http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/08/arts/design/08linz.html?th
The New York Times
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Since
1987 it has awarded a Prix Ars Electronica for interactive art, computer
animation, digital music and Web art. This year it added "digital
community." All categories share a total of $121,000 in prizes.
For this
year's festival, which ran from Thursday to Tuesday, Ars Electronica chose to
explore the next 25 years of media art while including a smattering of its
greatest hits.
What
started as an awkward genre appears to have become more self-assured. For instance,
this year's top prizewinner for interactive art was "Listening Post"
by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin, both Americans. In it 231 small displays are
mounted in a grid. A computer scans Internet chat rooms, message boards and
forums, and displays the results, while a speech synthesizer reads some of
them.
The cycle
starts its scanning for the phrase "I am," which is soon elaborated
upon: "I am Turkish." "I am a Beatles fan." "I am sure
you are right." All of these are read once, as the unseen writers assert
identities, perhaps false, while gentle electronic music plays. When most of
the grid is filled, it goes dark, and the real-time scanning of user-ID's is
shown, whirring past so quickly that it sounds like wind.
Then come
text fragments that remain for only a moment to be replaced by the next scan,
short sentences that are also read out. Since each displayed text has been
posted only seconds earlier, the viewer never sees the same "art"
twice.
Many of
these pieces involve the viewer. A popular one this year was "Messa di
Voce," also by two Americans, Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman. One steps
up to a projection, casting a shadow on one of three selected backgrounds, and
makes sound into a microphone. The shadow becomes surrounded by a line, which
can then be manipulated by waving the arms or making a different kind of sound.
The
participants in Ken Rinaldo's "Augmented Fish Reality" are Siamese
fighting fish, which are intensely territorial and have excellent vision. Mr.
Rinaldo has put three in separate fishbowls fitted with sensors the fish can
trigger to rotate a plant mounted in the bowl's center or move the stand on
which the bowl is mounted across the floor. Are the fish learning to do this?
Do they choose to move close to one another to perform threatening stances?
Whatever, there's no question that they have been moving around the space.
The
basement of
The Ars
Electronica Center was erected in 1996 to exhibit, document and archive media
art. It has become so popular that it can be jammed on weekends. Most of the
works exhibited at the center are lighthearted, like "Cheese" by
Christian Möller. It consists of filmed head shots of six young American
actresses who were asked to smile for up to an hour. Software that purports to
measure emotions determines whether the smile is genuine; when it judges it's
not, a red light goes on.
"La
Pâte ā Son," a screen with a grid on which whimsical pipes and vents can
be placed, moves little candylike bits of electronic melody through a
"factory," manufacturing tunes. And in "Moony" by Takehisa
Mashimo, Satoshi Shibata and Akio Kamisato, water evaporating from a surface
forms a mist into which three-dimensional butterflies are projected. Users can
manipulate the butterflies' position by moving their hands, but if they try to
touch one, it flies away.
A regular
event at Ars Electronica is an invitation to a media arts program at an
educational institution to occupy the
The
visiting students provided some of the high points of this year's festival. For
instance, "Karakuri Block" by Natsu Kawakita and Nobuya Suzuki has
two plastic blocks with Game Boy-like screens. When plugged into a grid, a
block shows an animated Japanese family crest. When a second block is plugged
in, elements from one block flow into the other.
Even the
cafe here was interactive: Hisako Yamakawa had a tea dispenser in which one
deposits a euro. A screen lights up and asks you to sign a promise to enjoy the
tea and drink it all, and the signature then determines the exact blend.
Music and
dance also are part of Ars Electronica. Over the weekend there was a
well-received performance of a dance piece, "Apparition," designed
and composed by Klaus Obermaier, in which two dancers begin by playing with
lines projected behind them and quickly move to more complex interactions.
Desiree Kongerod and Robert Tannion's precise, vigorous performance brought a
storm of applause afterward.
The grand
prize winner for digital music was Thomas Köner for "Banlieue du
Vide," a mix of 3,000 surveillance photos taken on deserted streets during
a nighttime snowstorm. It was mixed with documentary sounds of the daytime
streets and some electronic sounds. Some appeared to be a bit confused about
why this was considered music rather than a video installation, but most
viewers seemed to feel it deserved a prize.