The encounter with your own body is the subject of this chapter. After all: if you’re out to save the world, sometimes you have to start small.

Tom Hanslmaier (AT)
5. 9. 23:30 – 24:00
6. 9. 21:45 – 22:15

“Rear Impact” is a performance that deals with human latitude for action when the machine isn’t the tool of the human being but rather the human being the instrument of the machine. What influence do new technologies have on the body and its faculties of perception, and what aesthetics are the results? Audience members see a fluid situation cut up by the stroboscope into individual stopaction images. The flowing movement of a head-on collision between a car and a motorcycle driven the performer comes across as a series of snapshots. A minimalist stage set and a stark lighting concept underscore the character of an extreme situation that audience members experience live. One of the areas of emphasis of Tom Hanslmaier’s creative activities as an artist is the confrontation with the biomechanical processes that go on in the human body, the incredible power and intensity that the body generates, and the forces that act upon the body when it’s in motion.

www.tomhanslmaier.at

Performance&Concept: Tom Hanslmaier
Techniker: Martin Urstöger, Philipp Tengler, Thomas Rinner, Thomas Seiberl, Thomas Doppler
Sounddesign: Axel Wolph, Tom Kaser
Musik: Alex Joechtl, Flaer, Alexander Balanescu
Lichtdesign: Gerald Pappenberger
Stimme: Julia Noa Fischer
Regieassistenz: Christina Raab

Tom Hanslmaier (AT)
6. 9. 13:00

As a dancer and stuntman, Tom Hanslmaier and Tarek Rasouli (Wings for Life ambassador) deal intensively with the limits of the stress to which the human body can be subjected. The non-profit researchfoundation  Wings for Life wants to heal paraplegia and supports spinal marrow research.

The subsequent workshop shows how to train to take a fall.

Sonia Cillari (IT)
Generative / Interactive performance
2. 9. Part of Frozen Music
3. 9. – 7. 9. 18:30 – 20:00

While lying still on the floor, the artist is exhaling through a cable connecting her left nostril and the center of a big screen. A digital creature called “feather” is entirely generated by the artist’s exhalation. Around 14,000 digital elements are created during the performance, and the digital feather can be brought into more than 6 different states of being, from addition to resistance patterns of life. Furthermore, the carbon dioxide level in the exhibition space is indicated by the feather, which might lose its initial range of colors heading towards black in case of higher concentrations in the surrounding air. One can hear the fatigued sound of the artist’s respiration over time.

www.soniacillari.net

Supported by [ars]numerica (Montbeliard, France), Optofonica Laboratory for Immersive ArtScience and Mondriaan Foundation (Amsterdam, the Netherlands)

The aim of the Soft Bodies Performance Art Festival is to bring together at a single location the tremendous diversity of approaches to and takes on performance art. The participating artists put their ideas into practice upon themselves and together with their audience at the same time. Thus, they work on and with the living subject, which creates space for many different points of view amidst this encounter.

Performance art is processual and ephemeral; moments of transcendence, experimentation, insight and spectacularly going down in flames are possible and desirable. The performances will be staged at different locations throughout the Tabakfabrik grounds. bb15 is the festival headquarters, and will also serve as a setting for discussion and presentation of previously staged performances.

Schedule:

Festival headquarters: bb15, Baumbachstraße 15, 4020 Linz. Dates & hours: September 3-6, 2010, 2-6 PM each day

http://www.medea.or.at/bb15/

Curators: Elisa Andessner (AT), Didi Bruckmayer (AT)
Produced jointly by the Ars Electronica Festival and bb15, the Linz offspace

Nico Ferrando (AR) / presented by Edition Lammerhuber (AT)
2. 9. – 7. 9.

“My husband and me, me and my wife” is a series of photographs of twenty-five couples from different ages and ethnic groups. Some have been together their whole life, others just for a few months. Life-sized, in color and taken in a realistic fashion, the images will give you the impression that the models are standing in front of you. Naked and relaxed, they seem to be floating on the white background, almost levitating. Some of their body parts are interchanged, particularly those related to what is socially taken to define gender. “My husband and me, me and my wife” can be about identity, about marriage, about relationships, about genetics, about gender, about commitment, about the past, the present, maybe the future and definitely about love.

Revital Cohen (IL)
2. 9. – 7. 9.

Phantom pain is a phenomenon in which pain is projected onto and perceived in a part of the body that does not exist (e.g. has been amputated). Now, an innovative new interface can convey these sensations or record phantom movements a person feels. The *Phantom Recorder* system projects a cold, damp sensation onto the skin surface, triggering the brain to hallucinate a phantom. As the phantom movement stimulates the peripheral nerves, its activity is captured and recorded by a neural implant and external wireless equipment. When a prosthesis has been fitted to a subject, digital data of the recorded phantom sensation can be transmitted to the implant, allowing the nerves to recreate the sensation of the telescoped phantom hand, the severed foot or the severed arm.

www.revitalcohen.com

Daito Manabe (JP) & Motoi Ishibashi (JP)
2. 9. – 7. 9.

Portraits of individuals are taken by an infrared camera and then displayed by a laser projector on a phosphorescent screen. The laser constructs the image pixel by pixel, layer by layer, and thereby produces glowing areas on the phosphorescent screen that slowly fade.

Tove Kjellmark (SE)
2. 9. – 7. 9.

The Destruction of the Ego is a one-foot tall toy robot enlarged to a more than three meter tall giant, which still has the same features as the small original. It laughs hysterically, like a child that is tickled out of its mind, it falls on the floor in convulsions, and rises up on its feet again. Tove Kjellmark uses the machine to reveal our fears of losing control and human weaknesses. A machine is designed to function perfectly, it is materialized control. In this way The Destruction of the Ego also reflects on the relation between man and machine.

www.tovekjellmark.com

Thanks to Bengt Sjölén, Jens Lind, Daniel Eng, Johannes Gross, A ndrea Hvistendahl, Lars Hässler

Experiments in Crowd Gaming
2.9.-6.9.

Keep your eyes on the ball! This year, the balls will keep their eyes on you too. They know who touches them, they track social dynamics, and soon they will connect a local crowd to virtual crowds, via the cloud. crowd-2cloud is the next generation of large-scale physical crowd games. From one gigantic pleasure orb inspired by Woody Allen’s “Sleeper”, to hundreds of balls motion-captured with the latest technology, you will have the chance to play, experiment, and design your own games. Participants can experiment with the system, just bring your own laptop! We know how it will start, but it’s unpredictable how it will end.

Open Lab
2.9.-6.9.
Participants can experiment with our API to our motion capture balls in the dev space, and can sign up for slots in the event space to run their code in real-time on the big screen with the big balloons.

Open Demos
2. 9. – 6. 9. 13:00 – 15:00
Everybody is invited to try out the newest daily developments.

The Big Bounce
3. 9., 5.9., 6. 9. 21:30 – 22:00
ATTENTION: Performance at 4.9., 21:30-22:00 canceled!
Play the crowd2cloud team’s own games and the best of the new daily developments in this big show event.

NEWS: Sample code and API is already available online with simulator. Start coding in your bedroom already: http://crowd2cloud.org/code

www.squidball.net

Chris Bregler (US / DE), Sally Rosenthal (US), Kirill Smolskiy (US), Ian Spiro (US), Graham Taylor (CA), George Williams (US)

More and more people are becoming aware of and interested in a holistic approach to health to supplement the classic means of repair used in Western medicine. How do we repair ourselves? How do we maintain our wholeness and health in a comprehensive way? The Body & Soul Factory seeks to blend spirituality and science, medicine and alternative approaches to healing, and offers visitors a personalized REPAIR program during the Ars Electronica Festival.

Detailed Program as download.

Repair yourself
2. 9. – 7. 9
Shiatsu, coaching, shamanic counseling, physiotherapy, cranio-sacral integration, massage, energy treatments, kinesiology, lomilomi, sound massages and much more.
You can make reservations for individual “repair yourself” sessions beginning September 1, 2010 by calling 0699-177 81 560 on the day before the session or on site in the Infolounge.

Group repair
2. 9. – 7. 9
Yoga, energy balance, sound journeys, shamanic journeys, systemic configurations, mini-workshops… see detailed program.

Rescue repair
2. 9. – 7. 9 16:00 – 18:00
15-minute program for stressed-out Ars visitors—all Ars Electronica Pass holders are entitled to one treatment free of charge.

Eva Gütlinger (AT) und Birgit Kaps (AT)