Ars Electronica Festival
2 – 7 September
www.aec.at
Each September the small riverside city of Linz, Austria, becomes a tech-art boomtown. Hundreds of artists, programmers, philosophers, activists and entrepreneurs (most are a combination of these) descend like a cloud of locusts in faded jeans. This September marked the 25th anniversary of the Ars Electronica Festival, the most prestigious showcase for international new-media art. The festival began in 1979 as a forum for electronic music, and for many years functioned as a modern-day Salon des Refusés – an environment where the meeting of art and new technologies was supported long before museums or the commercial art world took note. The festival also presents the Oscars of new-media art – the Prix Ars Electronica – in categories ranging from Interactive Art and Net Vision to Digital Music and Animation.
Twenty-fifth anniversaries force one to sum
up. In this case, what was once a fringe event cannot deny its current
status as an Institution with a capital ‘I’. The 2004 Ars Electronica
symposium addressed the theme of ‘Timeshift’ – looking back over the last 25
years and forward 25 years into the future. Unfortunately, pioneers like
Myron Kruger (virtual reality), Marvin Minsky (artificial intelligence) and
Itsuo Sakane (educator and journalist) failed to give context to their
respective fields, delivering chronological or just plain ill-prepared
lectures that could easily have been presented by their graduate students.
If the symposium felt a little stuck, this year’s many exhibitions made it
clear that digital art has turned a corner. The best works consciously
distanced themselves from the whizz-bang obsession with technology itself,
moving towards a more contemplative vision, where technology served as an
invisible vehicle for pure aesthetic experience.
Listening Post (2001), which won the Prix Ars Electronica’s highest honour in the Interactive category, attempts to give us a window onto the global conversation that is taking place on the internet. The collaboration, between artist Ben Rubin and statistician Mark Hansen, typifies the strange bedfellows that Ars often brings together. In a darkened gallery, conversations taking place in chat rooms across the web were projected onto 231 small screens, suspended from the ceiling in the form of a shallow arc, while voice synthesizers converted the text into speech. There were several ‘scenes’ to the piece, during which filters were applied to the incoming chatter. At one point there was a continuous stream of text and sound, creating the din of a crowded restaurant from snippets of a thousand conversations. Another scene silently displayed only four-letter words – shoe, just, bone – cryptic messages worthy of a Greek oracle. A final filter displayed only phrases beginning with the words ‘I am’, foregrounding comments at once intimate and universal. There was a definite religious resonance to the piece which, rather than bowing to the alter of technology, provoked a feeling of awe at the presence of something larger than oneself.
New-media artists rarely confront art history head on, so I was pleased to find Irish artist John Gerrard’s Watchful Portrait (2004) – part of an exhibition from Futurelab, the Ars Electronica artist-in-residence program – in which the traditional portrait format is brought to life with the 3-D, real-time technology used in videogames. Gerrard took hundreds of photographs of his subject, Caroline Issa, a striking young woman of Palestinian decent. He then created two portraits, one whose eyes track the movements of the sun, the other the moon. The movements are subtle, not something you’d see if you stood in front of the work for just a few minutes, but enough to shake off the stillness, the weight of mortality that is perhaps the defining feature of traditional portraiture. The frames of the portraits can also be pivoted, although the 3-D images remain static, allowing the viewer to look around and behind them – a 2-D portrait suddenly endowed with the sculptural presence of a bust. It was like stepping through the art-historical looking glass. Is this what the back of the Mona Lisa’s head looks like?
There were plenty of one-liners among the artworks exhibited – some cheeky, some exquisite. French Canadian artist Jean-Marc Pelletier, a lecturer at IAMAS in Japan, set up a spotlight in a darkened room, focused on a pot of burning incense. The drifting smoke changed speed and direction as viewers moved in and out. Zen-like music playing in the background was generated in real time by a computer that captured the movements of the smoke – the effect was a simplicity bordering on the holy.
In the main town square two tall swimming tanks were open for business. Each swimmer put on a space-age helmet that cut off all sensory perception except for a telephone conversation with the swimmer in the other tank. Iso-phone (2004), by British-American team James Auger, Jimmy Loizeau and Stefan Agamanolis, was an exercise in concentration in an age of distractions.
Perhaps the most important project at this year’s Ars Electronica is not an artwork at all. Creative Commons (www.creativecommons.org) has introduced a kind of licensing agreement that offers an alternative to full copyright. Artists, musicians, writers and filmmakers who use the site can agree to let others use their content with specific restrictions – or with no restrictions at all. This month, several big names – including the Beastie Boys – will be putting the ‘cc’ symbol on their work. Finding an alternative to the iron-grip of copyright is a critical issue for the growing digital arts community. Creative Commons’ solution? Bring on the global re-mix.
Elizabeth Bard