Ars Electronica: Symposia #3 &4
Many great talks today. I’m still struggling to put some of the heavier pieces of this morning’s sessions together, some stuff went way over my head there, but then, i bet i wasn’t the only one in the audience longing for mind-expanding drugs during Massimo Canevacci’s talk. Jens Hauser talked about a common misconception of bio art, how it’s falsely categorized based on content (dna11 is not art) and introduced a fantastic project, disembodied cuisine: frog skeletal muscle tissue was grown over biopolymer for later food consumption. He concluded that the former “software” approach to bioart (genetic algorithms, codification of life) is now followed by a “hardware” approach, wetwork.
One of my favorite talks today was Marko Ahtisaari’s, who fortunately blogged it extensively. It wasn’t particularly challenging or revelatory, but i was delighted to see among his list of seven challenges hackability and openness. Also, his slides featured blinkenlights which as we hopefully all know make everything even more super.
Mostly unrelated: you know these apple stickers that come with apple computers? Marko had one on his thinkpad (at least i think it was his), which in any other context i might’ve found lame, but in this homogenous environment of apple prevalence it was kinda refreshing and (unintentionally?) ironic.
Marco Susani (of motorola) talked about the importance of the “here”, the “somewhere” as opposed to the peculiar notion of anywhere as “no-matter-where” and the non-immersive nature of cellphone interactions (i think there’s an interesting tension here, as probably the most immersive, disruptive interaction with cellphones is actually answering a call, talking to someone on your cellphone, whereas most other cellphone interactions seem to be indeed non-immersive and/or situated). He went on to the hybridization of content and communication (communicontent?), post-broadcasting models (few2few, many2many, narrowcasting) and networked things (which reminded me a lot of Bruce Sterling’s concept of spimes). For all the attention he directed to blogs in his talk i find it curious that i can’t find his – perhaps my google-foo isn’t strong enough, i’d be most grateful for any pointers.
Probably more later when it’s terribly outdated, but such is the peculiar nature of not having one’s gear on location.
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