Second City        fm4.orf.at/arselectronica

The data-based world of digital networks has become an increasingly important part of everyday life. A diverse array of platforms, devices and services vie for our attention. Human beings themselves comprise the interface between the abstract, digital world and the material, analog one. In which form does this network-data-world really manifest itself in our physical everyday-life-space? What is being fed back into physical space from the “cyberspace” into which data has been fed for so long now? How do these digital innovations influence our actions in everyday life? In the form of objects, installations, interventions, performances and workshops, *Second City* on Linz’s Marienstraße will take the developments of recent years to the extreme—and perhaps slightly beyond—and attempt to get to the bottom of the issues inherent in them. Serving as the basis of this effort is a very graphic form of digital world: the metaverses or 3D worlds like *Second Life* whose rise to prominence has been the talk of the data-domain of late. What happens when established forms of digital communication are transferred directly into physical, public space? What status does privacy have in that world and in this one? In which light do digital artifacts appear when they, in their form adapted to digital space, are transformed into concrete physical objects?
Aram Bartholl

Second City

Havidol

In reaction to the marketing and advertising strategies of the pharmaceutical industry, Justine Cooper has created a fictitious marketing campaign to launch HAVIDOL™, a new wonder drug designed to treat “dysphoric anxiety attacks due to a deficiency of social esteem and retail spending.”
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Second City

Terminal Air

Based on exhaustive research, this installation portrays the CIA bureau entrusted with the administration of “extraordinary transfers” as a sort of travel agency that coordinates a complex network of independent contractors, leased equipment, corporate-shell affiliates.
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Second City

SUNDAY files

Using the example of workplaces under 24/7 surveillance, SUNDAY-files is an experimental installation having to do with work, space and time. The basis of this effort is provided by visual material from webcams that monitor workplaces and feed their images in real time onto the Internet.
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Second City

Trail

A film as shadow theater. In Trail, the shadows of camels, elephants and other animals creep as quietly as can be through the nooks and crannies of a space that is completely empty with the exception of these fleeting creatures.
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In Your Hands

Inspired by the Stanford Prison and Milgram experiments of the 1970s, Dash Macdonald places his fate into the hands of audience members by letting installation visitors remote-control the roller skates strapped to his feet.
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Dr. Whippy

Dr. Whippy is a machine that proffers soft scoop ice cream according to the perceived unhappiness level of the customer.
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Second City

Pedestrian

In a public space, images are projected directly onto a sidewalk or concrete floor.
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Second City

Spy Kiting

Spy Kiting involves people planning, designing, building kites to which a CCTV camera will be securely connected. The kite is taken to an outdoor arena and flown.
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Second City

Arabesque I

“Arabesque” is a mechanical flower that has its roots both in Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein and the alchemist’s laboratory.
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Second City

AutoGene

Busby Berkeley choreographed dancers to mimic the motions of machines and modern inventions. “AutoGene” is the flipside of this.
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Second City

L.A.S.E.R. TAG

Laser Tag is the Graffiti Research Lab’s latest “open-source weapon” in the battle against the take-over of the public sphere by aggressive billboards.
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Siren

Siren is a whirling, spinning spectacle of mechanical movement, electronic sound and light.
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Pixelhotel

All of Linz becomes a hotel. The Pixelhotel’s rooms are dispersed all over town.
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Vacant Space

Using location recordings and panoramic photographs collected in a wide variety of empty interiors around the world, Vacant Space reveals and celebrates the life of space without us present.  
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The Second Life Experience

Visitors to this installation can stereoscopically experience the virtual world of Second Life.
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Arrival

*Arrival* is a multimedia installation in which viewers peer down onto small figures moving through the ambiguous spaces of an office, mall, apartment and video game.
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Second City

md4-200 Drone

The md4-200 drone can be used to do aerial photography and for surveillance purposes. The aircraft is 91 cm2 in size; it can remain aloft for up to 20 minutes.
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Pfarrplatz - Lido

Pfarrplatz, a square in downtown Linz, is the gravitational center of the festival. This will be the hub from which Second City radiates out into the urban sphere, where virtual and real worlds interface and blend. An old warehouse on Pfarrplatz will temporarily morph into the Festival Infopoint; the Press Bureau and the Bookshop are also situated there.
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Second City

Capture your City

Capture Your City is a mobile workshop that will be Stadtwerkstatt’s base on Pfarrplatz. A combination working and living space, the temporary architecture will serve as the point of departure for neighborhood reconnaissance tours by STWST’s editorial staff and artists in residence.
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Second City

Pimp your hair

Festivalgoers who dare to go beyond permanent waves and bobs can stop by for a genuine Second Life coiffure. Here, avatars from the virtual world model the cuts you can select from for your own hairdo.
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Augmented Sculpture v. 1.2

This installation is focused on the temporary quality of space.
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Calling the Glacier – A Mobile Elegy

Sound researcher Kalle Laar enables cellphone users to get connected with the Pasterze Glacier flanking Großglockner, Austria’s highest mountain. Microphones set up on site provide users with an up-close-and-personal auditory experience: the actual sounds—hissing, trickling, creaking, grunting and groaning—made by this melting ice-giant. This inexorable glacial process will betransmitted directly in real time to cellphones as a sound collage, and allow usto witness a matter of fact that has an impact on us all.
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Second City

Intrigue_E

Human beings as living, remote-controlled avatars in public places! A playercan use his cellphone’s keypad to issue any commands he wants to his livegame-piece (whom he can’t identify at first).What happens to the avatar isthus dependent on the cellphone user’s intentions. Passers-by in the publicspace in which Intrigue_E is being played are suddenly confronted by individualswho seem to have gotten out of control.
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Flooding

Ecological wear-and-tear is illustratedwith the example of Toefrafoss, a waterfallwhose very existence is threatened by the construction of a hydroelectricpower plant. A projection of a close-up image of massive torrents of water andan imposing sound environment let installation visitors experience the waterfall'soverwhelming, elemental power.

In cooperation with Kvik Film Productions; Fridthjofur Helgason: Camera
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Second City

Chat

Just like in World of Warcraft or Second Life,two participants communicate with eachother in the form of brief text messagesinput via keyboard. Immediately afterthey've been entered, the written communiqués appear in a comic-strip-likedialogue balloon projected above the speaker’s head. The projection surface isput in place by a technician positioned behind the “speaker” with the help of atelescoping pole featuring a built-in miniature projector.
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Second City

Synthetic Performance

Synthetic Performances revives actions that have attained renommé in arthistory and restages them in artificial worlds like Second Life. Eva and FrancoMattes’ avatars—outfitted with the couple’s physiques and facial features, perform all of the actions themselves. Art lovers can experience the performances online, either watching them live or viewing a video documentation of them afterwards. 
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Second City

Second City Shop

A series of workshops in Second City provides festivalgoers with the opportunity to explore the path into and out of the virtual world. In a variety of different forms, objects can beimported into and, above all, exported out of Second Life. The output of these workshops will be offered for sale in both virtual and physical form in the Second City Shop.
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Second City

Second Promotion

Utilizing a shift in perspective and pervaded by an unmistakably critical undertone aimed at the media and the society they mirror, Peter Harlander brings out the absurdity of the hype and anti-hype being showered upon Second Life.In purely fictitious reportage, inhabitants of the virtual 3D world Second Lifereport on the mega-buzz surrounding a game entitled “First Life.”
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Second City

Übermensch / Become Your Avatar

The experts at the Übermensch Agency are helping to bridge the gap between the Second Life user's actual body and his/her avatar’s physique. Utilizing modern training methods, pharmaceutical supplements and plastic surgery, Übermensch creates individual training and therapy plans to let you bring your body into line with your avatar.
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Second City

Tree

In Second Life, three-dimensional objects are replicated in simplified form. While a user is online, the graphic files are uploaded sequentially, which makes the objects’“sub-constructions” visible. Tree replicates several trees in various stages of loading. Semi-transparent surfaces representing the gaps among the leaves and branches get across the simplified and abstracted form of these trees from the virtual world that are set in a real, physical space.
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Second City

self-portrait with webcam

Just like everywhere else in the world, a host of webcams have been set up in public spaces all over Austria too.
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Bastard Spaces

Die Architecture & Design Competition in Second Life is being launched this year as an annual, open competition.
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Jury deliberations - Bastard Spaces

The jury deliberations are open to the public.
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Pixelspaces Exhibition

The Ars Electronica Futurelab will curate its own exhibition to accompany the Pixelspaces symposium.

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Digital Communities Exhibition

An exhibit at Pfarrplatz 6 showcases the prizewinning projects in the 2007 Prix Ars Electronica's Digital Communities category.
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GSA: Black Helicopters above Linz

At the core of Global.Security.Alliance.Com’s security concept and strategic communications plan for the City of Linz are black helicopter shadows installed in public spaces.
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Stiff People's League

There is a recurring concept of games where the game-figures are alive and equipped with their own agency, such as Alice’s croquet game in Wonderland with flamingo mallets that won’t hold still.We use this metaphor to construct a cooperative game between the physical and virtual worlds.
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Big Brother Award

The Big Brother Award will be bestowed upon an individual, institution, government agency or private firm for meritorious service in the field of surveillance, control and imposition of extraordinarily overbearing paternalism upon the general public.
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Faceless

In this film, Manu Luksch works with material recorded by video cameras set up in public places in London.
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Trans Reality Video Conference Phone Booth

There are many research projects working on ways to use virtual 3D worlds and avatars to carry out contact-intensive tasks like customer support.
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Second City

Street Training

We will walk through the night together in order to develop our street training skills. The reconnaissance tour will begin at midnight, proceed into the wee hours of the morning and continue on into the new day.
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IMA Salon #7 07

Five days in a row, IMA’s salon #7 07 will be serving up a tasty brunch accompanied by intellectual nourishment. Among the contributions to this theoretical discourse will be continuations of a tack initiated in 2006: focusing on the historical timeframe extending from the turn of the 20th century to World War II. This was a time of bold experiments and vivid dreams. The roots of the media art we are experiencing today can be traced back to this era. Many questions arise: How were women involved in these processes in art and technology? Which dreams did they dream? How are the "machine divas" of the 21st century catapulting these utopias into the 3rd millennium? The Longdrink series sets up a performance space for artistic manifestations of technical hearing and seeing. The cooking will be done by Schorsch & Florian.
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Second City

Everything you ever wanted to know about Second Life

about the impact of Second Life onto future developments of digital communities
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Second City

Talks and guided tours in Second Life

6.9.07 - Architecture
2 pm "Production of Architecture" Tor Lindstrand
4 pm "New Berlin" Jan Northoff & Tobias Neiseke
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