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Ars Electronica 2004 Ars Electronica 2004: Timeshift - The World In Twenty-five Years
An ambitious theme for an ambitious festival
"The spimes are coming. The spimes are coming." Bruce Sterling
If this is what happens now: Slick, well-designed PowerBooks totally covered with stickers. People taking digital photos of power point/flash presentations instead of taking notes. Blinking stickpins interacting with eachother. Internet searches creating beauty and poetry. Fear of RFID. Open Source Water. Gaming engines used to create art.
What will happen next? What will the next 25 years bring in new media and technological development?
25 years ago the very first Ars Electronica festival was held in Linz, Austria. What started out as an underground industrial video festival has since grown into the most influential media art festival - subtitled a Festival for Art, Science and Society. The Prix Ars Electronica has developped into the most important prize in media art - Golden Nicas are for media art what the Oscars are for movies. But as it goes, who says big and influential also says complex and problematic. Not everyone is a friend of Big Festivals and the politics that go along with them. One thing can be said for sure: Ars Electronica always offers a nice overview from which to gauge the latest trends and developments in media art.
In The Future Half The World Will Be Busy Reporting On The Other Half - McLuhan
In previous years the two-day symposium held at Brucknerhaus had been its centrepiece as well as one of the highlights of the Ars Electronica festival with usually a great line-up of speakers, thoughtprovoking presentations and high-quality discussions following the talks. This year the symposium was oddly dull, almost superficial. Maybe the theme was simply too big for the format. The speakers were constrained to 20 minute presentations, which leaves not much time to tackle the big questions. So the participants were left with a choice to either not get into it too deeply or to try and rush through what they had to say. In their futuristic predictions almost nobody dared to be too specific. Most scenarios remained surprisingly vague. And the discussion sessions after the talks were conducted in much the same manner. A few times the moderators even changed subject just a debate was about to flare up - something that in previous years could not have happened. (The complete line-up of this years speakers)
Any technical gadget that has the potential to kill a child should at least have an email address
As mentioned before, almost nobody dared to make a prediction about the future. Almost nobody except of course science fiction novelist and author Bruce The-Spimes-Are-Coming Sterling - one of the star speakers on this years symposium. Bruce Sterling presented a freestyle remix of the talk he had recently given at SIGGRAPH in LA. Presented in his trademark dark yet humorous style, his speech during the symposium combined poetry and deep reflection. And - later in the smaller setting of the downstairs electrolobby - he was willing to make a prediction about the future. A prediction given in his usual laconic style - but a prediction nevertheless.
"The Ars Electronica 25 years from now will be exactly like this place. Just 25 years later. Some of us will be alive and may even be here. Some of us will have died. But all of us will be 25 years older. I can guarantee you that. [...] The future will never be reached. There will never be a point where we will sit here and say, this is it, we have reached the future. I mean, the future has a future."
I Got Spimed at Ars Electronica - Bruce Sterling on his blog
 Every year around this time the pristine town of Linz (population 200,000) gets invaded by literally thousands of Ars Electronica visitors from around the world. Just to give you a broad idea, this year were present 555 artists from 28 countries as well as 587 accredited journalists from 33 countries. And of course visitors in the thousands. And much harder to count.
Traceencounters.org was a project realised by W. Bradford Paley, Jefferson K. Han and Peter K. Kennard (USA) trying to visualise this invasion of media artists. 1000 stickpins were distributed among the visitors. These pins, equipped with a limited range infrared data exchange, registered all contacts with other people carrying such a pin. The Data was later downloaded via a central interface and transformed into variety of visualisations, that were displayed on a plasma screen.
Data mining in an artistic context? Sure. But let me tell you, these pins were gone in no time...
Isolation Floatation On Main Square
 The Ars Electronica Festival is putting in a considerable effort to not only address the visiting nerds and geeks, but to offer also a program geared more towards the general public. For instance, there is always one big interactive art project that gets shown on the Hauptplatz (main city square) in Linz. This years the project was called Iso-phone by James Auger, Jimmy Loizeau and Stefan Agamanolis (UK/USA) from MIT Media Lab Europe. Iso-phone, a vertical floating tank almost completly isolated a person inside a tank filled with 31°C water - except for a helmet equipped with a phone line to communicate with a person of their choice. After the experience people were asked to write down some of the thoughts they had during the isolation.
Not far from the Hauptplatz at the OK Centrum the winners of this years Prix Ars Electronica were shown:
I am... I like... I love...
 This years Golden Nica Winner in the Interactive Arts category was called Listening Post by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin (USA). For this project internet chat rooms, forums and message boards were getting searched using simple search expressions such as "i am" "i like" or "i love". The resulting sentences were then displayed in pre-programmed patterns on a great wall consisting of 231 LCD displays while some were read out by a computervoice. The resulting display was really quite impressive and meditative. The piece kept evolving as the search results were constantly being updated. Nice. One of the first interactive art pieces I have seen, that would work quite well in a classic modern art museum.
It's A Wiki Wiki World
The Golden Nica in the brand new category Digital Communities logically went to wikipedia.org. I dont think much has to be said about wikipedia.org as most people must be familiar with this most impressive project.
However, community builders take note. According to member of the jury, Joi Ito, most the other projects were only strong in one of several relevant aspects, but lacking in other domains. Some of these important parameters he mentioned were style of communication, conflict management, activites on offer, resulting real life interactions and more generally design and technical questions. This of course can be taken as an interesting hint as to what would be expected of submissions for next years Prix. Digital communities will have to excel in several different areas in order to stand out. (All other awards of distinction and honorary mentions in this category can be seen here)
Open Source Water
 The deserved winner in the Net Vision category was creativecommons.org; the corresponding talk by Lawrence Lessig one of the highlights of the festival. Lessig announced, that next month, a new version of the creative commons license will get released: a version geared towards musicians who wanted to allow their music to be remixed. Apparently Gilberto Gil, David Byrne, Cornelius and the Beastie Boys were all involved during the development of this new remix license.
With creativecommons.org as the grand winner, it was only fitting that this years conference would end with the launch of the austrian version of the creative commons license. With this release, Austria is the seventh country offering a localised and adapted version of the creative commons license.
The drink of choice at the celebration was of course Open Source Water, bottled at a local fountain and released under a creative commons license... (All other awards of distinction and honorary mentions in this category can be seen here. Quite interesting to click through those)
It's The Business Of The Future To Be Dangerous - Peter Whitehead
For its 25 year celebration the Ars Electronica Festival avoided the most obvious trap and was not overly self-celebratory. There was a look back into the past 25 years of media art and into the history of the festival. And there was an attempt to look forward into what the future might bring. But for some reason the interesting discussions never quite got under way. This year's edition was surprisingly tame, especially if compared to other years with sometimes very heated debates. I am even tempted to use the word "nice", which of course is an awful thing to say about a festival used to stiring up spirits and heating up cultural debates. In the exhibited interactive media art there seemed to be a trend back to presentation - much of the work was notably less interface-oriented, yet much more spectacular to look at.
Ars Electronica still needs to address the issue of how to integrate younger media artists better into the core of the festival. Younger artists and their projects are present, but - quite symbolically - they are located in the basement or in off-site locations. u19, electrolobby and Campus are all very noble initiatives trying to adress the younger crowd, but since they are not incorporated into the main panels, they appear as their own festival inside the festival.
Looking at these works by younger artists is what convinces me, that the future does in fact have a future.
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