I went to Ars Electronica for a few days earlier this month (thanks to the lovely arts council) which was fantastic I thought.
There was so much to see that I didn't do it all justice once round, and I'd happily have gone round everything again when I had.
So this isn't really any sort of measured judgement, more of a "I liked this. And this. Oh, and this. And this."
The only judgement I've made is to put what I liked into three groups, themed around what I'm interested in, which is probably why I liked them in the first place.
Secret Gardens
The wooden walkway on top of the OK building – turning a rooftop into a secret garden that took us within touching distance of a church spire, out over the streets and past the smell of cakes coming out of the air conditioning ducts from a bakery below.
I liked the secret meadows that were growing on the rooftop, and on rooftops all over Linz.
Then down at the other end of the scale was this miniature secret garden, filled up with snow and no bigger than a table top, where tiny fairies lived, if you could find them using a magic lens.
These are terrible photos, but this fish pond, that you could play with and remake by sprinkling gravel:
It could also go in the folk processes section, and in fact these headings and the things in them all cross over.
Things with Souls
The were lots of things with souls, from a chair:
to a building:
to a mechanism:
and I think this sense of a world that is alive is going to be a big area for creative technology to play around in.
And of course people have souls. Like this guy:
who proved that people aren't all that much smarter than robots. Or at least I'm not.
I had a conversation with him, and was amazed by it. He didn't look very real, but because of the AI. I thought to myself “this is stunning, I had no idea that chat bots were so good”, and I had to stop talking to him because I got a bit self conscious thinking, “I'm having a proper chat with a machine.”
It was only later that I found out that there was a bloke upstairs listening to me and telling the puppet what to reply! Still clever, but not quite what I thought it was.
Folk Processes
These were open spaces where the people taking part made the thing for themselves.
I've previously thought of these as digital archives, but at Ars Electronica there were spaces made by physical interactions by one or more people – there was a nice piece in the sound art retrospective exhibition, for example, in which movement triggered sound, so several people at once would be creating the event, and in the Device Art exhibition the video game with the circular screen hanging in the middle of the room, which two players had to run round in order to see what they were shooting at like a children's playground game (no photos of either of them sadly).
There was this Nam June Paik piece in which you could make sounds in whatever order you wanted from those strips of audio tape stuck to the wall, by running a part from a tape player along them.
And Yoko Ono's very poetic instructions for making music:
Both of which are from the 60s.
And this net of LED lights strung on threads that you could slide backwards and forwards like beads on an abacus:
which took me ages of fighting off little kids to customise.