after much babbel blogging re: ar5_3l3etc. here, my full review is now online @ pixelsurgeon … woooheee.
Ars Electronica 2004: Timeshift - The World In Twenty-five Years
An ambitious theme for an ambitious festival“The spimes are coming. The spimes are coming.” Bruce Sterling [more]
555 artists from 28 countries
587 accredited journalists form 33 countries
34 000 visitors (not counting the visitors to the many public exhibits around linz)
4.4 mio hits at aec.at
(7 mio counting the two weeks before)
137 000 page views per day
traceencouters.org:
20 000 contacts
2 000 primary contacts
and counting…
pieceoBlog
1 very exhausted blogger
last day in linz. i am pretty exhausted. my system has reached information overload. and…
what else is there to say?
the weather in linz will be “heiter”.
they say so on tv. i am all packed up to go, checked out from the hotel, eager to leave. but my train leaves only tonite 2322. this must have been the worst planing ever. i got here one day early an dleave here a day late. damn.
and no, i am not complaining. this bitch is i am bitchin, whinin and moanin.
actually my most burning question after almost a week thinking about what the future will bring is the following one, ready? when will “they” get it together to invent beaming? “beam me up [which in this case means home], scotty [wifey]” probably i will end up having to invent it…
traceencounters.org is starting to look nice. this is the project that handed out 1000 pins to ars visitors. the pins register encounters between the people carrying them and download the data to a database to create patterns and networks.
in other words, data mining in an artistic context.
its also the project that got bruce sterling into soldering and saying: “linz is probably completetly hallucinating each year during ars electronica, you know, with these thousands of people running around wearing badges, blinking pins and spimes…” and he probably said it much better than that, so dont quote me on that… oh, and he also said that the defining point of such festivals like ars is that people wear fancy shoes. which he has proved so eloquently on his blog…
in fact listening to bruce sterling spew his rants was TEH *HIGH*LIGHT ov TEH FESTIVAL. yesterday he spoke downstairs in the kitchen of the electrolobby - a much more initimate setting. deep stuff man. plus i have not laughed this hard in decades. he started out with a 5 minute diss on open source water [image here]. how it tasted like regular tabwater… the bottle was poorly designed… the water bottled in a source nobody had ever heard of… he said, he was deeply dissapointed. open source water should taste and look great.
dont even get me started on software patents. they are truely the devil…
lawrence lessig 06.09.2004
please check my moblog for images…
finally someone is leaning out the window and making a prediction about the world 25 years from today…
interviewer: will you make a prediction about the world 25 years from now?
bruce sterling: sure…
interviewer: oh good, because so far nobody on this panel has done so…
bruce sterling: [...] ars electronica in 25 years will be this place - 25 years from now. not much else can be said about it. some of you will be here, some of you will have died. all of you will be 25 years older, i can guarantee you that… [...] the future never arrives here. there will never be a point where we will sit here and say this is the future. the future has a future. dystopias and utopias are just tries to stop the passing of time… but time passes whether you think about it or not.
scoop: gilberto gil, david byrne, cornelius, beastie boys might put there work out under a creative commons license… after a slight music specific license adaption which will be launched next month. lawrence lessig just hinted towards something like that during his speech.