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Timeshift – The World in 25 Years
To mark the festival’s 25th anniversary, Ars Electronica’s 2004 encounter with art, technology and society will span an arc from the past to the future. Numerous innovations in the festival format, additional featured presentations and special events make it possible to add almost two full days of activities and even more fascinating takes on the “Timeshift” theme to the program lineup.
2004 Ars Electronica Festival – The Theme
“TIMESHIFT – The World in Twenty-Five Years” is the title of the 2004 festival; transformation, upheaval and the future are its programmatic concepts. The point of departure is reflection upon the past 25 years; the aim is to identify the developments that promise to be the driving forces in art, technology and society over the next quarter century.
Will key technologies like nanotechnology lead to another technological revolution that will change our lives as fundamentally as digital media have done? What areas of social confrontation can we anticipate? Does the way we deal with new technologies change in light of our ever-increasing experience or do we still lapse into the same automatic reaction mechanisms of enthusiasm for or hostility towards innovation?
What conclusions can be drawn from the past and utilized in addressing these emerging issues? Ars Electronica has 25 years of development and experience behind it, and has amassed an enormous archive documenting its unique breadth as a discussion forum. On the basis of the experience thus gained and in keeping with its mission as an instrument of social analysis, Ars Electronica 2004 will also be dedicated to the question of whether ongoing social development—in the sense of a learning curve derived from the past and applied to the future—is possible.
Innovations in the Festival...
The most noticeable change is the new festival format: kicking off on Thursday and running until Tuesday makes for a more intensive use of the whole weekend, which now occupies the centerpiece of the festival schedule.
The rich offering of conferences—essential to Ars Electronica—has been enhanced with a new event. The Language of Networks, which is being staged prior to the opening of the 2004 festival, will scrutinize current network theories and state-of-the-art network visualizations, and shed light on potential applications in diverse fields of science, commerce and art. A major convocation of experts representing businesses and research institutions—thus underscoring the wide-ranging interest in this topic—will support the series of discussions.
Ars Electronica is pleased to welcome the new Lentos Museum of Art as a venue for festival exhibitions. Digital Avant-Garde / Prix Selection, a show that has already had a very successful run in New York, presents a selection of outstanding works from the history of interactive art. The artists represented in the Digital Avant-Garde / Prix Selection exhibition will present their works at Media Art Forum – Digital Avant-Garde.
There have also been some changes in the events area. For the first time, the grand opening of the festival and the Prix Ars Electronica gala are being combined into one big event that will include both the kickoff of Ars Electronica 2004 and the presentation of the Golden Nica statuettes to this year’s Prix Ars Electronica winners.
Plus, there are a number of Ars 25 - Specials to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Ars Electronica Festival. Itsuo Sakane, former head of Japan’s International Academy of Media Art and Science, will present trends and developments from the pioneering age of digital media culture. Another of these special features is the Re-Inventing Radio symposium that will thematicize developments in radio and telecommunications art.
...as an enhancement to tried-and-tested formats
In light of the multifaceted history of Ars Electronica, the Timeshift Symposium will host a dialog on future developments in art, technology and society. Attendees will include representatives of different generations of theoreticians, scientists, scholars and practitioners as well as interested laymen. Among the speakers are:
- Harry Kroto, winner of the Nobel Prize for chemistry
- Philosopher and essayist Paul Virilio
- Marvin Minsky of the MIT Media Lab, pioneer in robotics and AI
- Astrophysicist and theoretician Roger Malina
- Sherry Turkle, a leading thinker in the area of computer-human interaction
- Stewart Brand, pioneer in the field of Web-based communities (e.g. The Well)
- Japanese “star blogger” Joichi Ito
- Joan Shikegawa of the Rockefeller Foundation
- Esther Dyson, journalist and former chair of the ICANN Internet authority
The Prix Ars Electronica Forum will present the prizewinning projects from the 2004 Prix Ars Electronica and analyze them within the context of the general development of digital media culture. Howard Rheingold is the expert on the digital communities that are the focus of the new Prix Ars Electronica category launched in 2004. He, together with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, experts from Creative Commons and other community practitioners, will participate in the Forum’s encounter with communities on the Internet. Pixelspaces and the Radio FRO Conference will be taking up issues within the thematic domain at the interface of art, technology and society.
For the fourth time this year, the campus of the Linz University of Art will serve as a space for exhibitions by international academies of art that are taking an innovative approach to teaching media art and media culture. The 2004 guest is IAMAS, the renowned Japanese educational institution specializing in media art and technology. IAMAS’s unique interdisciplinary orientation raises expectations of an exciting show. Works singled out for recognition by the Prix Ars Electronica will be on display at the O.K Center for Contemporary Art, and a series of additional exhibitions at locations throughout Linz will provide insights into leading-edge developments in media art.
A full lineup of events provides a fascinating enhancement of the festival experience. Here, two works can serve as proxies for the incredible assortment of concerts and performances that awaits festivalgoers: the premiere of Klaus Obermaier’s “Apparition,” a work that blazes new trails at the nexus of media art and dance, and “L'Espace Temporel,” a fascinating blend of orchestral music, digital sound synthesis, live electronics and remix. A special highlight: the Franz-Josefs-Warte will be the picturesque setting for soundstreams, tonal installations and performances during a “chill in evening.”
Once again, the electrolobby will make available a platform for open discussions. What began as an “experimental array” for the presentation of “unexhibitable” forms of digital art has long since mutated into a convivial get-together and a popular fixture at Ars Electronica each year. And with the electrolobby Kitchen, this “festival within a festival” has spawned its own discourse domain in which artists put their positions and works up for discussion and subject what’s been going on at the Festival to critical analysis.
Stay updated: www.aec.at/timeshift
During the time leading up to the festival, log on to www.aec.at/timeshift for regular updates on the festival theme, program details and news. During the festival, www.aec.at/timeshift becomes Ars Electronica’s online showcase delivering live streams from symposia and online reports about festival happenings.
With queries please contact:
Wolfgang A. Bednarzek
Ars Electronica Center Linz
Hauptstraße 2, 4040 Linz, Austria
tel ++43.732.7272-38
fax ++43.732.7272-638
wolfgang.bednarzek@aec.at
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