Surfing on Electronic Surfaces
15 YEARS OF ARS ELECTRONICA". CD-ROM

' Station Rose Station Rose

The CD-ROM "Surfing on Electronic Surfaces – 15 Years of Ars Electronic" is an interactive digital database containing 640 megabytes of multimedia information. Special attention is given to the transformation of art previously presented in linear fashion, such as that distributed in the form of catalogs, into a multimedia sensory world networked with many "arteries" - an electronic biotope, a landscape of Station Rose art and the enormous river of data from 15 years of Ars Electronica. The user can skim over this landscape of icons, samples, morphs, quicktimes, sounds, text, interview samples, scripts and anis as desired, actively researching, and linger over concepts such as Art, Music, Cyberspace, Performance, Sound and Image Databases, Pioneers, Endo/Nano, Art in Progress, Installations, Art in Networks, Pop and Psychedelic Culture, Hi-Lo-Tech, Mind Children, Robotics, Multimedia, Prix Ars Electronica, Technoculture, Interface Design, Terminal Art, MIDI, Video Art, Global Village.

Ars Electronica, in the course of its 15 years, has made the most current art history. In a unique, pioneering way, it has enabled experiments in the areas of art and science. With its festivals, it has also represented a transitional period, and during this time, it has contributed to the financial survival of several avant-garde artists.

Most likely, this phase is to a certain extent past, as the production of CD-ROMs represents a beginning, the first real chance for multimedia artists to exist on the large-scale market of capitalist society as independent developers. Multimedia art leaves its ghetto and comes to the surface.

For Ars Electronica itself, this CD-ROM is a historical moment, because thanks to it, the festival can present itself for the first time as a digital database and communicate on the international software market - not only at localities such as the Ars Electronica Center, but most importantly independently of time and space, in networked communication systems of a complex, democratic nature such as Internet, etc.

Access to Ars Electronica data on this CD-ROM, to art, science and society, to the hypermedia dictionary and plant-like networked arteries in the electronic jungle and through the entire spectrum of events since 1979 will be explained here by using a few arteries as an example.

Interactive timetables conform to intelligent structures. This means that an event, a lecture, a subject area or an artist can be found in the following way:

• By calling the level where the festival programs are waiting for the mouse click. These levels are arranged chronologically, for traditional, quick browsing, so to speak.



• By "playing the CD-ROM through", interactive buttons provide the red threads (arteries) which intersect with other sensory correlations. The red thread is also provided in the form of music: connections can be found through various remixes of the same piece of music.



• By clicking the desired subject area or artist in the hypermedia dictionary, which is divided into 3 large areas: Art, Technology and Society.
  
  Just as the first music computers, e.g. the Fairlight, became prototypes for a new kind of musical production, and finally, home recording initiated pop culture and influenced mass culture through pop music, the interplay of music and graphic computers are having similar effects: Virtual realities are being produced. The unit of measure is no longer B.P.M. (beats per minute), but R.P.M. (realities per minute).
  
  Providing a list of the new electronic "TOOLS" is another important function of the Ars Electronica dictionary on the CD-ROM.
  
  Nanotechnology provides a look into the world of atoms and tempts the artist to create virtual atoms.
  
  In the end, these virtual, digital realities will take on an individual existence through Artificial Life and mutate to mind children.
  
  Until that time, the renunciation of verbal language will remain in effect, and for that reason, some concluding words:
  
  We are replacing verbal language with one of a more complex nature, namely multimedia language. Verbal language has done its duty; it has interpreted information in a makeshift way and divides peoples from one another through a lack of understanding. Above all, its boring appearance consisting of black and white hieroglyphics has under-stimulated our brains in spite of the stylistic devices of grammar as definitive l'art pour l'art.



• Wires and chips are a girl's and a boy's best friends!!!!!!!!!!