Ars Electronica: Day 1

33 hours from Kiev to Linz. In a train. Without a food car­riage. Nuts.

Anyhow, apart from acco­mod­a­tion hassles, Ars Elec­tron­ica is excit­ing, exhil­ar­at­ing, huge. The fest­ival is to be spread out over about five build­ings. In the main square, a huge climb­ing wall has been set up with key char­ac­ters on it and but­tons that climbers must press. It’s a full-body pro­gram­ming exper­i­ence. Slow, but wow.

Col­lect press pass and kit. Meet funky people. Wander over to lunch at a little café next to the Lentos Kunst Museum, the palest white wine, sit­ting by the Danube in sun and warmth. The con­trast to Kiev is unbelievable.

That night is a major, amaz­ing per­form­ance that at the same time man­ages to be intensely dis­ap­point­ing. Dubbed “Europa: A requiem”, this per­form­ance of incred­ible scale has two parts. The first, bril­liant, is Carl Orff does Dante, a bloody jour­ney through the evils of European his­tory with a full choir and orches­tra, and quotes from Titian, Freud, Hitler, Ceau­cescu, Ein­stein, Aris­totle and many more peppered through the pro­jec­tions of oppres­sion and gore. The second begins with the arrival of a Bul­garian gypsy choir, beau­ti­ful voices, trav­el­ling across a bridge to the stage, wel­comed warmly by the con­ductor. And then a Romanian gypsy band. Great. But I can’t help but think after my travels that this is 1920s Harlem all over again: they’re fine as the per­formers, but it’s so super­fi­cial. Gypsies are *not* wel­come in day-to-day European life, this is not some tri­umphal return to the bosom of the Fath­er­land, but rather a trivi­al­ising of cul­ture as enter­tain­ment… but let’s see…

No, it gets worse. The final part of the second act sees the cur­tain rise on a per­former behind a large key­board dressed in velour and pro­du­cing sounds like Jean-Michel Jarre doing Hol­st’s Plan­ets, com­bined with the orches­tra doing 18th cen­tury Aus­trian cham­ber music, com­bined with the Gypsies… It does­n’t really work music­ally and I’m scep­tical about it as a solu­tion to Europe’s dilem­mas. Then it gets even worse: a pop singer, dressed in more velour, this time cham­pagne-col­oured, starts singing “Lord, have mercy on us, let eternal light shine on us” while the choir sings “Shine On” and fire­works go off. At one point, there’s a line about “we face you without con­tri­tion”. What? After *that* parade of death and destruc­tion? So, the solu­tion to 2000 years of colo­ni­al­isa­tion, imper­i­al­isa­tion, oppres­sion of the other, woman-killing and more, the answer is prayer? Give me a break. Nice spec­tacle though.

Thank­fully, every­one else is equally unim­pressed and we all troop off to the open­ing night party which is bril­liant. I meet new friends, dance, eat lots of grapes and don’t get back to the hotel till 4am.