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Space Conquests: Do It Yourself!
'Nicoletta Blacher
Nicoletta Blacher
What characteristics are displayed by interactive installations and programs that motivate their users to engage in experimentation? In conjunction with The Age of Simulation— Learning and Research in the 21st Century, a conference of international experts recently held in Linz, the Ars Electronica Center developed a special exhibit focusing on this theme in early 2006 (http://www.aec.at/simulation).(1) Setting up a simulation path through the Museum of the Future is designed to make a sort of proving ground available to visitors. In this area, the specific exhibition situation in the Ars Electronica Center features a juxtaposition of simulation models from many different fields in which simulation is being applied and a broad spectrum of exhibit formats—from interactive installations and 3-D visuals, artistic animated works & videos and educational computer games all the way to network visualizations. Here, the Museum of the Future presents itself at its finest: as a creative environment designed to explore the possibilities of hands-on experimentation at the interface of real and virtual space.
Along with the growing complexity of information, its ever-diminishing half-life and the acceleration of technological development, there’s an increasing need for appropriate forms of mediation that dynamically take the user’s physical location into consideration. Questions dealing with the user-friendliness of interfaces and their degree of interactivity are increasingly to be understood in the context of accessibility—in the all-encompassing sense of barrier-free design as well as in the sense of possibilities available to users to define their own role and to provide for active, creative utilization by a broad spectrum of users with varying cultural and technological backgrounds.
The Museum of the Future’s current exhibits and ancillary programs designed to mediate users' encounters with the exhibits’ content offer settings to make contact with new domains, to experience and learn about them..
During the Festival, this year’s prizewinning projects in the u19—freestyle computing category will be on display in the new Simulation Lab (former Mediatheque). The creative youngsters who made them use an incredibly diverse mix of materials and tools to produce works that superbly illustrate the importance of the do-it-yourself principle in a proactive and critical process of exploring and mastering digital domains and possibilities of representation. Using media and media's influence on cultural forms of expression and the latitude for action open to young people will constitute a core theme of the Ars Electronica Center’s fall and spring activities. The 10th anniversary of the u19—freestyle computing category provides one fitting occasion in this connection. To this can be added current initiatives by local youth groups leading up to Linz serving as European Capital of Culture in 2009. These young people are involved in exploring the performative quality of digital space in its sensory and aesthetic dimensions, and the possibilities of a process of exchange among different youth scenes for purposes of brainstorming, planning and establishing a presence in the public sphere.
This approach will be carried on in the utilization mode of the Simulation Lab, alternately a venue for presenting mapping projects and urban simulations and a setting for workshops. It is precisely the juxtaposition of screen-based applications and interactive scenarios that brings about the reflection of spaces for experience and action. The first Linz WikiMap developed by the Ars Electronica Futurelab in the fall of 2005 was a contribution to the city’s Hotspot wireless LAN initiative. Since then, additional WikiMaps have been developed on an ongoing basis in collaboration with various partners and users (www.aec.at/wikimap). These include virtual interactive maps that have been commissioned by regional and international clients as platforms for a wide variety of projects ranging from associative, artistically inspired efforts to capture a cityscape all the way to treatments of concrete design proposals—such as Wikimap Madrid in cooperation with MediaLab Madrid and Wikimap Europe in conjunction with Austria’s EU Council presidency. With the continuous enhancement of the communications tools built into them, these WikiMaps make available a host of marvelous opportunities to take advantage of the Internet as a domain of information, communication and new ideas at points where they dovetail with on-site activities.
Another mediation tool developed by the Ars Electronica Futurelab combines screen-based applications with the walk-through accessibility of a self-designed space. With the World Editor any user can design his/her own virtual world for the CAVE. A special program enables computer users—even those with no prior experience in this area—to arrange landscapes and to populate them with figures and other objects. In going about this, drawings or photos can serve as models, and users can enhance their work with sounds and ambient noise to generate atmosphere. Afterwards, workshop attendees can personally experience their creations right in the CAVE. Do-it-yourself is the guiding principle of the Robolab. Sensors of all sorts are used to produce an amazing variety of creations—from eminently sensible to serendipitously fantastic. The assembly of ELEKIT robot components rounds out the program, a combination of high-quality design and playful encounter with sensor technology.
With its intramural and extramural activities, the Ars Electronica Center offers an open program governed by a hands-on approach to the encounter with digital domains. This can be played out in concrete references to reality or in the form of mind mappings, and experienced as a journey of discovery to the user’s own potential.
u19—freestyle exhibition
u19—freestyle computing is Austria’s largest computer competition for young people. It’s been held annually since 1998 in conjunction with the Prix Ars Electronica and has successfully established itself as a setting in which the creative spirit of youth can interface with our digital future. The growing number and diversity of submissions each year—including Internet applications, websites, graphics, computer animation, sounds and homebrew software and hardware—are indicative of an unconventional and creative encounter with our mediatized society. During the Festival, this year’s winners will be on display in the Simulation Lab (2nd Upper Level). The permanent exhibit on the 1st Upper Level showcases the incredible diversity of u19 entries and the fascinating 4- to 19-year-olds who created them. The Console station utilizes objects resembling trading cards as tools to control data visualization, videos and animated films. The Wall of Fame features the young inventors and artists themselves. Our encounter with the filmmaking crew that produced this year’s u19 Golden Nica winner inspired us to set up a miniature animation studio in the u19 exhibit area. The “making of” spot documenting this first production to emerge from the Krmpf Krmpf Studios is meant to get young visitors to the Museum of the Future into the do-it-yourself spirit and develop their own film sequences.(2) The studio provides a camera, simple editing equipment, a selection of background projections and—just like in this year’s Golden Nica winner—Lego blocks for set construction and Lego figures as the starring cast.
Translated from German by Mel Greenwald
(1)
A joint production of Ars Electronica and FAS.research. Powered by www.innovitives-oesterreich.at  back
(2)
Consulted by Ehrentraud Hager, Alexander Niederklapfer, David Wurm, Magdalena Wurm (Krmpf Krmpf Studios) back
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