Das Wunder von Linz

Greetings from Ars Electronica! I finally made my way to Linz -- and I am super-super happy about it. Ars Electronica is an interesting event in many ways. This year the theme of Ars Electronica is simplicity. Today we were at St Florian, some 15 km from Linz. I listened three 'lectures' that were [I quess] somehow linked to the theme. Morning session was a huge disappointment. The session was chaired by John Maeda and the panelist were relatively interesting but the discussion about 'simplicity' was lame, uninspiring and dry. Luckily the following sessions were better.

The following lecture-performance by Tmema guys featuring Erkki Huhtamo was working well. The basic idea was that Erkki chatted about 'magic hands' in audiovisual media. 'Whether intended or not, these hands evoke the cultural acts of sleight-of-hand they had been trained to perform.' Between chat sessions, Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman presented some of their exciting and rather simple audio-visual art works.

Third lecture was given by media art superstar Toshio Iwai. Mr Iwai was once again very symphatic and charmingly passionate about his work. The session was horrible because the lecture room was way too small for the lecture. As a consequency of the room size, tens of listeners had to standstill throughout the 2 hour session. And they did! I quess that pretty much gives you an idea how exuberant the lecture was.

Actually I quess exhibitions, installations and other activities were more interesting than the lectures at AEC. Jus to name a few... 'Moonride' sounded pretty dull but was pretty nice, also exhibitions at Ars Electronica Center and O.K Centrum were excellent. There are lots of things going on all the time from electronic music spectacles to fireworks, Sankari chat karaoke to playful media art pieces. Suberb, excellent & supa cool :)