Ars Electronica: Missed
Theo Jansen was awesome. At least that’s what i’ve read as i was sitting through a panel discussion on digital radio of surprisingly litte relevance and interest to me when he gave his talk. The only thing i took away from these two hours is that drm’s not just an acronym for digital rights management, but also digital radio mondiale. At least the afternoon session on copyright issues was more interesting, you should soon be able to download it here.
Know how a dominant theme can impose on the vocabulary of an event? That’s been going on here with the term “hybrid”, everything is hybrid or hybrisomething and we should all think a lot about hybridity, really. It’s getting a bit unnerving and it’s sad to see a word that i previously associated more or less exclusively with fancy japanese cars for treehuggers turning into “the dreaded h-word” within two days. Gladly i won’t have to further expound on this as Jan Zuppinger already did – funny how his overload happened at precisely the same moment as mine.
Later in the afternoon, prix forum #3 with the prize winners in the computer animation/visual effects category. Golden-nica-winning fallen art is awesome – go digging online, tomek mentioned that the version he’d show was some pirated near-0-day bootleg copy as he didn’t have the short on dvd with him, so apparently it’s out there.
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.
Ars Electronica: Symposia & Machinima
Lots of listening today, i hope they’ll put up video of all the symposia online again this year as i didn’t really bother taking notes – David Weinberger blogged all the sessions if you can’t wait.
Later at the pixelspaces exhibition they had a nice display of some modern machinima classics. I arrived at some point in the second half of shutup and dance! followed by dance, voldo, dance – hadn’t seen that one in a while. After that an episode of strangerhood, then i left.
Ars Electronica: Tangible Interfaces
Ars electronica is shaping up to be rather overwhelming again this year – six days just aren’t enough to take in all these lectures, exhibitions and performances. I’m also moblogging at flickr, if that’s your kinda thing.
Two nice projects right up my alley as part of the interface culture exhibition:
reacTable, yet another musical tangible table. Uses visual code recognition for tracking tokens.
Recipe table is a panel built into a kitchen’s countertop – place products on it and it’ll suggest recipes with these ingredients. Search results can be influenced by placement of products, e.g. things placed closer to you have a higher priority as ingredients in recipe suggestions. Uses the same visual code recognition system as reacTable.
