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Prix2008
Prix 1987 - 2007

 
 
Organiser:
Ars Electronica Linz & ORF Oberösterreich
 


HONORARY MENTION
Constrained City / the pain of everyday life
Gordan Savicic


Constraint City / the pain of everyday life is a critical performance in urban environments, addressing public and private space within the realm of everyday constraints. It resembles an interface for an invisible city; an architecture that is subconsciously perceived. A chest strap (corset) with high-torque servo motors and a WIFI-enabled game-console are worn as a fetish object. The motors tighten the straps when an enclosed wireless network is detected: the better the WIFI signal is, the tighter the jacket becomes. Closed network points improve the pleasurable play of tight lacing the performer's bustier. Thus, constituting the ether as a space of possible pregnancy, filled with potential access-points to networks of communication.

This technique, also called Inverse War-Driving, challenges the much over-hyped discourse about locative and wearable media. Everyday walks between home, work and leisure are recompiled into a static schizogeographic pain- map which data is acquired from GoogleMaps servers with automated script bots. By wearing the straitjacket, the artist not only writes, but is at once also able to read the city code. Hence, the outcome of his walk provokes the emergence of a city-shaped body formed by surrounding electromagnetic waves. The technical necessity of wearing the jacket on the naked chest adds some unexpected dimensions of gender. The object itself presents a new genre, a mixture of a fashion apparatus, technical gadgetry, low-tech DIY object, sex toy and a sarcastic wearable media device, all linked by their relation to the architecture of cities and networks and politics of everyday life.

The project evokes a wide range of emotional and intellectual questions considering the freedoms of everyday life. As a critical performance in urban space, it cleverly combines the Situationists' technique of city exploration (dérive) with contemporary network structures, toy gadgetry, fetishism, locative and wearable media. It has been performed in different cities and gained publicity not only within the field of new media.

Extended Cognitive Tools is the general name for software that has expressions for extending human recognition and includes Incompatible BLOCK, OLE Coordinate System, and Constellation.

Incompatible BLOCK is a block-based 3D modeling software with an interface of wonders. While the user edits blocks by dragging them across the screen, based on 2D interpretation rather than 3D construction, the system places the block. The OLE Coordinate System has some interactive illusions that enable the character to perform impossible motions on the block and the stairs in the virtual 3D world. For example, the character walks between non-contiguous blocks, which seem to be contiguous on the screen. Constellation is point-based animation system that generates a character by using several points or metamorphoses a character by using points to construct another character.