ars electronica performances



Brain Opera 3. - 6. 9. Design Center Linz 3. 9. 20.00 Live-Performance, European Premiere Tod Machover, MIT Media Lab/USA		Based on texts and ideas by Marvin Minsky and the technological innovations at the MIT Media Lab Boston, the Brain Opera project sets new standards in interactive art. The collaboration and interaction of artists, academics, musicians and technologists has resulted in a complex, interlinked, adaptive sound/image/network environment. One of the Brain Opera's greatest aims is to encourage people to be excited by their own minds, and by the desire to look inside and hear what is going on (Minsky). It is this kind of audience involvement - not the mere manipulation of the hyperinstruments - that makes the Brain Opera truly an opera. More significantly, the Brain Opera does have a significant dramatic progression, which is the voyage of each audience member through the maze of fragments, thoughts and memories, to collective and coherent experience.
Perks 4. 9. Design Center Linz 17.00 Jon Rose/Aus, NL		Jon Rose's music project, arranged around an interactive Badminton match, is based on the ideas and obsessions of the Australian composer and pianist Percy Grainger. Perks celebrates the technology and physicality of music - speed and movements are the controlling forces. "Space is not the final frontier, nor is it cyberspace... it's the brain, or at least, our understanding of how it actually works. Jon Rose presents a simple analogy, the Badminton Court represents the brain, the two Badminton players play out the roles of the left and the right hemispheres. The "thoughts" of the players are heard periodically loud and clear througout the performance. They react to each other (as sportspeople do!) with personal comments, spurious philosophical assertions, occasional abuse, and observations on the evolutionary struggle."