ars electronica 2008 – a new cultural economy – day 33 min read

A New Cultural Economy Symposium Day 2

The second day of the symposium was far more interesting, even if everybody still was on the same page regading the topic. i would have liked to hear at least a few speakers defend a somewhat opposing view, i am sure the ensuing discussions would have been much more passionate. a priest, a.k.m. adam, suggested that religious texts should be transcribed into xml, to be used in new media applications. james boyle pointed out, to my big surprise, that science is one of the most complicated areas to access materials online, because apparently many papers are protected in internal databases, only to be reached if you are part of the same faculty. they are now working on a project called science commons.

in the afternoon georgia popplewell spoke about the amazing global voices project, “the world is talking. are you listening?”. elisabeth stark presented freeculture.org and their inspiring anti-drm activism and jonathan mcintosh showed political remix videos, a field where artists just go ahead and use copyrighted material, not waiting around for the legal situation to get cleared up. good point there, as we might have to wait awhile before everything gets released under the perfect creative commons license. in the meantime people need to just keep doing what they are doing, mix, mash, remix and remash. it’s the results, the new culture and art forms, that will eventually convince everyone.

Vernichtungsaktion

Knock-offs of brand-name merchandise were getting shredded all day on the main square by a machine incidentally called “Terminator”. a lot of discussion ensued as perfectly wearable items of adidas and nike clothing went up the conveyor belt to get destroyed by the machine. i didn’t see this, but apparently in the morning there was a flea market on the main square and vendors used the surrounding fence to attach some of their second hand clothing items, with price tags on them, while behind the fence brandnew knockoffs, most of them still in their plastic wrappers, were fed to “Terminator”.

the action left some questions open, like, is ars taking a stand against knock-offs with this? i think that point was left ambiguous on purpose in order to get everyone talking. this process, the destroying of knock-offs, is taking place anyway, only behind closed doors, and here it was shown out in the open. apparently the organizers first had the idea to let people cut off the brand logos and replace them with something else. but confiscated merchandise needs to be made unwearable by law.

Bleu remix

a long line of people wanted to see the yann marussich preformance Bleu Remix at lentos museum. there was atmospheric music and minimal lights as we entered the room, the artist sat prefectly still in some sort of class container, wearing only a piece of white underwear, sometimes his eyes blinked, sometimes opening for brief moments, but other than that nothing. blue liquids started to seep through his skin, coming out of his pores. apparently he developped this process with the help of scientists. i am quite curious what he will say about it, on how it works, during his artist talk on sunday. oh, and he is swiss ^^.

no paul granjon ;(((

i really really wanted to go see paul granjon’s performance lo tech songs with servo drive at OK Center. i had loved his robots at biennale in venice a few years ago. especially sexed robots, which he was gonna show as well. but i made the mistake to quickly pop home to drop off my bag and the last thing i remember, i turned on the tv to watch some footie … i think austria beat france!!! oh well, can’t see them all, or can you? i will have to search the glorious interweb, maybe someone youtubed or at the very least flickered this performance…

what’s on today?

10:00 – 18:30 Prix Forum – the artist talks
13:00 – 15:00 LEF@ARS Leonardo Education Forum gives an update (not sure about this)
classical music in the evening

my flickr set: ars electronica 2008