you end up missing the really cool stuff. i am half joking of course, but this year it really is true. here are two projects that i missed, and i honestly think those would both have been amazing.

street training with lottie child

lottie child, a london based performance artist/activist, uses the urban landscape to teach groups of people street training skills. here is how she discribes street training on her website:

Street training is the art of constantly training our bodies and minds, both collectively and individually to develop awareness on the streets. It’s commonly understood that our surroundings have a powerful effect on us. Street training teaches us that we can have an equally powerful effect on our surroundings both with our thoughts and our behavior. The regular practice of exploring ourselves and our locality safely and joyfully helps Street Trainers to make positive changes in both.

for this edition of the ars electronica a “night-time exploration followed by doing nothing” was scheduled, sounds awesome:

we will walk through the night together in order to develop our street training skills. the reconnaissance tour will begin at midnight, proceed into the wee hours of the morning and continue into the new day. Culminating in a period of doing nothing at the volksgarten as training in relaxing, a vtal skill in a climae of hyperprduction and consumption.

why i missed it: i was tired and has a slight cold, blame the weather really.

audioweg gusen by christoph mayer chm

the gusen audiopath leads visitors through the now idyllic middleclass neighborhood where the nazi concentration camps gusen I and II used to be. the 90 minute audio tour contains eyewitness reports from current residents as well as from former SS members.

why i missed it: the shuttles left in the afternoon, and there was just always something. argh. no excuse.

mr.whippy gave me a huge scoop

well, missed opportunities *sigh. but at least mr. whippy finally was operational these last few days and he gave me a huge scoop of ice cream, my voice managed to convey my unhappiness in the appropriate fashion.

- people really did it. this photo was taken relatively early yesterday morning as people were getting ready to set up their messages on the grassy borders of the donube for “all of linz, the group photo from above”. i never saw it, but someone i met claimed he had spotted the plane equipped with a high resolution camera that flew back and forth across linz between 10 and 14 h. but i think it was cancelled, at least on the website it says “Because of the heavy cloulds the GROUPPORTRAIT FROM ABOVE will take place next saturday, September 15 between 10 AM and 2 PM.” i blame the pope tbh, he brought the shitty weather with him.

- free networks, free knowledge, saw joi ito and leonard dobusch discussing the importance of access of free webspace for all. leonard dobusch is co-editor of the book freie netze, freies wissen:

Freie Netze

Noch nie war es einfacher, Menschen und ihr Wissen in Form von Texten, Bildern oder Tönen zusammenzubringen und zu vernetzen. Freie Netze sind der Versuch, dieses Potential von Internet und PC auszuschöpfen und möglichst alle Menschen daran teilhaben zu lassen.

Freies Wissen

Der Zugang zu digitalen Netzen bedeutet noch nicht den Zugang zu Inhalten. Ein freier Zugang zu Wissen ist aber die Basis für Innovation und Emanzipation. Den neuen Möglichkeiten für freien Zugang zu Wissen stehen neue und alte, soziale und rechtliche Barrieren gegenüber.

- bananas and music might soon have one important selling point in common. a label called fair music was launched yesterday, that will be used to qualify music that is being produced and distrubuted under fair conditions to the musicians, much like the fair trade certification for bananas and other food. yesterday the first fair music award ceremony was held in linz, honouring projects that already abide to fair priniciples. there is a petition to sign on their website. this really is a nice initiative pointing into the right direction, i would gladly pay for music, if i knew the money went straight to the artists. good luck in promoting and establishing this certification.

- it’s raining again. this is how the rain has turned me into an anti-nuclear activist. again. it was drizzeling and i passed a group of people wearing yellow rain coats sporting the old “atomkraft? ein danke” logo. half joking i asked them, where i could get one of these jackets. a man instantly took his coat off and held it out towards me, “here, it costs 11 euro”.

- i made this, with my own lil, clumbsy fingers and RSI-ridden hands.

links:

joi ito sums up his visit to ars (i missed one of his talks, darn)
Clothesline Display, credit card scarves and news knitters (regine raves about the campus exhibits – so i don’t have to …)
vvork photos from ars electronica 2007

i feel like i just had a huge warning finger stuck in my face over the last two days.

yes. things are bad. all our alarms should be going off. actions and countermeasures should be taken. the two day symposium “goodbye privacy! – welcome publicity?” made that much clear. datamining is happening on a massive scale, the data trails that we all leave behind online and using our mobile devices are huge and just there for the taking, waiting to be exploited, or in some cases they already are being used to profile us and classify us into citizens/customers of various standing. i did hear some new, some of it quite shocking information, most of it, the general credo i already knew.

so i really should be worried. we all should. but i somehow fail to so, in fact, i don’t seem able to come up with any sort of an emotional response, well, at least nothing beyond maybe a tiny little yelp. call me naive, but i still think the advantages of free access to all information outweighs the potentially negative outcome. yes, a lot of things need sorting, like who has access to what information, and maybe for how long. but, uhm, can please somebody else deal with this?

somehow this year’s symposium left me really indifferent. maybe, just maybe, my lack of emotional response also had to do with who and what we got to hear. it felt like most speakers were preaching to the choir, to the already converted and maybe things could have gotten a little more heated, had we heard some of the more extreme viewpoints, the conspiracy theorists in one corner (ok, we did have erich moechel), a few let-it-all-hang-out bloggers in another corner and maybe a few of the “bad guys”, surveillance software developpers, dataminers etc. – in short, some more speakers willing to express the non-consensus viewpoints in order to get some sort of discussion going. as it was, it was all pretty shallow.

and then of course it was quite funny and maybe a little sad to observe, that when one of the great critics of the festival in recent years, at least informally, suddenly sits in the driving seat, and i do mean armin medosch here, he ends up making the exact same mistakes as everybody else, inviting his compadres, his pals, his posse, and failing to step out of his own mindframe and offering a broader view. on another level the presentation was very well done, witty, informed, but the selection of speakers was too narrow to get me exited.

my personal highlight yesterday was a small, unadvertised talk by joi ito about WoW. for lack of people he turned it into an informal lets-just-get-coffee session. as it turned out all people present were WoW players, past or present, and we talked about the various aspects of the game, elite versus casual guilds, social implications, the fascination when 10, 20, 40 players are “in the zone”, what happens when children play with their parents, the potential for addiction, outlook on further develeopments.

today the pope will visit austria. ars electronica has invited michael schmidt-salomon, atheist, philosopher, co-founder of the giordano bruno foundation, to give a speech entitled “do you still believe or are you already thinking?”. should be interesting. meanwhile i am tempted to “the pope on your mobile” as one huge advert claims.

this morning my first thought was: has the rain stopped? for the moment it has. and then: are my things dry? for the moment they are.

rain pretty much dominated the scene yesterday and it could very well dominate the whole festival. gosh, let’s hope not. this would be the perfect time to call for a small woodstock revival on the main square; let’s all get naked and chant “rain, rain go away, please come back some other day …”

but seriously, many of the main events of this years festival rely heavily on the weather being relatively nice. well, so far the weather has been awful, wet, cold.

last night the opening party “more than memories” was held at botanischer garten. i briefly went, but only encountered a few fearless people, or the one’s with perfect rain gear, stumbeling through the park, trying to avoid the torrents. tonite “music, bed and breakfast”, an all night open air event, is scheduled to take place on the top floor of a parking building with music from SPEKTR and ray lee. tomorrow saturday planes equipped with high resolution cameras will fly across the sky for “all of linz – a group photo from above”. impressive fact, the resolution will be such that one pixel correspond with 6 x 6 cm on the ground. but if the weather is crap … gosh, let’s hope not.

the goodbye privacy symposium started yesterday and i literaly have no idea what to say about it. yet. probably the information is still smoldering or fermenting within me. manu luksch, austrian artist living in london, spoke about her film project “faceless”, a film made from CCTV materials, that she was able to obtain after years of research and negotiations, and since has transformed into a 50 minute movie based on her “manifesto for CCTV filmmakers”. i can’t wait to see it; sadly the film is not shown at the festival.

to end this pathetic entry on a somewhat more positive note, i am now proud owner of a chinese tongue cleaner, thanx to regine who just got back from china.

links:

ralf bendrath blog – speaker at the goodbye privacy syposium
trackmenot - helen nissenbaum, another speaker developped this firefox addon that helps to conceal search trails
ambienttv – manu luksch website

i’ve only been here for one day and was quite tired yesterday after spending a night from hell in a sleeping coach with two strange men, both of them heavy snorers. but i have a feeling that this year’s ars electronica festival is gonna be a good one – despite the rain and the crappy, cold weather, *sigh*.

goodbye privacy

i agree with marco peljahn, the featured artist at the lentos museum this year, that privacy, the theme of the festival, couldn’t have come one minute later. it is spot on as it will be one of the major themes that will preoccupy us over these coming years. how to protect our privacy in times of ubiquitous, always on connectivity? i am usually one to advocate total vulnerability, for laying it all out there and i am quite allergic to some of the conspiracy theories out there. but when a company like microsoft announces their redesigned seach engine pushing the fact that it won’t track nor store the user’s search patterns as one of its major selling points, it should be clear that this theme is on many people’s minds.

hybrid art

i am not a big fan of inventing new terminology just for the sake of it, especially when they dont explain themselves – like “hybrid art”. everyone seems a little puzzled what the new prix ars category should mean. from a quick visit at the ok center i can gather that it was used for artwork that is hard to otherwise classify because different approaches merge, it used where science meets art, performance meets new media etc. some of the pieces shown are quite “performative” and must haven presented quite the nightmare to the curator. i mean, how do you exhibit a piece like camera lucida that requires a dark room and people need stay in the dark for 3 minutes until their eyes switch to nightvision?

neoanalog

now here’s a neologism that fully works, because quite simply it explans itself. i have a feeling that this years campus – or sorry, i should say campus 2.0 – will be one of the highlights of this years festival. basel’s hyperwerk has invited students and professors from different schools to participate in finding art works that bridges the gap between the digital and analog worlds. the results are impressive, a knitting machines producing creditcard patterns on shawls, plastic construction pipes used in loop sequencers, an ars electronica logo made from underwear stretching over the city’s main square and much more. buzzing with exitement. a simple yet very effective trick gave the exhibit its distinctive appearance, all the signs and texts for the exhibit have been lasercut into plain cardboard, and it looks awesome.

dr. whippy

this project is such a symbol, an ice cream machine that will evaluate your voice using voice stress analysis and decide how much icecream you receive according to these findings, if you sound unhappy you will receive a bigger portion. so in theory, gief ice cream to mr. grumpy, huge scoop! but with this shitty weather ice cream is the last thing on my mind. a soup version would be in order.

[sorry about the cryptic notes towards the end]

limits of existing legislation and legal precedents with respect to the demands of life online (examples)
keynote: fundamental rights in the digital world
joi ito 4.9.2007 11:30

legislation needs to make market sense, but even more importantly it has to make social sense to the users online. it is very important to look at the way the new generation of internet users thinks. we witness the emergence of what has been coined “the creative class”, many of them stem from a new generation of young people who can’t remember a time without the internet. their behavior is very different from people like us who saw it develop. this is a historically unique situation, when young people know more about a technical medium than older people, kids more than their parents, users more than judges.

(joi explains icann)
many people who run name servers don’t follow laws. internet is a working anarchy, the only way to make them follow laws is by consensus. a dozen of people could turn the internet off, if they wanted to. internet does not have a real legal foundation.

(shows the pepsi commercial that used convicted internet pirates to hand out free itunes songs)
when people download music from the internet, the record industry got it wrong, they said they break the law, let’s procecute them. apple and itunes tried to find a business model that works, that makes legal uses possible and accessible.

some points that describes the new generation of internet users:

context

what sms and text messaging show is that the context – the who, the where, the when – has the value, not the actual data.

copresence

an average japanese teenager is copresent w. 5 – 10 other people, he knows when they sleep, when they are awake. copresence is a new kind of content.

remix

(shows some examples of clips)
the cost to remix has gone down so much that all content now can get remixed easily. with video and music there are legal issues, copyrights. this is very different than with text, where quotation and remix are very common and accepted.

sharing

for hollywood sharing means stealing. but kids are exchanging data in an exchange that helps them to get literate.

amateur

amateur comes from a latin root, doing it for the love of it. linux developpers do it for the love of open source, not because they can’t get jobs at microsoft. the bar to be creative has gone down; the downside is, there is more noise, but on the upside amateurs can be very creative in fresh and innovative ways, while professionals tend to get stuck in certain set ways.

happiness

many online behaviors are driven not by market interest, nor are they done for fame, people do them because it brings them happiness.

example: wikipedia, where users do much, even tedious work without even asking for attribution.

example: FanSubs, communities of fans who will translate their favorite tvshows adding subtitles. hollywood says they are pirates, but often they will stop distribting these files as soon as the dvd becomes available.

copyright

the internet and digital media means everything can be copied. so it is important to find a way that makes sense to regulate this.
(explains the creative commons licences)