The deadline for adding another letter to this huge alphabet isn’t until just about the last minute. You can craft yours at the ABC Workshop, in the comfort of your own home, or at an OTELO open technology lab in Gmunden, Vöcklabruck and Kremstal. Components are available free of charge at all ABC Check-in Stations, where you can also register your finished letter and get it equipped with a radio receiver.

All Klangwolke letter designers who just can’t delay gratification any longer can gather on the Ars Electronica Center’s Maindeck on September 1st at 5 PM. Everyone’s invited! With voestalpine’s own marching band leading the way, a parade of people and letters will proceed across the Nibelungen Bridge to the Lentos Art Museum. Then it’s on via Pfarrplatz, Marienstraße and the Passage shopping mall to OK-Platz, where the colorful procession cuts through Ursulinenhof and makes a right onto Landstraße. Around 6 PM, the Klangwolke caravan converges on the Mobile Ö1 Atelier on Linz’s Main Square, where terpsichorean troops ranging from hip-hoppers to folk dancers will display their individualize choreographies in which letters coalesce into words. The best of these performances will be reprised shortly thereafter before a much larger audience. The groups will strut their stuff in the main event—the 2012 voestalpine Klangwolke.

Complete information about the 2012 voestalpine Klangwolke will be available during the days leading up to the big event at the ABC Check-in Stations. And that’s not all: Anybody who’d like to participate can buy an illuminated letter, the first one costs 8 €, every next one 5 €.

Right up to the last minute, those who have already completed their letters can register them here and equip them with a radio receiver.

This is where you can get access to six workspaces, any one of 26 (A-Z) letter kits and various other materials to use in fashioning your letters. It’s all free of charge and available any time during the Museum of the Future’s opening hours. Groups of up to 15 can preregister for their own ABC Workshop by sending an e-mail to center@aec.at or by calling +43.732.7272.51.

To serve as inspiration for the next wave of creative tinkerers, the letters will then go on display in the ABC Showcase on the 1st Upper Level or in the ABC Gallery in the Lobby, which is also where you can pick up your letters—complete with a radio receiver—beginning on August 13th.

CharacterBook

ars.electronica.art/klangwolke/participate/soundcloud-abc/abc-gallery/
Each letter produced in the Ars Electronica Center’s ABC Workshop is photographed on site together with its creator, and these colorful portraits immediately become part of the ABC Gallery on the voestalpine Klangwolke website. People who create their letters at home or in one of the OTELOs can photograph their work themselves and upload the pictures to the website. The Ars Wild Card iPhone app is a great way to do it.
The CharacterBook assembled online offers letter designers the opportunity to get in contact with their peers and to exchange e-mails with one another in a colorful Klangwolke script that consists of all registered letters.
ars.electronica.art/klangwolke/en/participate/soundcloud-abc/abc-nachricht.

ABC-Showcase

Ars Electronica Center

The ABC Showcase is an exhibition space, experimentation lab and inspiration source all in one. A small sample of previously constructed letters is on display here. They’re also available for visitors to use when leaving behind a message. And there are examples of how people down through the ages have adorned letters by hand, and how the alphabet has excited the human imagination. Plus, you can use the Bavarian State Library’s iPad application to admire magnificent old manuscripts, as well as interactive software that lets you compose images with letters of all shapes and sizes or transform your own handwriting into a personal digital typeface.