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.