| Ars
Electronica 2009 3.9.2009
CyberArts 09 unites the best and most interesting entries in the Prix Ars Electronica, the international competition for computer art, comprising a survey show of digital art around the world. The OK presents the prize-winning projects and Honorary Mentions from the categories of Interactive Art, Digital Musics and Hybrid Art. The artists present their works on site, and most of them are present during the festival. What is characteristic of this year’s works
is a strong interweaving of real space with digital space in the different
categories: The distinction of classically aesthetic works by Lawrence
Malstaf (BE) or a sliding door set up in public space by Osman Khan
and Kim Beck (US), but also the focus on the publication of what is
private on the World Wide Web via Twitter & Co by Jens Wunderling
(DE) shows the broad scope and especially the topicality of discourses
on interactivity in the category Interactive Art. The works by Eduardo Kac and Shiho Fukuhara / Georg Tremmel are not only fascinating contributions to current debates on genetic engineering. They also demonstrate the challenges facing the art business with projects of so-called "bio-art": this applies to complex permit procedures as well as issues of authorship, copyright, the concept of art, and thus the concommitant gray areas in the realm of legal framework conditions. The Ars Electronica Animation Festival (4. – 8.9.) is also part of this years program at the OK: Almost 40 hours of video program from experimental-abstract productions, sound visualisatins, short-Cuts and special effects all the way to classic narrative fimmaking The OK Night on September 5 th
starts at 8:00 p.m. with the Electronic Theatre in
the open air Cinema outside the OK. The film screening features the
best computer animations from this year’s Prix Ars Electronica. During Ars Electronica, the opening hours of the
OK will be extended: Guided tours: Fr/Sa/So 14.00
Uhr and on appointment +43.732.784178-243 2nd FLOOR
The Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus is
a method and device revealing the relations between inventions by
crawling through millions of patents and their references. Patents
are manifested thoughts or goals of the inventor. Similar to scientific
papers they contain references to so-called prior art and to principles
the invention is based on. The machine’s echanism reproduces
the patents and their relations in a neverending stream of semantically
connected drawings. Surprising connections between seemingly unrelated
objects and ideas emerge.
Tantalum Memorial utilizes antique analogue
electromagnetic Strowger telephony switches to produce a memorial
to the four million people thought to have been killed in 10 years
of “Coltan Wars” in the Congo. The metal tantalum, refi
ned from coltan ore, is an essential component of mobile phones. The
switches have been reanimated to track calls from Telephone Trottoire,
a ‚social telephony‘ network also built by the artists
in collaboration with the Congolese radio program Nostalgie Ya Mboka
for the interantional Congolese diaspora. By creating a concrete presence
for this intangible network of conversations, the work becomes a reminder
of the social, geographical and fi nancial displacements of globalisation.
In computer technology the “basic input-output
system” (bios) designates the module which basically coordinates
the interchange between hardware and software. So it contains the
indispensable code, the essential program writing, on which every
further program can be established. Like a monk in the scriptorium
an industrial robot draws calligraphic lines with high precision on
rolls of paper and by this produces all the 66 books of the Bible
within seven months. The installation emphasizes scripture as the
fundamental function for religion and science – two cultural
systemsthat are essential for societies today.
In the Line of Sight uses 100
computer-controlled tactical flashlights to project low-resolution
video footage of suspicious human motion. Each flashlight shines a
light spot on the wall. All the flashlights combined create a ten-by-ten
matrix representation of the source footage, featured on a video monitor.
Smith & Wesson, the brand of the flashlights chosen for this installation,
is best known for its firearms. By walking between the light source
and the projected images, the role of the visitors changes from observer
to subject – with 100 flashlights pointed at them.
It could be said that the vinyl record, originally
invented as Edison’s gramophone, is the most modern and the
finest media in the field of analog recording technology. Yuri Suzuki
is suspicious of digital recording formats, as the digital data of
sound is for him nothing more than a virtual copy of the existing
original. Thus he is showing this series of interactive works with
the five unique and creative ways of using vinyl records. It is an
ironic, playful and positive way to enjoy the “true“ physical
value of sound.
Sliding automatic doors open when approached by
a viewer and close after they walk away – an experience that
is ubiquitous in our daily lives. With equal nods to Minimalism’s
aesthetics and mega-consumerism’s spectacle, when laughter trips
at the threshold of the divine places a fully functioning automatic
sliding door in the middle of a public park. The project offers the
everyday as a folly for play, re-experience and reflection on neutered
thresholds and the use of public space.
Developed between 2003 and 2008, Natural History
of the Enigma is a biotechnological art project instigated by Eduardo
Kac: The creation of a transgenic Petunia flower that expresses
Bill Fontana set the standards for dealing with
sound and noise in media, and made listening itself a topic: For the
most part, he takes everyday sounds and transfers them directly from
their usual situations to other everyday situations. The object of
his work Speeds of Time, Versions 1 and 2, is to deconstruct
one of the most renowned acoustic icons in the world: the sound of
Big Ben. Live sensors and microphones are mounted to generate a spatial-acoustic
composition. A 12-hour multitrack recording, which can be realized
as an eight-channel sound installation, makes it possible to fully
recreate the real-time sense of this artwork.
Cosmic Revelation is a minimalist light-art
project and a scientific experiment as well. In a field of 16 flashing
mirror sculptures connected to the Kascade detector field at the Forschungszentrum
[Research Center] Karlsruhe (Germany) the impact of high-energy cosmic
rays on the earth can be experienced at first hand. Cosmic Revelation
is presented directly in the detector field, but also like in the
OK remotely. As a new kind of land art, the flashing field not only
refers to the physical processes in matter, but also indicates the
protecting and moderating qualities of the atmosphere as basic condition
for the existence of a biosphere on earth.
A array of piezo-speakers is used to reproduce
an ultrasonic signal. An „acoustic camera“– a scientific
tool for measuring sound – is used to visualize the wave pattern
on a monitor.
1st FLOOR
The Turbulence Sound Matrix: Signe is
a complex amalgamation consisting of sound transmission and flow patterns
from the environment, electro-acoustic music and sound installation.
A 64-channel soundscape is broadcast into a gallery space via eight
towers, each of which contains eight speakers. These create an almost
spherical listening space in which visitors immerse themselves in
a rich, continuously morphing audio composition constructed with the
sounds of old typewriters, a grand piano, and wind-generated sine
waves. This production processes Heimbecker’s research findings
on “wind space architecture“ and carefully uses them to
build a
The interactive installation Double-Taker (Snout)
deals in a whimsical manner with the themes of trans-species eye contact,
gestural choreography, subjecthood and autonomous surveillance. The
project consists of an 2.5 m industrial robot arm, resembling an enormous
inchworm. Situated above a museum entrance and governed by a real-time
machine-vision algorithm, Double-Taker (Snout) orients his supersized
googly-eye towards passers-by, suggesting an intelligent awareness.
Evelina Domnitch’s and Dmitry Gelfand’s
performance Sonolevitation takes the form of a physical experiment
on stage: a specially created microgravity event in which slivers
of gold are acoustically suspended and spun in different directions
at varying speeds. The work enables the perception of sonic standing
waves and frictionless motion.
Default to Public deals with the discrepancy
between people’s feeling of privacy on the web and the physical
world. It consists of an ongoing series of works linking the physical
world to the online world in unexpected ways to create awareness for
self-exposure. The objects and interventions Status Panel, Tweetleak,
and Tweetscreen follow a simple yet powerful principle: information
from the Twitter network (standing for information on the web) is
displayed in another public environment, the documentation of this
process is fed back into the digital public sphere and the authors
of the information are notified that it has been “leaked”.
EarthStar emphasizes the sun’s elemental
and mythic qualities. Spectacular footage of the solar chromo-sphere
merges with virtual aroma compositions that smell ozonic. Building
a bridge between these two elements, the radio bursts emitted by the
sun provide a real-time soundtrack. Based on research and experiments,
this exploration of electromagnetic and vibrational energy of the
sun offers an intense, poetically charged experience for all the senses.
A pendulum swings through a space. A video screen,
constituting its pendulum bob, carves its path through the exhibition
space. It presents – from its ever changing position –
a view of another world in the background. Although freely swaying
through space it collides with objects; invisible, but audible. A
computer traces the pendulum‘s position and – in a computer
model – embeds it into a mathematical world where it collides
and interacts with objects. This interaction between the pendulum
and its mathematical surroundings provides the source for a three-dimensional
soundscape.
On November 12, 2008, one week after the election
of Barack Obama, a special edition of The New York Times hit the streets.
The end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a maximum wage, a new
national public transit system and 14 more pages of “all the
news we hope to print” were announced. The paper, dated nine
months in the future, was a vision; a plan detailing the rewards of
everyday people organizing together and pressuring, demanding a more
just world. Next to the international strongly perceived project The
New York Times Special Edition, there are two follow-up projects on
display: „Die Zeit“ and „International Herald Tribune“.
Corpora in Si(gh)te is an installation
based on real-time processing of environmental data. A mesh network
throughout the area of the OK is set up in order to collect temperature,
brightness, loudness, humidity, wind direction and wind speed. This
sensor network can be seen as the nervous system of the virtual structure.
The data collected from these sources is processed by software and
translated into autonomously acting nodes. These “super eyes”
are the seeds for the virtual architecture of “Corpora”
representing a cellular, distributed network of nodes. It reacts through
real-time processing, is growing and subsiding like an organism and
overgrows the OK.
The project is based on the fi rst commercially
available genetically modifi ed fl ower, the blue “Moondust”
GM carnation. Shiho Fukuhara and Georg Tremmel have used tactical
plant-tissue culture to reverse-engineer genetically modifi ed blue
carnations with an elegantly simple hack of the patented gene code.
In Common Flowers – Flower Commons using simple DIY
tissue culture methods the artists grow and “clone” plants
from purchased genetically altered cut-fl owers. This project emphasizes
the need to rethink “open source” culture in changing
technologies. The Ars Electronica Center Biolab cloned and grew the
blue carnations especially for the CyberArts exhibition.
The ReConstitution software, written by
Sosolimited for the 2008 United States Presidential debates between
John McCain and Barack Obama, deconstructs and reconstructs critical
political/entertainment events. With a goal of exposing hidden themes
and structures in the performances of the presidential candidates,
Sosolimited’s custom software and interfaces process live audiovisual
feeds through algorithms to reveal in their live performances components
such as word frequencies.
GROUND FLOOR
Arias for All «Der Rosenkavalier» by
Richard Strauss From March 9th to May 26th 2007, audio bugs, hidden
in the auditorium, transmitted the performances of the Zurich Opera
to randomly selected telephone land-lines in the city of Zurich. In
proper style of a home-delivery service, anyone that picked up their
telephone, was able to listen to the on-going opera performances for
as long as s/he wanted through a live connection with the audio bug
signal. In total, over 90 hours of opera performances were retransmitted
to 4363 households.
The intriguing neuroconstructivist installation
Silent Barrage stages emergent behavior of real neuronal
activity by transmitting neuron signals into a gallery space where
they are three-dimensionally explored. The impressive interactive
display proposes a feedback loop between audiences and these neuro-cultures
as tracked visitor’s movements are transmitted to the lab to
stimulate the barrage as the typical mode of neuronal activity. The
displayed drawings are notations of neuronal activity, which were
recorded by robots on the poles of the installation.
the idea of a tree translates the various
sunshine conditions that occur during a day into a three-dimensional
object. The length/height of the resulting object depends on the hours
of sunlight during the day. The thickness of the layer and the color
depends on the amount of solar energy. Each object represents one
day at one spot where it was produced. The three dimensional images
made during the festival stay together with a documentary video in
the exhibition.
Styrofoam beads are blown around in a big transparent
PVC cylinder by five strong fans. Take a seat in the eye of the storm!
In the center – on the chair – it is calm and safe. Spectacular
at first sight, this installation starts to mesmerize like a kind
of meditation machine. One can follow the seemingly cyclical patterns,
focus on the different layers of 3D pixels or listen to its waterfall
sound.
CONNECT – feedback-driven sculpture
by Andreas Muxel portrays complex mechanical acrobatics based on very
simple local feedback-based rules. Carbon rods fitted with magnets
swing seemingly aimlessly from a suspended grid of metal spheres,
yet a carefully tuned frequency results in chaotic swinging, eventually
snapping the magnet on the rod to an adjacent sphere. The consequent
forces disengage one of the ends, continuing the aimless wandering
of the carbon rods across the matrix. |
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