Ars electronica 2nd part…

Overall, this year festival was great and surely is in one of my favourite ars electronica festivals (I’ve been already in four). There were so many good projects, conferences and screenings that it would take me forever to talk about everything. So, I’ll make a very short reference to the projects that most caught my attention.

If someone asked me which projects I found interesting the first that would come to my mind would be Ocean of Light: Surface by SquidSoup. This installations combines sound, light and the physical space resulting in some kind of immersive light sculpture where you can see beautiful fluid movements any angle.

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Another excellent project and one of the Honorary Mentions in Interactive art was f5x5x5 by Lab[au]. A kinetic sculpture  capable to generate different patterns light patterns.

Take a look at the video to have a better idea

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The EyeWriter, the golden nica for interactive art this year, was one of the projects that call the attention in this festival due its unique team work. A team compose by the artists  Zachary Lieberman, Chris Sugrue, Theo Watson, Evan Roth, James powderly and, of course, Tony Quan joined efforts in order to build a system that would make possible to draw with. I belive that the main reason for this project was Tony Quan’s will to continue to draw graffities. Tony Quan was a graffiti artist living in L.A. but a few years ago he was diagnosed with ALS, a illness that paralyses the body muscles, and at the moment the only thing he can move is his eyes. So, he started to work with an artists team in a development of a eyetracking system that would allow him to draw again.

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Like I said in the beginning, it would take me forever if I talked about all the good things I’ve seen at Ars electronica this year but it would also be unfair not to mention (at least very briefly) this great projects: The toaster project by Thomas Thwaites where he engaged himself in the process of building his own toaster from the scratch, The Whispering table by TheGreenEyl, the amazing sound installation Rheo: five horizons by Ryoichi Kurokawa, and Cycloid-E by Michel and André Décosterd.

Good to be back

Wow!!! It has been a while since the last time I updated this blog, but the truth is that I’ve been really super busy working.

Anyway, last week I’ve just returned from a small pause from work. Once more I visited the cosy city of Linz in Austria because of Ars electronica Festival. This year the organisation of the Festival was quite peculiar: instead of the exhibition and all the other events being distributed by the Brucknerhaus, the OK Center (for those who know Linz will certainly know this places, mostly cultural institutions), the festival was concentrated in the TabakFrabik of Linz.

The TabakFabrik is one of the protected landmarks of the City of Linz and after its closure last year, the city council decided to seize the building for cultural purposes such as Ars Electronica’s Festival. So, this year instead of going around the city centre the visitor had almost everything concentrated in one unique and huge space.

The festival theme was repair, proposing to think about  our critical present and the upcoming future with a sense of idealism and realism as well, with a strong focus on sustainability, in politics, environmental and economical problems of today’s world. you can take a look to some of the conferences here. However, my purpose is to write about some of the artwork that I’ve seen during the Festival and not  about the conferences.

If art is suppose to show something that usually it’s there  but we don’t see it, then Jon Rafman may have get to that point and done one of the most interesting projects that I’ve seen.

The Nine Eyes of Google Street views is a project that uncovers a hidden, yet visible, reality of google street maps.  Rafman started to collect captures from google street maps in a search of a human transparency and a truthful image of reality capture by a neutral eye. In Jon Rafman’s words:

“The world captured by Google appears to be more truthful and more transparent because of the weight accorded to external reality, the perception of a neutral, unbiased recording, and even the vastness of the project.”

What I like about this project is the critical approach of reality and the world, but also a critic perspective about the technology of google street view and the experience we can extract of it. There is another aspect that I also enjoyed that is the narrative inherent to images, making almost impossible not to think about the story behind those frozen moments by the google camera.

To be continued…