king talk

I spent a great inspiring long weekend at this year’s Ars Electronica Festival in Linz. Together with my project partner Jochen Winker we had the great opportunity to be part of it as artists by contributing with our bachelor project.

But of course there was much more to see during the festival (some exhibitions are actually still open until 09/11 in case someone want’s to go there spontaneously). The thing I like most about that exceptional festival for media arts, is the mixture of exhibitons, conferences and events. You can both see impressive artworks and learn amazing things from specialists of all areas of arts and science.

This year the topic was “Repair – ready to pull the lifetime” (or in German: “Repair – sind wir noch zu retten”) so it was all about brining our word forward and helping it to solve the major crisis we had or we are heading to. A big diversity of different speakers and topics provided the audience with knowledge from areas of design (e.g. a talk from munich based train-design-pioneer Alexander Neumeister about mobility) to science (e.G. an outstanding and exciting talk about neuroscience from LMU Prof. Ernst Pöppel) and many many more. Fortunately all of the talks were recorded and should be online at Ars Electronica’s vimeo channel soon.

Of course the festival also stands for one of the most important awards in media arts – the golden Nica. This year’s winner in interactive art was a group around open-frameworks inventor Zach Liebermann who developed an inexpensive eye-tracking solution for a paralyzed graffiti artist – The Eye Writer – which is not only one single product but also an initiative to help that artist and many others to express themselves again. A great work wich totally deserves the price and also fitted very well into this year’s topic “Repair”. For more informations about the awards, winners and categories just head to the Prix Ars Electronica website.

One point I want to mention for people who have been at the Ars Electronica Festival before:
This year the festival organizers had the opportunity to hold the event in an old tobaco factory which provided an interesting venue for the artworks.
I guess the things that profited the most from the industrial surrounding where the Cyber Arts projects which really looked much better there then in some modern art gallery like the OK-Kunsthaus were the exhibition normally takes place.
Unfortunately the talks, lectures and conferences where the ones who really suffered from the venue. Obviously there was no real space that could be used for talks so the main area for the symposiums was located in a room which hat massive pillars that prevented the audience to have a clear sight to the speakers .They tried to fix that with a notable amount of hd-screens and projectors but it was still not perfect compared to the conference hall at the Bruckner House where the talks normally takes place.
Nevertheless the biggest advantage was to have nearly everything in one place and not spread throughout the city how it was done in the last year. Actually you only had to leave the factory for some special events or for the Ars-Electronica-Center. A point which made it much easier to switch from talks to exhibtions or to see everything in a much shorter amount of time.

For me the most impressing exhibtion was the Cyber Arts 2010 which showed most of the prix winners, destinction awards and honorary mentions.
There are three projects I really want to point out in the next days and which impressed me the most. Interestingly only one of them is interactive. Perhaps I am just to much inside that field now so that i am not that easily impressed anymore – which is really a pitty. But still: stay tuned for these 3 great pieces of art.

The idea is simple and nice. Take a wind mill and put some colorful LED lights on it so everybody can see. The so called Siemens SuperStar was created by multimedia artist Michael Pendry for the company and was displayed till January in Munich (close to the Allianz Arena). Pendry convinced both Siemens and the Stadtwerke München (Munich City Utilities) to let him install this art piece on one of the utilities’ wind turbines. It was created to showcase and promote sustainable energy and green innovation. Passing cars on the motorway could find this a little bit distracting, but it looks good.

9.000 OSRAM LEDs were superglued to a wind turbine in just under two weeks. Thanks to smart energy systems like smart grids and power highways, it only consumes as much energy as a hair dryer! The 9.000 LEDs put out as much light as 20.000 Christmas candles.

I think it´s pretty amazing that a project like this was done in Munich, a city which is known as a conservative city, but Munich’s Mayor, Christian Ude, has been an enthusiastic proponent of the energy-efficient spectacle from the start and hopes his city will be the first of its size to meet all energy requirements from renewable sources.

via Andreas Brendle

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Golan Levin, an artist and engineer, uses modern tools – robotics, new software, cognitive research – to make artworks that surprise and delight. Watch as sounds become shapes, bodies create paintings, and a curious eye looks back at the curious viewer. Golan worked as an academic at MIT and a researcher specializing in computer technology and software engineering, Golan Levin now spends most of his time working as a performance artist. Rest assured his education hasn’t gone to waste, however, as Levin blends high tech and customized software programs to create his own extraordinary audio and visual compositions. The results are inordinately experimental sonic and visual extravaganzas from the furthest left of the field.

Many of his pieces force audience participation, such as Dialtones: A Telesymphony, a concert from 2001 entirely composed of the choreographed ringtones of his audience. Regularly exhibiting pieces in galleries around the world, and also working as an Assistant Professor of Electronic Time-Based Art at Carnegie Mellon University, Levin is unapologetically pushing boundaries to define a brave new world of what is possible. His latest piece, Double-Taker (Snout), is installed at the Pittsburg Museum of Art.

Holy sh*t! It’s a giant, floating, responsive, colorful, mist-projected installation! Usman Haque created this marvellous piece of media art especially for the Glow 08 (OK, this post IS a little late…), a dusk til dawn festival in Santa Monica. The image, projected on a wall of mist, adjusted its appearance and behaviour as the noise level of the crowd changed. As you might know, anything that makes lots of people scream, chant and cheer totally kicks ass in my opinion. And if it is combined with floating, colorful projections, it’s simply pure awesomeness!

Kudos to Usman, and shame on me for not knowing about the mere existence of Glow.

via Interactive Architecture