I made a playlist of videos i found on youtube from this years ARS Electronica Festival. Most of them from the FH St. Pölten.
Monthly Archive for September, 2008
This years theme of the ARS Electronica Festival “a new cultural economy” has been a big challenge for Gerfried Stocker, Christine Schöpf and their team. Maybe my expectations are far to high in concerns of this topic because if i look back to the festival i can´t find a dispute with or a deep investigation into this theme. We are allready familiar with the advantages of web 2.0 and open source at least for us users, but what about the dark side of the holy participation movement ? I think this comes down to a very basic question about ARS Electronica and their positioning. Their idea is a common consideration of art, technology and society far from technical and industrial interests as they write in their pressmap. At least it´s their idea. My reception was kind of different, but i didn´t attend all conferences and lectures to be honest. To present the “University of Tokyo” as a kind of figurehead is at least straightforward in our new cultural economy which heads towards creative industries. Alright, enough complaints. Like every year you find some interesting works out of this huge range of works, and some i even managed to document. funny that two of this works are out of tokyo university. even though the most of the works there were kind of unsubstantial i found some funny ideas and charming realisation like in the installation “ephemeral melody”. but check out the videos…
check out also the official ARS project we guide you where visitors where invited to participate and document the festival.
HEHE are Helen Evans (FR/UK) and Heiko Hansen (FR/DE). Both completed an MA inc omputer related design at the RCA in 1999 and are now living in Paris. Their project “Nuage Vert” won the Golden Nica in the Category Hybrid Art, it is part of Pollstream – a collection of ideas, forms and images that explore man-made clouds.
Because of it’s performative nature, only the documentation of the project was exhibited in the O.K. – therefore another project of Pollstream was shown – apparently for the first time in a public space. Smoking Lamp (2006) requires a smoking audience – on most places on earth this is a vital problem, but not in Linz. Simple but very nice installation:
The winning Project of this years Prix Ars is the Image Fulgurator by Julius von Bismarck (DE) – with good reason. The project is based on technology that’s been out there for the last 40 years. All it does ist to invert the concept of an analog SLR camera and turns it into a projector.
A flash is mounted on the back of a SLR camera and connected to a flash sensor. As soon as a flash from another camera is recognized, the flash goes of, shines through the the dia thats inserted in the camera and projects the image for a few milliseconds – just long enough to be recognized by other camera that triggered the flash initially.
A detailed description can be found on his homepage.
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