Art Week
How do you know that you're visiting Linz during the time of Ars Electronica Festival? When half of the passengers on your plane to Linz are Japanese. What is otherwise a small sleepy city in the Upper Austria, annually becomes a bustling world center of electronic and digital art for a week in the beginning of September. And it was exactly the Ars Electronica festival that has put Linz on the world map.
I've been coming here for quite a few years now, and whenever I've visited I've never left disappointed. Quite the contrary, this is such an exciting place that I can easily forget to eat and sleep while being here. Might be a bit hard to understand, but those who are similarly passionate (no matter what your passion is) know what I mean. And I am not the only one. During the week long festival a lot of festival goers, artists, researchers and art lovers consume art and attend lectures during the day and party hard into the morning hours.
Every year the organizers assign a topic for the festival which is then discussed in the symposia, discussions and brought to life in a variety of workshops. The topic this year was simplicity. The discussion was at all times about how the striving for simplicity in our increasingly complex world, what to do to reach it and why is it so important. An interesting topic, which has spurred many an interesting presentation and discussion.
But lectures are just a forum where ideas are verbalized. The majority of attention falls on the exhibitions. And every year the festival program is richer as more venues and events where visitors can enjoy the works of digital contemporary artists are added to the list. But, speaking about quantities is not really that interesting. I'll rather mention details that caught my attention and which I've enjoyed most.
Practically all art presented at the festival is divided into six categories: interactive art, digital musics, computer animation/visual effects, digital communities, net vision and u19 - freestyle computing. Although one cannot really measure progress in arts, it seems like a certain level of achievement satisfaction can be attributed to the computer animation/visual effects category.
The works presented in this category have clearly reached an incredible level of complexity. Less than ten years ago, one could see clever works, but they nevertheless resembled garage works. What one sees at Ars Electronica nowadays is outright incredible display of high quality art and technological prowess. The viewer doesn't have to pretend anymore that they don't see the patched up low-tech with a good plot and a nice twist. Practically all the works are polished to the very last detail. Not in the sense of Hollywood blockbusters (although there's every year at least few of those who get some attention too), but rather in Hollywood superficial sense. Whereas works submitted by Hollywood received a lot of attention for years, the independent or school projects now kick their ass. Hollywood should learn from these people. Thus it comes as a no surprise that the award winners in this category this year supposedly already got lucrative job offers.
It is amazing to witness how the presence at the Festival pulls artists from obscurity and into the center of digital arts scene. At the Festival almost without exception receive a whole barrage of invitations and offers.
One of my favorites was indisputably Ryoichi Kurokawa and his intensive, visually striking and musically rich audio/video performance. His incredible skill of combining sounds with visuals almost drives you crazy. The piece he has performed was both technically perfected, as well as aesthetically complex yet balanced. In fact, it was so beautiful that putting it to words comes nowhere near to experiencing it in first person. Browse around his site and try to catch him play.
Another act that really impressed me was the Graffiti Research Lab group. The Lab was thought up by New Yorkers James Powderly and Evan Roth who tend to describe themselves as not gutsy enough to do the graffiti themselves, but admire all those phlegmatic graffiti artists who are responsible for enriching our urban landscapes. But they wanted to give them a hand and augment the paint bucket and spray can. The duo came up with several immensely clever albeit simple ways of doing this. And they excel at it and even NY cops love it.
GRL guys have won the hearts of the public with their throwies: a 1 buck, 20 second retrograde hi-tech graffiti solution. By strapping together a simple consumer LED light, battery and a strong magnet, they have started a whole craze around the net and on the streets. All of a sudden they became magnetic themselves as they were approached even by the Absolut marketing machine (cooperation with which they have blatantly - and rightfully so - refused). Their throwies stick to any ferromagnetic surface and thus far have adored everything from buildings, bridges and sculptures in New York, to, after their most recent action, Linz trams. Make sure you check the videos on their site.
At this years' Ars Electronica I have also immensely enjoyed works by Zachary Lieberman. Besides the performance/lecture done in collaboration with artist/engineer Golan Levin and media archeologist and Finnish star professor Erkki Huhtamo, Zach had three of his works at Ars: drawn, The Manual Input Station and Messa di Voce (the latter two done in collaboration with Golan Levin). Although all these works are interactive and children love them, they are also ingenious visually elegant sound works. They all demand interaction from the audience and are great for jamming. But I have to say that seeing Zach and Golan perform with their creations was truly inspiring. Especially make sure you check out the videos on the sites of these projects, since it's all in the interaction.
Then there were the nerd-retro Papierpixel and PingPongPixel; the unbelievably cool self-destructive (but also self-assembling) Robotic Chair; undeniably cool Khronos Projector and Hello World!. I think I could go on and on about all the projects I have liked. If you've never been to Ars Electronica, you should go. So far I have not met anyone who wouldn't have fun there.
But Ars Electronica is also all about networking, partying and hanging around with the most creative people in the digital contemporary arts.
Later tonight I'll update the gallery with a bunch of images from the festival. Make sure you check it out as there's some pretty nifty stuff there too.
Mladen
I've been coming here for quite a few years now, and whenever I've visited I've never left disappointed. Quite the contrary, this is such an exciting place that I can easily forget to eat and sleep while being here. Might be a bit hard to understand, but those who are similarly passionate (no matter what your passion is) know what I mean. And I am not the only one. During the week long festival a lot of festival goers, artists, researchers and art lovers consume art and attend lectures during the day and party hard into the morning hours.
Every year the organizers assign a topic for the festival which is then discussed in the symposia, discussions and brought to life in a variety of workshops. The topic this year was simplicity. The discussion was at all times about how the striving for simplicity in our increasingly complex world, what to do to reach it and why is it so important. An interesting topic, which has spurred many an interesting presentation and discussion.
But lectures are just a forum where ideas are verbalized. The majority of attention falls on the exhibitions. And every year the festival program is richer as more venues and events where visitors can enjoy the works of digital contemporary artists are added to the list. But, speaking about quantities is not really that interesting. I'll rather mention details that caught my attention and which I've enjoyed most.
Practically all art presented at the festival is divided into six categories: interactive art, digital musics, computer animation/visual effects, digital communities, net vision and u19 - freestyle computing. Although one cannot really measure progress in arts, it seems like a certain level of achievement satisfaction can be attributed to the computer animation/visual effects category.
The works presented in this category have clearly reached an incredible level of complexity. Less than ten years ago, one could see clever works, but they nevertheless resembled garage works. What one sees at Ars Electronica nowadays is outright incredible display of high quality art and technological prowess. The viewer doesn't have to pretend anymore that they don't see the patched up low-tech with a good plot and a nice twist. Practically all the works are polished to the very last detail. Not in the sense of Hollywood blockbusters (although there's every year at least few of those who get some attention too), but rather in Hollywood superficial sense. Whereas works submitted by Hollywood received a lot of attention for years, the independent or school projects now kick their ass. Hollywood should learn from these people. Thus it comes as a no surprise that the award winners in this category this year supposedly already got lucrative job offers.
It is amazing to witness how the presence at the Festival pulls artists from obscurity and into the center of digital arts scene. At the Festival almost without exception receive a whole barrage of invitations and offers.
One of my favorites was indisputably Ryoichi Kurokawa and his intensive, visually striking and musically rich audio/video performance. His incredible skill of combining sounds with visuals almost drives you crazy. The piece he has performed was both technically perfected, as well as aesthetically complex yet balanced. In fact, it was so beautiful that putting it to words comes nowhere near to experiencing it in first person. Browse around his site and try to catch him play.
Another act that really impressed me was the Graffiti Research Lab group. The Lab was thought up by New Yorkers James Powderly and Evan Roth who tend to describe themselves as not gutsy enough to do the graffiti themselves, but admire all those phlegmatic graffiti artists who are responsible for enriching our urban landscapes. But they wanted to give them a hand and augment the paint bucket and spray can. The duo came up with several immensely clever albeit simple ways of doing this. And they excel at it and even NY cops love it.
GRL guys have won the hearts of the public with their throwies: a 1 buck, 20 second retrograde hi-tech graffiti solution. By strapping together a simple consumer LED light, battery and a strong magnet, they have started a whole craze around the net and on the streets. All of a sudden they became magnetic themselves as they were approached even by the Absolut marketing machine (cooperation with which they have blatantly - and rightfully so - refused). Their throwies stick to any ferromagnetic surface and thus far have adored everything from buildings, bridges and sculptures in New York, to, after their most recent action, Linz trams. Make sure you check the videos on their site.
At this years' Ars Electronica I have also immensely enjoyed works by Zachary Lieberman. Besides the performance/lecture done in collaboration with artist/engineer Golan Levin and media archeologist and Finnish star professor Erkki Huhtamo, Zach had three of his works at Ars: drawn, The Manual Input Station and Messa di Voce (the latter two done in collaboration with Golan Levin). Although all these works are interactive and children love them, they are also ingenious visually elegant sound works. They all demand interaction from the audience and are great for jamming. But I have to say that seeing Zach and Golan perform with their creations was truly inspiring. Especially make sure you check out the videos on the sites of these projects, since it's all in the interaction.
Then there were the nerd-retro Papierpixel and PingPongPixel; the unbelievably cool self-destructive (but also self-assembling) Robotic Chair; undeniably cool Khronos Projector and Hello World!. I think I could go on and on about all the projects I have liked. If you've never been to Ars Electronica, you should go. So far I have not met anyone who wouldn't have fun there.
But Ars Electronica is also all about networking, partying and hanging around with the most creative people in the digital contemporary arts.
Later tonight I'll update the gallery with a bunch of images from the festival. Make sure you check it out as there's some pretty nifty stuff there too.
Mladen
posted by Mladen at 9/06/2006 09:18:00 PM
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