The grand finale of the elaborate Opening Parcours is the official opening event of the 2014 Ars Electronica Festival, a not so ceremonious and rather more playful-sensorial form of entertainment in St. Mary’s Cathedral and on the plaza in front of it. Magistratsmusik Linz leads off with a rendition of Mysteries of Antartika. Archifon III and OscFluctuation then transform the huge façade of Austria’s largest church into an audiovisual playground for festivalgoers. Leading-edge media art from Taiwan is represented in the form of Smashing Karaoke vs.Brass Band and Long Live. An unprecedented augmented reality experience is offered by Mirage, and a new wrinkle has even been added to the playbook of the church’s venerable Rudigierorgel: harmonious visualizations accompanying the musical artistry of cathedral organist Wolfgang Kreuzhuber.

Program

8:30 PM
Mysteries of Antarctica
Magistratsmusik Linz (AT)
Domplatz

8:40 PM
Smashing Karaoke vs. Brass Band
Dawang Huang (TW)
Domplatz

9 PM
Archifon III
Tomáš Dvořák (CZ), Dan Gregor (CZ)
Domplatz

9 PM
OscFluctuation
Robert Praxmarer (At), Gerlinde Emsenhuber (At), Robert Sommeregger (AT), Steven Stojanovic (AT), Thomas Wagner (AT)
Domplatz

9:15 PM-9:45 PM
Mirage
Grinder-man (JP)
Mariendom

9:45 PM-10 PM
Long Live
Jui-Chung Yao (TW)
Mariendom

from 10 PM
Rudigierorgel visualized
Wolfgang Kreuzhuber (AT), Ars Electronica (AT)
Mariendom

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As different as the Ars Electronica Center and Linz’s St. Mary’s Cathedral may be in every imaginable respect, they’ll have something in common during Ars Electronica 2014: festivalgoers will be able to employ the façades of both buildings as projection surfaces.

Living Architecture

Archifon III, an audiovisual and architectural installation by Tomáš Dvořák and Dan Gregor, turns Mariendom’s windows and walls into a virtual musical instrument. It can be played with laser pointers, which activate acoustic and optical elements mounted at various stops on the façade. Suddenly, the church’s stone walls seem to come alive, to react like a resonating body.

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A sponge, brush or water pistol and some water—that’s all it takes to conjure up Water Light Graffiti on a wall studded with thousands of water-sensitive LEDs. The principle is simple; the results are a feast for the eyes.

Water Makes Light

The water produces an electrical bridge that enables current to flow between the LEDs mounted in a wall panel. The quantity of water also determines how intensively the respective LEDs light up—the more liquid that comes into play, the brighter the rapidly blinking graffito is illuminated.

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The media art installation OscFluctuation, can be seen as an interactive audiovisual instrument, which is played by the visitor’s movement. The title combines the English terms oscillation and fluctuation, which both can be traced back in such diverse fields as thermodynamics, music and quantum mechanics.

Moving silhouettes

The work seeks to blurs the line between predictability, improvisation and composition. Recorded movement sequences are projected as silhouettes onto the Domhotel. The movement within these sequences is analyzed and translated into sound parameters, which results in an ever changing improvisation of music, movement and algorithms.

Video auf Vimeo

This work was developed within the research project CADET, which is carried out jointly by the FH Salzburg and the Ars Electronica Futurelab. CADET is funded by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) within the program “COIN Aufbau”.

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Weary of the media art scene’s many highly elaborate interactive installations, panGenerator, a crew from Poland, created Constellaction, a smart yet playful alternative to the stacks of hardware everyone else seems to require these days. Handy, three-dimensional tetrahedrons are the elements used to construct this array, one that’s so simple kids can master it immediately.

Communicating Light

The tiny, four-faceted figures react to sudden changes in lighting by glowing and making sounds. Plus, they’re quite communicative in that their illumination proves infectious to their neighbors. Thus, on a surface full of adjacent tetrahedrons, the illumination of a single unit triggers a light wave running across the whole field. In a dark space, all you need is a small flashlight to get the installation started.

Crew: Piotr Barszczewski, Krzysztof Cybulski, Krzysztof Goliński, Jakub Koźniewski (panGenerator / PL)

The project has been originally created for the Copernicus Science Centre in Warsaw, Poland, for Przemiany Festival 2013.