re: pieceoBlog
a post can now have multiple categories! [which i impressively demonstrated above]
plus: for people on dial-up! there is now a txt-version of pieceoBlog without all the knick-knacks and layouts and other heaviness. i was recently on dial-up and i noticed how slow pBlob loads…

HE CAN BOOGIE!!!
meet my new toy. i bought this at ars electronica from maywa denki, makers of non-sense machines and the secret stars of this years ars.
BITMAN has a 64 bit display, he can dance, display messages, morse these messages, and has a watch/alarmclock innit as well. fucking brilliant!
you might be able to get one at the above website, if you read japanese that is…

the clash of generations
what most marked this latest edition of ars electronica was an underlying clash of generations. for the first time a substantial part of the conference’s line-up was made up by a relatively young generation of artists/coders. while among the art exhibits the freshest and most vibrant approach could definitely be found in the so-called campus, where students of the hgkz in zuerich were using combinations of low-tech/high-tech materials to challenge the analogue/digital destinction in a most innovative manner. yet both the younger generation of speakers and media artists had one thing in common. their presentations were in both cases hip, oozing with life-style and sounded/looked real good, but if you actually thought about their message, it did not go very deep.
one of the key characteristics of the “babyboomers” has always been, that they are a highly opinionated bunch. with all the irritation, that this sometimes produces, at least they are easy to understand and even easier to go into opposition against.
the new generation of speakers/artists seemed rather vague in comparison.
so in a way a very typical situation was reproduced here at ars electronica. the “babyboomers” once again took it upon themselves to outline the highly opinionated theoretical backdrop, while the “nintendo generation” were/are the one’s doing the actual work and taking things to the next level – but not talking about it! one is left wondering when and how this smoldering conflict of generations will start to clash in a more overt way …

read my complete review at fieldreport

on thursday afternoon the winners in the categories NET EXCELLENCE and NET VISION gave their presentations.
a few months ago, when this year’s winner’s were first announced on the website aec.at/prix, i had been very surprised about the jury’s choices. so i was quite looking forward to this presentation, maybe things would get explained a bit better here. unfortunately this did not happen. i think more than ever, that it is a scandal who won and why.
golden nica NET EXCELLENCE: sulake labs oy for habbo hotel [google it if you must...]
this is just plain wrong. the biggest scandal of this years ars electronica festival actually…
and i have only started to think about the implications of the jury’s decision and about what is communicated here.
first of all the habbo hotel project is not even that new. the bulk of the shockwave chat environment has been online for almost 3 years and therefore what may have been the innovative part of this project at one point belongs to the past.
and second, what was honoured here is actually primarily a business-model, and as such, i think it should not receive an award from an artistic festival auch as ars electronica. habbo hotel represents a business-model offering answers to the industry’s questions about how to generate a new generation of internet-users, who are willing to pay for internet services and, as in this case, micro-content. habbo hotel’s target audience is now clearly declared as teenagers, who are willing to spend money for status symbols like furniture inside the rooms of habbo hotel. confronted with these questions the habbo hotel representatives at the festival were very unclear and vague in their responses. they were just sort of shruging these vaild reservations off. so that made it even worse.
golden nica NET VISION: yury gitman and carlos j. gomez de llarena for noderunner
this wifi node detection game is an interseting idea as it bridges the online/offline gap in an innovative manner. however the coding is very poor as this page was not even programmed dynamically. during the game one of the members of the group stayed back in the “hq” and updated the position of the players manually. no wonder they only played the game a few times and have long dropped it since. good idea, very poorly implemented. does not deserve a nica at all.
award of distinction NET VISION: david crawford for stop motion studies
whatever. i dont get this. it’s not very good fotography, and it’s not very well animated. the only thing that might be interesting is the algorhythm animating the image sequences. but this is something you have to be told, you wouldn’t see it from the work itself. terrible.
award of distinction NET VISION: golan levin for the secret lives of numbers
sort of a cute idea, but even golan himself admitted that this project has not been very high on his priority list. and it shows …
award of distinction NET EXCELLENCE: james tindall for boards of canada
don’t get me wrong here. boc is my favorite band and this website is quite nice, really meditative and well done. but is not an outstanding website. there are many many like this. hmmm. it’s still the best website of the 6 winners here.
award of distinction NET EXCELLENCE: lia for re:move
there always has to be at least one website with an austrian author among the winners. so there… terrible awful webart!
the weird thing is that some of the other websites, that got an honorable mention, are actually much much better than all of these, supervillainizer.ch, unmovie.net, injunction generator and sinplex.com

christiane paul: i have given many interviews over these last days and there is one question, that most journalists have asked me in some form or other: is softwareart art made by geeks for geeks and only they will ever look at it? i disagree completely, absolutely not!
but me, somehow, today, i am not convinced…
tonite trip back home in der tschu tschu bahn

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.

i wonder: why does alex galloway of the radical software group have almost only icons of microsoft applications on the dock of his apple g4 powerbook??
what is so radical about microsoft software?

a computer code that reads like someone’s post-traumatic self-therapeutic purching-session and renders like the oedipus-saga.
how poetic!
//////////////////
on jealousToDeath jocasta
— my husband had sex with my daughter – son of a bitch!
print(myName && “is scared to death by her husbands shameful action”)
jocasta.iDie()
end
//////////////////
from CODeDOC II: annja krautgasser & rainer mandl
read the complete code here
run the application here
in construction industry machines exist that “print” concrete walls according to a computers instructions. the windows, doors and all the wires and installations are laid out in a frame and then the concrete gets sort of plotted over it. the proces looks like an over-dimensional inkjet-printer.
[oliver fritz/architect/tangible code]
hah. i scored a [hand-burned] DIVE cd-rom. it reads: “an introduction to free software and free networks. a complete documentation of the online project kingdom of piracy.” kop is now hosted by fact in liverpool.
the book/cd-rom looks brilliant, contains texts by saul albert, lawrence chua, armin medosch and more, but is also a bootable GNU/linux distribution. now that’s what we call free software truely brought home to your computer.
today is karl lagerfeld’s birthday. seen on german breakfast tellie:
moderator: mr. lagerfeld, how do get out of bed in the morning?
lagerfeld: very good, i don’t have a problem with it. i lay down for a few hours during the night and then i just get up. could be i am a computer. maybe i am virtual.

my two-sentence-per-speaker-highly-opinionated-
and-totally-unfair conference review:::
yesterday morning the theme of the conference was social code.
first howard rheingold delivered a sales pitch of – instead of an update to – his brillant book smartmobs; the book, that has recently inspired flashmobs, flashcommerce and other forms of new technology-based forms of social interactions. okay, howard, we know that. but what has happened since you wrote the book? we think lots.
next leo feindeisen drew an interesting comparison between two traditional attempts at creating an international language. he said, that codes, in his example languages, create communities. but what defines the developement and continuity of the communites is strongly determined by the fact of how the code was distributed. he showed how in the case of volapük, which was handeled in a very proprietary way by it’s inventor, has now dissappered. while in the case of esperanto, which was distributed in a more “open-source” way, the language has survived, even through two world wars, and is thriving to this day.
after that i sort of lost it for the morning. errrr. hmmm. i dont remember anything about the next two speakers: where was i? oh wait… fiona raby talked about pigs some, so that was *oink* and showed a slide of a dildo with a gun-handle.
[PDF] florian cramer spoke really really fast…
[PDF] the afternoon session [theme: collective creativity] started off with pierre levy. he is the wanker/scientist i have written about in my earlier post.
then there were two speakers that left me with a wow-what-fun-to-see-one-of-these-guys-in-person feeling.
john warnock is the founding member and i think ceo of adobe software company. it was a funny situation to have the ceo of a software company in front of you, of which you have been borrowing rather much software over the years.
i was wondering the whole time if i owe him money? and i sort of got the feeling, that lots of people went through the same process.
[PDF] next up spoke marc cantor [ex-macromedia and inventor of director]. now here we had the classic old-hippie/computer nerd/weirdo idealist/powerhouse.
woo to marc! they still exists!
plus: marc is the ultimate buzzword-generator!
want some?
activity based computing. social software for social networking. digital convergence. digital lifestyle aggregators. scalable content.
cantor solved my earlier dilemna almost immediatly by introducing the concept of pay-per-use in software licensing. we should only pay for software, that we actually use alot and are making money with. marc calls for new school software: pay-per-use, the tool itself a community, adaptable to different types of users.
the last speaker of the day was james mccartney who mumbeled awhile about his programming language supercollider…
fair enough.
and i was fried!

as usual: more, better, fairer information can be found at aec.at/code

woo! i got hacked! it was a gentle-fun-pranck-hack. a wow-how-did-they-do-that-hack.
my ftp-client all of a sudden had a new button. an additional pull-down menu.
and no, i did not click that button.
do you think i should have?
so that was fun. but other than that the joy of wifi gets somehow dampened by the constant ping floods, that i am having to block. [it's no wonder really considering the fact, that there are 50 hacker kids hanging around in the basement on the same wifi]
and, the wifi won’t work inside the conference hall. i gave up on it, so that’s why you won’t see any right-on-time blogs here. (unlike over at marc [cantor's] voice)
in the hall you can observe these other blokes sort of hovering around their laptops in the air, trying to catch the wifi. so that’s a new behavior.
is there no code against this yet? thou shalt not hover yer laptop?
then we met this year’s ars electronica wanker par excellence. if you ever feel like seeing the definition of a wanker/scientist you must go see pierre levy.
mr. levy is a master at the art of how to speak for half an hour making sure no one understands.
or: of how to create a theory that only he himself will ever be able to understand.
his french accent sort of did not seem to help, an observation which i admit must stem from some weird codes i am harboring.
böttöm öp vs. töp down…
more later!

marc canter: [ex-macromedia]
those guys yesterday, who wanna go back to script-based interface computing … i don’t get. why? well god bless them and good luck!

in his opening speech gerfried stocker, the managing director of the ars electronica festival, quoted the recent SPD election-campaign in munich, germany: mehr linux – mehr freiheit. more linux – more freedom. this is of course a statement that could come straight out of the free software community. so code is making mainstream politics now. the code we decide to use has become a political decision – and more so than ever before .
the conference has started full on with a full day of speeches and discussions, most of it rather heady stuff, despite the fact stocker had pointed out, that the artist/scientist ratio is leaning much more towards artists than in other years.
but i don’t get it yet.
i wonder.
is it legitimate to use the word code almost interchangeably for all these different meanings, computer code, social code, aesthetic code, codex? ars electronica version 2003 seems to be missing some basic definitions of terminologies so far. and my next question: is this focus on code not an overemphasis on the software-side of things in? this focus in and of itself might be an illegit emphasis containing a value judgement as peter j. bailey pointed out in his talk. coders must be careful not to develop a god-complex as they seem to be the the one’s running things – the masters inside the machine. but code does not make machines redundant.
peter j. bailey’s talk [PDF] has then been the most inspiring one so far. he suggests that we should stop playing god and start to help the machines along to start doing their own thing. “if we get it right, code will merge with computers without any separation.” taking his inspiration from biology he calls for an evolutionary, natural code, with the ability to develop autonomously and in symbiosis with us, the coders. his futuristic call might be rather poetic and almost utopian, but some of the examples of software he showed were amazing, bubbeling environments of code reacting and adapting to changing an ever changing context.
the hgkz [zurich new media art school] exhibit of student’s works is amazing. the actual pieces are maybe even less important than the way they are exhibited here. the artwork is presented in a funky and relaxed way, media art presented with amazing low-tech/high-tech clashes. one machine called “Mami, ich will auch Super-Algorithmen” told me that my profession should be teacher and my hobby outrageous dance parties. now, there is some useful information….

has the distinction between the user of code and the coder in fact disappeared? [cindy cohn]
is the seperation between software and hardware an artificial one? [peter j. bentley]
is there an elegant way to create poetic code (as opposed to bad shopping-list code)? [peter j. bentley]
how deeply can you plump into the world of code and still stay human? [roy ascott]
am i using the wrong code at the right time? [pieceoplastic]

so here i am in linz.
the trip was long and sort of boring.
you can watch the movie here. loop it!
it’s the next day, i slept well after watching some footie last night in the hotel [island:germany 0:0 only! he he!!!], and later eating some grapes at the opening party [which btw. was called login: - the first downloads and performances of the festival *arf* an awful name for a boring party. but it's mostly me, really. standing around in smoky rooms, with loud music, where you don't understand a word of and end up screaming at eachother, it's just not fun. i tend to fall asleep at parties... so we left early]
then today, the sun woke me up, it hit me right smack in the middle of my face… i loved it.
the pressconference is about to start and my week as a mock-journalist can begin!!! woo! yay! or am i a wanna-be journalist? or even a could-be?

right now my biggest pleasure is a rather naive one: the wifi in the building. i was a wifi virgin up to now. so this is great. hah… cables can fuck off!
oh i almost forgot. the whole conference can be watched as a realtime stream at aec.at/code

today i am on the long-ass journey from bern to linz. hours and hours of train.
8 hours and 59 minutes through horrible austrian mountains to be exact.
ugh. good books and magazines are essential.
i will read the newmedia reader on this trip. quite appropriate, no? the reader, published by MIT press, claims to trace the history of media art through a collection of texts from borges to mcluhan to donna harraway’s cyborg manifesto to tim berners-lee.
nerd-alert! but highly interesting stuff!
electrolobby – the work-in-progress lab thingy – will feature 2 very cool projects this year:
proce55ing.net: “a programming language, a graphical programming environment, an instructional user interface and, at the same time, a designer community.” an attempt to make programming accessible to users with even very little technical knowledge.
scene.org: “the scene is made up of 15,000 young software enthusiasts from all over the world who get together at huge creative workshops and competitions.” should be buzzing in the basement…

today i am getting ready for my trip to linz.
the conference at this years ars electronica runs under the title: code – the language of our time

“Software and digital codes will be the centerpiece of this year’s Ars Electronica entitled “CODE – the Language of Our Time.” Software as the law code prevailing in cyberspace, digital codes as basic elements of media art, and the convergence of information technology and biotech are the three thematic focal points that crystallize into the formula Code=Law, Code=Art und Code=Life.”
highly interesting stuff! the nerd in me will have a field-day. i am trying to get exited about questions like: “How can we go about defining a contemporary digital media art that concentrates on these new practices but does not set aside its conceptual forerunners?”, “How strong is the socially regulative and normative power of the software monopoly actually?” or even “Will we use this genetic alphabet to rewrite the Book of Life or to summon forth a biological Babylon?”
meanwhile i am trying to configure my mobilephone for WAPing in austria and battling around with all sorts of log-in’s and passwords, so my fotologs will work and my blog will receive it’s daily updates…

things often feel so mundane, next to the beauty of abstraction.