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Ars Electronica Center Exhibition
On the occasion of the Ars Electronica Festival, the exhibits in the Museum of the Future are getting a makeover to offer visitors a series of impressive new installations from the world of media art.
The Ars Electronica Center’s CAVETM—driven by the Ars-Box, a Linux cluster developed at the Ars Electronica Futurelab—is one of the few high-end VR environments that is made available to artists. For “TIMESHIFT,” Kurt Hentschläger (A/USA) was invited to develop a new CAVE world. His work is based on Unreal Tournament and deals with the perception of animation and movement. Plus, Masaki Fujihata (J) will exhibit VR visualizations from his latest GPS/video project. For artists and visitors alike, this is a one-of-a-kind opportunity to pursue the vision of immersive works of art.
The media façade on the exterior surface of the Ars Electronica Center is a field of artistic experimentation in its own right. Lia (A) and Miguel Carvalhais (P) were commissioned to produce a work for this setting. The result is “Seek,” a play with forms and patterns that consists of an online domain and a façade domain. At http://www.aec.at/seek, any user can directly influence the online version and thus simultaneously intervene in the sequence of movements on the façade.
The popular “Gulliver’s Box” installation designed by the Ars Electronica Futurelab (A) and Hirokazu Kato (J) is being expanded and made even more attractive thereby. “Gulliver’s Box” involves a table that initially appears to be nothing out of the ordinary, but visitors wearing special glasses can experience a fantastic fairytale landscape being played out upon it. A series of animated characters or even digitized avatars of themselves that users produce in the installation’s Recording Room wait in transparent boxes to be dispatched into this virtual world—to interact with the other figures, to perform feats of magic, to breathe fire or to reconnoiter the area. The newly adapted version entitled “Gulliver’s World” now enables users to design their own worlds, to modify the avatars or to create completely new ones.
Within the framework of the 2004 Siemens Artist-in-Residence Program, John Gerrard (IRL) was invited to carry out a project at the Ars Electronica Futurelab. His “Watchful Portrait” displays two virtual likenesses that continually follow the position of the sun and the moon. “Caroline” opens her eyes at daybreak and observes the course of the sun. When she closes her eyes at dusk, “Nadia” opens hers and follows the course of the moon throughout the night.
Ars Electronica Center Exhibition
September 2–7, 2004
10 AM to 9 PM
Ars Electronica Center
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