Ars Electronica: Day 2

Dragged myself out of bed after a mere four hours sleep to make it to the first sym­po­sia of the con­fer­ence, “The mean­ing of code” and “The art of code”. An amaz­ing talk by Friedrich Kit­tler (PDF of the talk) on the his­tory of codes (Alberti, Morse, Tà¼ring), great dis­cus­sion on the dif­fer­ence between encoding/decoding and encryption/decryption, on eleg­ance, code as lan­guage, get­ting out more than you put in… I want to bring up ques­tions of lossy com­pres­sion, of the social dimen­sions of encod­ing and trans­la­tion ques­tions (yes, I’m a Birm­ing­ham school whore) but we run out of ques­tion time.

Cindy Kohn from EFF talks about code as speech and the vari­ous issues of win­ning that case years ago which determ­ined that soft­ware was an act of speech under the US First Amend­ment (PDF). And then Peter Bent­ley (PDF) talk­ing about DNA encoding… 

The after­noon ses­sion didn’t seem as inter­est­ing (and reports later said it was awful), so after lunch I wandered around a little (there’s art and install­a­tions *every­where* – in the ‘elec­tro­lobby’ down­stairs, in the Ars Elec­tron­ica Centre itself, in the Hauptplatz).

The even­ing’s per­form­ance is called Messa di Voce (put­ting the voice appar­ently). The descrip­tion in the pro­gram does­n’t inspire me much but the actual thing is mind-blow­ing. We are all given 3D glasses as we enter. Two “abstract voice artists” (which means they babble and sing and use voice as an instru­ment) are on stage in front of three enorm­ous screens. Their voices are the input for the imagery that appears on the screens. At the time, I write: 

“Black oil creature spikes. Theatres­ports voice over. Haunt­ing monk-like inton­a­tions. Black sil­hou­ettes against crim­son. On a field of red like dis­tress flare fog the per­formers seem to speak in streams of white lava and teal oil like a pro­jec­tion at a 60s party. This is fol­lowed by an angelic choir-like hall­space of blue ver­tical and medi­eval arches in green horizontals.”

There are about seven ‘scenes’, some nar­rat­ive, some abstract. The black spike creature (the per­former calls it a ‘space chicken’ at the press con­fer­ence) with the babbled anthro­po­lo­gical voice-over; the man speak­ing in bubbles who then tries to keep all his bubbles float­ing and ends up drown­ing in them; the beau­ti­ful paint­ing by voice where loud deep notes pro­duce fat black lines and vari­ations in pitch make the line­curve and swoop, col­ours appear­ing where the lines cross… it becomes intric­ate, com­plex and then “Shhh’ the screen is blank again in her sec­tion and I gasp. How bril­liant! “Shh’ as the erase com­mand, undo, start over, code as speech, be silent as an instruc­tion to be blank. She paints again, swirls and cur­licues. The applause is deaf­en­ing. (Oh, and sluis? They’ll be doing two per­form­ance in London at the end of November…)

I have watched the per­form­ance with new friends David and Marcus from Vienna and James from Adelaide. We head out, float­ing and excited, col­lect someone else from Aus­tralia, a woman named Fabi­enne I’ve known pro­fes­sion­ally for years via press release but never met (she’s Exec­ut­ive Pro­du­cer of Exper­i­menta), and meander over to the Haupt­platz for the Japan­im­a­tion ses­sion. I manage to grab us a table for eight in the square, com­plete with swinging covered bench thingy and we all order beers and gin&tonic and settle back to watch the show. There’s just too much fab­ulous­ness to describe right now. I’m going to have to buy the DVD.

From there to the Ars Elec­tron­ica Centre for the artist’s recep­tion and fab­ulous food, con­ver­sa­tion with an Eng­lish artist about rein­carn­a­tion and spir­itu­al­ism, then on to the party at Time’s Up, at a ware­house a little out of town but still right on the Danube, great dub and drum’n’bass, dan­cing, talk­ing, con­ver­sa­tions with more artists and once again it’s 4am before I fall into bed.