“The Messenger” is an examination of the relationship between electricity and democracy as well as the influence of telecommunications technologies on our lifestyle. E-mails from all over the world are received by a computer and decoded by three output systems that actually constitute a historical reference to early experiments in transmitting messages via telegraphy: 26 washbasins with a different voice assigned to each one, a chorus line of 26 dancing skeletons, and a series of 26 electrolytic jars deliver short-lived read-outs of the electronic messages.

Prix Ars Electronica 2006, Golden Nica Interactive Art

This “mobile installation” originated on a bus trip that Japanese and German artists took through Japan. It combines the traditional Japanese art of origami with the road movie genre. While the group was traveling about through a wide variety of landscapes, a webcam mounted on the bus snapped photos of the surroundings at five minute intervals from many different perspectives. The image files have been uploaded to the Internet in the form of origami patterns that enable users to copy the original and make their own road movie.

Prix Ars Electronica 2006, Golden Nica Net Vision

In Zachary Lieberman’s installation, figures drawn with pen and ink take on a life of their own and interact with their creators in that they seem to arise from the sheet of drawing paper and start to move in synch with the hand motions of the person who drew them. This installation, which features very user-friendly operation, is powered by special software that transforms a video image in real time into a digital image that, in turn, reacts to real processes like the movements of the hand that drew the figure.

Prix Ars Electronica 2006, Award of Distinction Interactive Art

The modern city is characterized by aggressive neon signage and in-yer-face billboards that can be seen as a proxy for the commercialization of our society. In response, Graffiti Research Lab has developed an arsenal of technologies like LED throwies, graffiti-writing caption software and mobile urban projectors that allow individuals to stake their own claim to a piece of the cityscape. Affordable DIY components facilitate a form of urban protest that carries on the graffiti tradition using state-of-the-art high-tech.

Prix Ars Electronica 2006, Award of Distinction Interactive Art

“Double helix swing” is an installation for gnats and people. Gnats are attracted by particular humming sounds and filmed with a camera. These images then serve as the basis of a virtual world in which the swarms of gnats in nature are confronted by digital creatures from the computer.

Prix Ars Electronica 2006, Honorary Mention Interactive Art

“Hello, world!” is an interesting take on long- and short-lived data storage media. It uses acoustic signals to store data. A codified auditory signal (feedback) circulates in a closed system consisting of a computer, a loudspeaker, 246 meters of copper tubing and a microphone. Due to the acoustic delay in the tubing system, it’s possible to save data, whereby the rule is: the longer the copper tubing, the longer the time delay and the greater the memory capacity.

Prix Ars Electronica 2006, Honorary Mention Interactive Art

The “Khronos Projector” provides visitors with a totally new way to modify finished film footage. Touching and thus distorting the projection surface makes it possible to shift a portion of the image forward or backward in time.

Prix Ars Electronica 2006, Honorary Mention Interactive Art

The modern office as self-organizing and self-generating system is the core of this interactive installation that functions on the basis of a chain reaction. With it, the Techart Group calls into question the organization of the modern office and its working environment.
The installation’s protagonist is a fish in an aquarium. Through its movements, the fish sequentially activates various devices and thereby triggers a cyclical working process that culminates in the fish being fed. RFID, computer networks and sound frequency sensors are some of the technologies that make possible this tongue-in-cheek treatment of everyday life in the modern office.

Prix Ars Electronica 2006, Honorary Mention Interactive Art

“Outerspace” is a reactive sculpture that behaves like an animal. It desires to explore the space surrounding it and to seek contact. This “curiosity” motivates it to search for light, motion, finally contact. When it finds something interesting, this again increases its curiosity to find out even more. Inevitable, the viewer becomes infected by the impetus of the sculpture. Its basic form is inspired by sensitive insect antennae that are able to make flexible movements in order to explore the environment.

Prix Ars Electronica 2006, Honorary Mention Interactive Art

“Retroyou_nostal(g)” is a software research project whose aim is to transform the original programs into self-running simulation environments. The conditions in four flight simulator programs are modulated in such a way that they can hardly be operated by human pilots any more.

Prix Ars Electronica 2006, Honorary Mention Interactive Art

S.U.I. stands for Smart Urban Intelligence and caricatures the social tendency towards computer-controlled surveillance of public and private spheres. This project is based on so-called smart cards that are used in the Tokyo subway system to record the cardholders movements through the city. S.U.I. reads out the data from such cards and interprets them in an arbitrary, prejudiced way.

Prix Ars Electronica 2006, Honorary Mention Interactive Art

In his performance-in-progress, Alberto Frigo has compiled an elaborate depiction of acts he performs on a daily basis by photographing every object that he uses with his dominant (right) hand. These objects become a code that depicts both actions he carries out repeatedly as well as one-time-only events, and thus provides a visual representation of the patterns inherent in his life. This documentation of objects and daily sequences gives rise to a linkage structure that enables the viewer to interrelate the events that take place in this person’s life; despite taking place at scattered times, their content is quite similar.

Prix Ars Electronica 2006, Honorary Mention Interactive Art

A 3D simulation in real time involves the visitor in an exercise in futility. The viewer uses a touchscreen to guide a virtual figure carrying his burden in the form of a wooden chair through dilapidated staircases and dark rooms. Replications of the chair begin to accumulate, eventually building an impasse. At this critical point, the obstacles fade and the cycle repeats.
Real time 3D graphics and game engine technology put the viewer in control of this representation of the individual’s daily burden.

Prix Ars Electronica 2006, Honorary Mention Interactive Art

A completely normal chair, just like the ones typically found in school classes or waiting rooms, turns out to be a robot of all things! Before the eyes of the beholder, it repeatedly morphs back and forth between chair and robot. With the help of a built-in camera, the robot can assign its missing parts to their proper places. Thanks to special mechanical joints, the robot can reassemble the dispersed legs and back of the chair into a complete chair, only to morph back into a robot once again.

Prix Ars Electronica 2006, Honorary Mention Interactive Art

supported by: runnaway bunny

“Occular Witness” is a series of installations that deal with light and seeing, and thematicize light in both a physical and metaphorical sense as a bearer of information and meaning. All of these experiments attempt to come to terms with questions of representation in a world of information glut and overproduction. Each model is set up as an optical problem in which the emission and absorption of light trigger reactions both by the machine’s systems of sensors as well as on the part of human observers, the “eyewitnesses.”

Prix Ars Electronica 2006, Honorary Mention Interactive Art

in some parts collaboration with Pablo Miranda, Ann Sofie Börjesson, Fredrik Petersson, Peter Lundén, Lili and Aurelian Bria (Sweden)

Kaffe Matthews’ “Sonic Bed_London” installation consists of a bed equipped with built-in loudspeakers; when installation visitors lie down on the bed, an endlessly changing music moves and vibrates up and down and around their body. Due to these sounds’ frequency and intensity, they are perceived not only with the ears but with the entire body too.

Prix Ars Electronica 2006, Distinction Digital Musics

This installation was inspired by and based on Erik Satie’s piano piece “Vexations.” In a remark written on the original score, the composer invited the musician to play the piece’s motif 840 times in a row. Mohri and Mihara now take him up on it. They modified the original performance of a pianist with environmental noise and replayed the result. This process was repeated 840 times. The interplay of digital and analog produces a local variation of “Vexations.”

Prix Ars Electronica 2006, Honorary Mention Interactive Art

Supported by: YCAM(Yamaguchi Center of Art and Media)

Stencils are cut-out patterns that let you spray images onto surfaces in public spaces. Since graffiti can usually be removed very quickly, stencilboard.at serves as a constantly growing international archive designed to conserve some of these creative, dynamic and socially critical works of art, and to make them accessible to wider audiences all over the world.

Prix Ars Electronica 2006, Honorary Mention Digital Communities

Ten vinyl-killer model-auto turntables equipped with FM transmitters. The sound comes from a set of radios that receive the signal transmitted by the vinyl-killers. YOKOMONO is anything but easy for installation visitors to operate: since it’s impossible to select specific tracks, setting down the stylus needle is pretty much a hit-or-miss affair; another essential feature is that the vinyl-killers are battery-operated, so they slow down during the concert.

Prix Ars Electronica 2006, Honorary Mention Digital Musics