Another time we went to see the Ars electronica Festival , which always takes place in Linz – which is by the way the European Capital of Culture this year!
Like always, the golden Nica and awards of distinction are given to projects in the sections digital music / hybrid art/ interactive art / digital communities / computer animation-film-vfx. Some projects this year have been better than others. Here the ones which impressed me most.
————- interactive art————-
default to public by Jens Wunderling is a project dealing with the discrepancy between people’s feeling of privacy on the web and the physical world. It consists of an ongoing series of objects and interventions linking the physical world to the online world in unexpected and narrative ways to create awareness for self-exposure. Information from the twitter network are displayed in another public environment.
Status Panel: Using your Twitter-Status for your doorbell
or Tweetscreen: Projecting tweets, which have been written near its own physical location on a large projection screen
————- digital communities————-
WikiLeaks is a website that publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive governmental, corporate, or religious documents, while attempting to preserve the anonymity and untraceability of its contributors.
See here the talk of Julian Assange at Ars Electronica on the value of journalism and WikiLeaks to the world.
————- digital music ————-
A funny concert we saw was NABAZ’MOB by Antoine Schmitt and Jean-Jacques Birgé.
“NABAZ’MOB” is an opera composed especially for 100 nabaztags, these are bunny featuring a WLAN internet connection which can communicate via voice, light signals and wiggling its ears. Its subject matter is the growing importance of teamwork, decision-making and control—and, simultaneously, the problems increasingly associated with them—in our ever-more-complex world.
————- hybrid art ————-
The New York Times Special Edition by Steve Lambert member of Because We Want It.
One week after Barack Obama was elected president of the United States, there appeared a perfectly counterfeited special edition of the New York Times reporting the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And that’s not all. The whole issue was devoted exclusively to good news, the kind of stories people would like to read on a daily basis. This paper, dated 9 months in the future, stands for the vision of a more righteous world.
————- animation ————-
Boris by Daniel Lundquist is an amazing animation film – the style, the story and the transitions between the images are very impressive.
————- soon more on the ars electronica 2009 ————-
