SIMPLICITY - the art of complexity - ARS ELECTRONICA 2006 - Festival für Kunst, Technologie und Gesellschaft - Linz, Do 31. August – Di 5. September

The Danube Panorama Project is an experimental approach to photographic mapping and cartography. It's goal is to produce a full panorama of the Danube's river sides by digitally slit-scanning its coastlines, resulting in a unique 'cross section' of contemporary Europe.

The Danube - "Europe's River of Destiny" - connecting Western, Central and Eastern Europe uniquely reflects the shifting relationships of its peoples, cultures and religions in its accumulated history and contemporary dimensions. It is as much a cultural as a geographic landscape. It will guide as a symbolic red line of this intense survey.

Michael Aschauer (AT)

dun.AV

CabBoots is an innovative interface with a pedestrian navigation system. The information transmission process can be perceived tactilely, is intuitively understandable, and is applied to the part of the body most directly involved in the act of walking: the foot. Whereas conventional navigational devices normally communicate with the user on the auditory and visual levels, CabBoots utilizes the faculty of kinesthetic perception akin to walking on a well-trodden path.

Martin Frey (DE)

CabBoots

With their "Song for C", artistic duo M+M (Marc Weis and Martin De Mattia) has come up with a "film noir"-style detective story in which the boundary between fiction and real life tends to get a bit blurred.
The narrative gets the audience of cell phone users partaking of it involved in a drama entailing a variety of different seemingly authentic messages, transmitted images, clues and leads that turn passive viewers into active “voyeurs” of what is transpiring. It works like this: a female detective sends out mobile video dispatches to keep the audience of cell phone users updated about the progress of her investigation and, at the same time, to actively involve them in the case.


"Song for C"– a cinematic narrative for cell phones by M+M
Project Associates: Department of Technology of the HGKZ – School of Art and Design Zurich; Mobile Art Lab of Vodafone Group R&D, Germany

Martin de Mattia
Marc Weis

The Sledgehammer Keyboard communicates with a computer like its common counterpart - it is the user's experience that is unusual. Participants are invited to lay down their thoughts by striking its keys with a hammer. Each key requires a great force to activate, so users must be aggressive and concise in order to complete an idea.

The printing press, ballpoint pen and desktop computer all represent great leaps in the technology of communication. Each of these benchmarks made the writing process easier, at least in terms of procedure. But perhaps something is lost when an intellectual endeavor becomes too facile. If we put less physical effort into writing, is there also a corresponding shift in mental effort?

Taylor Hokanson (US)

Sledgehammer Keyboard

Regrets are often the conceptual vehicle of self-improving tendencies, but they are rarely communally active in any meaningful way. The Regrets team seeks to intervene and enable such interaction. In particular, remorse is posited here as a positive entity, incorporating recall, reflection, and learning.

Five custom mobile computer units roaming public space in and around a chosen city, community, or event, collect anonymously submitted regrets from the public, gathering and comparing them to comprise a sociological database of contemporary regret. Instant feedback to the individual user based on other contributors' similar concerns is algorithmically generated to 'share the burden'. Random selections of the regrets are made public via locally negotiated sites and existing signage, network, and broadcast facilities. The archive represents a glimpse of a given community at a particular time through the rubric of regret; its results available for future studies.

Graham Budgett (US)
Jane Mulfinger (US)

Regrets