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ARS ELECTRONICA 2003
ARS ELECTRONICA presents a rundown of the program for this year’s Festival, CODE – The Language of Our Time, at which internationally renowned artists, theorists and specialists in media art and new technologies will confront the impact of code and software upon society.
Vienna (August 20, 2003). Codes are omnipresent.We encounter them in all areas and aspects of life; they are an essential, indispensable part of Information Society. And this applies in equal measure to the legal sphere in light of discussions surrounding software monopoly and restrictions on the Internet and to the field of biogenetics that, in the wake of the deciphering of the human genetic code, has recently been at the center of social debate.
Digital technology has assumed particular significance for media art. The enormous speed with which it has developed and proliferated over the last decade makes it incumbent upon us to recommence and expand a fundamental discourse on how media art ought to be defined, what are its essential characteristics, and whether art is programmable and software by its very nature can even be art.
At symposia, exhibitions, events and performances, the 2003 ARS ELECTRONICA Festival will be dealing with the significance of CODE in our society. The Electrolobby provides a live setting for visitors to observe artists as they go about working with CODE. And, like every year, the brightest spotlight will be on the Prix Ars Electronica as the definitive showcase of the very best of media art.
Symposia will focus on three thematic domains—CODE=LAW, CODE=LIFE and CODE=ART. Important figures from the worlds of art, science and business such as John Warnock, Giaco Schiesser, Howard Rheingold, John Maeda, Pierre Lévy, Marc Canter and Cindy Cohn will subject the theme to critical evaluation and reflection. The ongoing digitization of more and more areas of life and this phenomenon’s impact on legal rights, the social fabric and art itself constitute the point of departure of this discussion. Just how vast is the power of the software monopoly? Can art be programmed? Now that life has been genetically deciphered, is it programmable like a computer? Such questions demarcate a hotly disputed field of tension, confrontation and interplay of ideas for the discussions
surrounding CODE.
Exhibitions CODE Exhibitions present media artists’ works having to do with CODE. In “datawork : man,” Richard Kriesche thematicizes the impact upon art of the deciphering of the human genetic blueprint. He translates genetic code into graphic depictions and thereby places it into a new context —a strongly conceptual and philosophical approach. The work of Casey Reas, on the other hand, is relatively lively and straightforward. The artist is a representative of the generation that grew up with software and for whom artistic work without this medium would have been inconceivable from the very outset. Reas stands for a new type of art comprised of code, in that he works with dynamic, independently reacting systems. His piece entitled “MicroImage” consists of thousands of micro-software organisms, every single one of which is programmed and reacts independently with movements in response to user interventions via mouse-click as well as to stimuli from their own immediate environment—that is, on the part of other software organisms. These movements are captured in graphic form, whereby new, unforeseeable images are generated by each system startup.
Ben Fry, John Maeda and Roman Verostko are only a few of the other artists who will be presenting works connected with CODE. Christiane Paul from New York’s Whitney Museum has curated the CODeDOC II exhibition for ARS ELECTRONICA.
This year’s Campus Exhibition is being staged by the Department of Media & Art at the University of Art and Design Zurich, an educational institution that defines itself as an experimental laboratory and proving ground for the artistic use of analog and digital media. One of the featured attractions to emerge from the cooperation between these two colleges is the Teleklettergarten. This project embellishing the Linz university’s exterior façade during Ars Electronica is an oversized computer keyboard that is operated by mountain climbers.
Cyberarts presents the prizewinning works in the Prix Ars Electronica’s Interactive Art category— above all, a dynamic, action-packed chase through urban and virtual space entitled “Can You See me Now?” – A Project of Blast Theory in Collaboration with the Mixed Reality Laboratory, University of Nottingham (UK).
Among the many new exhibits on display at the ARS ELECTRONICA Center is the upgraded “Humphrey II” simulator that gives visitors to the Museum of the Future the consummate illusion of flight.
The lineup of concerts, events and performances is one of the Festival’s mainstays. A special highlight this year is “Principles of Indeterminism,” music performed in and around the Brucknerhaus and accompanied by impressive visualizations including large-format projections on the façade of the nearby Arcotel—a concert for all the senses and, simultaneously, a survey of musical forms ranging from traditional composition to digital live performance. In this ensemble extravaganza featuring the Bruckner Orchestra, digital music and dramatic visualizations, the greats of minimal music, electronic music and media art such as Dennis Russel Davis, Rupert Huber, Lia and Ryoji Ikeda will convene to perform works by Steve Reich, Edgar Varèse, Iannis Xenakis and Marco Stroppa.
This will be an evening of epic dimensions, one designed in keeping with Iannis Xenakis’ enduring commitment to an interdisciplinary, multimedial approach to art.
Another program highlight will be Messa di Voce featuring two vocal artists utilizing a novel instrument. Every nuance of their vocalizations is recorded and transformed into 3-D graphic objects that float in space above and beside them. The singers can play with these objects or reposition and compress them, actions which, in turn, modify the acoustic reproduction of the graphics. The interplay of the two elements results in a concert of voice and code.
A series of additional events—such as POL, a fable about a mechatronic rabbit on a diet, which features an interactive stage and robotic performers, or Floating Points, a sound experience in the OMV Klangpark—provides a glimpse into the process of artistic creation with CODE. In addition, the >digital sparks< awards presented by the MARS – Exploratory Media Lab of the Fraunhofer Institute for Media Communication in recognition of outstanding interactive and experimental work in the field of New Media will be handed out as part of the ARS ELECTRONICA festivities this year.
The electrolobby and the electrolobby Kitchen are the hubs for contact with the artists themselves. Besides exciting projects like the conversation-fueled Chat Grill and the dreamlike graphic creatures of “LeCielEstBleu,” this year’s featured attraction will be the presentation of Proce55ing, a new programming language by Casey Reas and Ben Fry that opens up new possibilities in artistic creativity. Within the framework of the Electrolobby, several artists will be working and developing projects with Proce55ing. Electrolobby and E-lobby Kitchen are open domains designed to foster discussions and to be conducive to interaction among symposium participants, artists and visitors.
Press Information in detail is available!
Contact: Wolfgang A. Bednarzek, ARS ELECTRONICA CENTER, Press Relations Department
++43.732.7272-38
wolfgang.bednarzek@aec.at
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