Report on the book:
Springer Wien New York
Ars Electronica Center URL: http://www.aec.at
Prix Ars Electronica URL: http://prixars.orf.at
Ars Electronica was founded in 1979 by the Brukner
House in Linz and the Austrian Broadcasting Company (ORF) studio
in the Province of Upper Austria.
In 1986 the ORF's Prix Ars Electronica was
created: a competition for computer artists.
In 1996 the Ars Electronica Center has been
opened: a center of competence for new, interdisciplinary knowledge
at the interfaces of the arts, culture, technology and society.
Netsymposium
Pre-Festival symposium with invited speakers
and open to public partecipation (many-to-many approach).
Symposium
Symposium with the same invited speakers
of the Netsymposium (one-to-many approach).
Installations
Hardware and software installations for
man-machine-environment interaction and/or man-machine-environment
generated art.
Events
Electronic art events: computer controlled/generated
art; in some cases there is also a man-machine interaction (where
man could be both person from the audience and an actor).
Event is conceived as a real-time performance.
I think that it is important to stress as many Events could be
considered Installations, i.e. that they could append at any time
and with only one person in the public and with no human actors
on the stage/scene. Some Events are a hybrid where there is no
dimension and localisation of the stage and/or of the public and
where the actions of the actors are effected by the choices of
the interactive public.
Network
This section presents mainly works based
on the use radio broadcast: traditional radio, Internet radio,
and also how to built your own illegal radio station. Th famous
www.HotWired.com is also part of this section with its live audio
broadcast of the entire Ars Electronica Festival.
Expo
Same as Installations.
Memesis - a hybrid composed
of Richard Dawkins' meme [coined by analogy with gene]
and "genesis" - is the watchword of the 1996
Ars Electronica Festival.
Memes: - cultural
information units, cognitive behavioural patterns that propagate
themselves and replicate through communication, a paradigm of
a "culture-based history of development".
Media memory - a memory which is shaped by media, or the
collective memory and experience of humanity externalised in world-wide
networks. What history will be perpetuauted on the other side
of the media filter, in cyberspace?
At the heart of the debate are the conditions
which will increasingly determine our cultural self-conception
and thus our thinking and acting, above all with the establishment
of communication spaces for data and telematics.
URL: http://web.aec.at/meme/symp/
The on-line symposium preceding the "real life conference"
was introduced as follows by Geert Lovink: "...We would like
to get away from the usual panels and presentations and see the
getting-together in Linz, early september, as a place to continue
and round-up ongoing discussions. Of course it is not that easy
to simply blow up the entire concept of the 'conference' and its
rituals, although it is already imaginable to host a festival
entirely in cyberspace. At least at this moment certain hierarchical
('one to many') modes can be modified through an open discussion
in the phase of preparation.... So far there is not much experience
and expertise in the orchestrating of net-based public debates
on technology. It didn't make much sense to confront the technophobic
with the technophile. At this stage we are leaving the era of
the introductions on the nature and implications of new technologies
(and the role of artists in this process) and find ourselves in
the middle of controversies around topics like copyright, privacy,
war on standards, cultural biases, public access, censorship and
other 'old patterns' in 'new media'.
We would like to invite you to participate
in the discussion between the other artists and critics we have
already invited to send their first statement.
'The Future of Evolution' should not only
attract meme-experts, cyberartists and bio-engineers. Recently
we have witnessed a shift in the definition of 'evolution' from
biology to culture. Artists are actively appropriating the term
'evolution' and are working on their own models of 'cultural viruses',
robotics, artificial life, knowbots etc. But to what extent are
these models actually promoting ideas like 'survival of the fittest
information', cynical socio-biological elitism; racist images
of the cyber body and neo-liberal market philosophies? Or is it
'just' technology?
The concept of the 'meme' seems to be objective
and neutral. After the fall of the Berlin Wall certain aspects
of the communist tradition (for example) could metaphorize into
'memes' in order to continue their travel through history. And
why not? Or is this just a silly idea and will we face a so-called
'natural order' in order to reduce diversity, complexity, noise
and resistance? And is the meme-concept useful if we want to
study the way collective memory is formed? Will the Holocaust
memory emigrate with us in cyberspace? Digital culture is a voyage
into the realm of the artificial, borrowing metaphors here and
there, with little or no reflexion on the implications of the
cultural patterns in which interfaces, databases and gadgets are
shaped. Both private obsessions and political correctness have
stopped the media-art community to raise (and reject) all these
questions. Now, in the middle of the 'digital revolution', it
is time to look for unspoken permissions and organize a lively,
open debate."
As I could understand from the summary of
the first six weeks of the discussion on the Net, the quality
of the discussion has been of a low level, or, in other words,
the theme of the debate was misunderstood. As a matter of fact
the artist Perry Oberman (invited speaker) claimed that "If
we are going to use a term, we ought to have a reasonable understanding
of it".
The Brain Opera (Tod
Machover - MIT Media Lab)
The author states that "technology should
respond to human intentions, rather than simulate or replace them",
and he started developing hyperinstruments at the MIT Media Lab
in 1985. In Brain Opera the audience - live and via Internet
- is involved in contributing to, performing, and helping to create
the piece itself: a set of specially designed hyperinstruments
lets people play with different aspects of music (Rhythm, Melody,
Harmony, Timbre, etc.). Brain Opera was designed to stimulate
audiences to reflect on Marvin Minsky basic questions: "Why
do we like music? Why do we spend so much time with an activity
that has little or no practical benefit? Why does music make us
feel? Why do we spend so much time with an activity that most
deeply unifies our complex selves?" And also to achieve Glenn
Gould prediction that "in the electronic age the art of music
will become much more viably a part of our lives, much less an
ornament to them, and that it will consequently change them much
more profoundly".
Brain Opera is structure in three movements as a classical music
composition, but each movement has its own structure. In Movement
1 the original sample sounds are mixed with the actual sound
of the audience. Movement 2 is completely composed by the
artist, but lot of room for interpretation is left. In Movement
3 Internet players can control and improve the composition
by way they manipulate online instruments; Internet players are
soloists.
Liquid Cities (Michel
Redolfi)
Liquid Cities is
a series of sound installations in which swimming-pools are transformed
into three-dimensional, fluid and interactive spaces. The participants
moving in the medium of weightlessness explore a transparent city
which exists only via the sounds they make.
Music is generated by the bodies of people
swimming in the pool and also by internauts who registered their
name in the WWW site of Liquid Cities. These names are than synthesised
into the water of the pool. In this way people of the Internet
"acoustically populate the pool".
Two digital cameras pick up movements of the participants (visitor,
swimmers) and translate them into the MIDI (Musical Instrument
Digital Interface) music code: each visitor has a different chromatic
identity given by the colour of the bathing-cap and her/his movements
are detected by the changing of luminosity of the cap. Movements
are then translated into sounds.
Pictures become sounds, and sounds become
a picture again using MIDI: a software for graphic animation in
real-time is controlled. This visualisation in also retransmitted
as feedback to the WWW page.