Ars Electronica: Day 6 & beyond

(actual date: sept 11 for later backdating…)

So, drag myself out of bed in the am (noti­cing a pat­tern here) to go to the last sym­posium, Soft­ware and Art II. While swal­low­ing the oblig­at­ory coffee and updat­ing the journal via the WiFi in the café, a couple of friends come up. The ses­sion wasn’t as good as they hoped, so they’ve come out for a breather. Chat for a while, then head in for the last few speak­ers, on an inter­est­ing guy talk­ing about crack­ing as art (sounds impossible at first, but when he starts talk­ing about using ter­minal screens on public buses to dis­play secur­ity holes in a fairly artistic inter­face along with real­time mes­sages being exhanged between hack­ers it becomes a more inter­est­ing pro­pos­i­tion. Then the guy who runs Trans­me­diale, who is great. Con­tro­ver­sial, he dir­ectly chal­lenges some of the assump­tions of the con­fer­ence that are less ten­able (code=art being one of them). The con­ver­sa­tion after­wards is great with lots of good ques­tions, includ­ing one from a cer­tain DJ who is not just a pretty face.

From there to lunch with Markus and David, then the final Prix ses­sion, this time Net Excel­lence. We just make it in time to catch Golan Lev­in’s present­a­tion of his excel­lent cul­tural life of num­bers pro­ject and then a couple of great artists talk­ing about their web design work: Lia with, well, her entire oeuvre and James Tin­dall with his old site the square root of minus one and the work he got the award for on the boards of canada site.

I want to see if I can’t catch the last install­a­tions I didn’t see at Elec­tro­Lobby, Campus and the Ars Elec­tron­ica Centre, so Markus and I do a light­ning tour before we meet up with David again and jump in a cab to Pos­thof for the Pol mechat­ronic per­form­ance and the DJ Spooky performance. 

In the foyer, I spot DJ Spooky lean­ing back near the door watch­ing the crowd. I go to say to him how much I liked the gig the night before when he says hi to me first and says “I noticed you dan­cing last night”. *boggle*.

“I noticed you play­ing,” I say. “I also noticed you asked a really insight­ful ques­tion in this morn­ing’s sym­posium…” and we’re off. He asks me to meet him back in the foyer after the performance.

Sadly, I found both per­form­ances less than thrill­ing. I wanted to walk out of Pol. Incom­pre­hens­ible avant garde per­form­ance art with some inter­est­ing con­trol mech­an­isms between the mechat­ronic suits and the video but too many biz­zarre images of women eating saus­ages, naked women’s bodies badly com­pos­ited with hairy male faces and a lot of visual toilet humour. DJ Spooky’s per­form­ance was mixed. The music was fine: a remix of Duch­amp mater­ial, timestretched and scratched with a bunch of other stuff. Not my favour­ite sort of stuff, but inter­est­ing enough and the tex­tual mater­ial was good. Visu­ally though, it’s a dis­aster. The Flash Player bar kept appear­ing on the huge screen, extremely dis­tract­ing, and the mater­ial itself wasn’t that inter­est­ing. (Sorry, Paul, if you’re read­ing). It didn’t have pro­gres­sion, it was entirely abstract, it didn’t do any­thing for me.

Anyhow, after­wards, some of us go to dinner and then to the small bar where Paul had been play­ing the night before. Paul is mobbed, of course, but he wants to take a small crowd back to his hotel room to watch – of all things – a revi­sion­ist film about the Amer­ican civil war called Gods and Gen­er­als. We order wine from room ser­vice and settle in. It’s not what I was expect­ing I’d be doing, but it’s an inter­est­ing crowd with some inter­est­ing things to say and I can’t help ima­gin­ing what hawk_eye would think of it all.

Most of the crowd leaves around 4am. In the morn­ing, Paul is sup­posed to leave for Bolzano where he’s DJing at another fest­ival. We arrange for me to do an inter­view over break­fast. Then he real­ises he has time and so we just chat over break­fast, where we’re joined by Golan Levin (who worked on the Messa di Voce pro­ject and the cul­tural life of num­bers). Great chat, so when it comes to taping the inter­view, I just invite Golan to stay and get this fab­ulous rap between the two of them. They both want copies of the transcript.

Then we’re joined by Ger­fried Stocker, the organ­iser of Ars Elec­tron­ica, and we all have lunch. Paul goes to Bolzano, invit­ing me to come if I want. I go to Ars Elec­tron­ica Centre and do a couple of VR things, one of them a flying sim in a full-body har­ness that leaves me quite queasy. 

That night is the chill­down party for work­ers and artists but I manage to get in along with James, an artist from Adelaide I’ve been hanging with and Fabi­enne from Exper­i­menta in Mel­bourne who’s been part of our posse too. Another good night but I pike early. Fabi­enne and I agree we’ll try to make it to Bolzano, but in the end, we just spend Sat­urday having coffee and shar­ing per­sonal stor­ies, then join two of her friends, one of them an artist cur­rently res­id­ent at the Future­Lab, and we have lunch then go up the moun­tain to Pà¶stlingberg, the world’s cutest fairy train through an animat­ronic gnome museum and great views of Linz with large pots of most, a local cider. They go off to Justin Man­or’s party after dinner and I jump on a train to venice for the Bien­nale. It feels very odd just ‘decid­ing’ to go to Italy on the spur of the moment.