Ars Electronica 2002: A Wrap-Up

Ars Electronica wraps up another successful festival. Bottom line for 2002: artists and scientists from 37 nations were joined by more than 25,000 visitors.

'Intensive and successful' was how Ars Electronica artistic directors Gerfried Stocker and Christine Schöpf initially summed up the internationally renowned get-together of artists, scholars and activists representing the entire spectrum of contemporary media art. The 2002 festival concluded in Linz yesterday.

The theme 'UNPLUGGED – Art as the Scene of Global Conflicts' was the point of departure of debates featuring up-to-the-minute views on cultural and political barriers connected to globalization and on artistic strategies for overcoming them.

'We’re particularly pleased,' Stocker said, 'that the artists we invited to Linz — and especially those from Africa — were able to engage in productive discussions with curators active on a global scope while the program was still in progress, so that Ars Electronica’s impact will continue beyond the timeframe of the festival itself.'

This year’s highlights included a wide array of projects and initiatives. The symposium featured discussions with a number of prominent intellectual pioneers including American futurist Jeremy Rifkin, French philosopher Paul Virilio, globalization expert Saskia Sassen, Oumou Sy from Senegal, one of several initiators of Internet projects in Africa, Suhair Al-Zahabi, a journalist with the Arab satellite TV channel Al-Jazeera, and representatives of international organizations like UNESCO’s Philippe Quéau.

In addition to the presentation of Golden Nica awards to Prix Ars Electronica prizewinners in the Austrian Broadcasting Company’s Upper Austria Regional Studio, exhibitions in the Brucknerhaus, O.K Center for Contemporary Art and the Ars Electronica Center, as well as the popular Body Movies installation on Linz’s Main Square, visitors were also able to encounter more highly specialized projects positioned at the interface of art, technology and mediatized public space.

Open Air – A Radiotopia was a project initiated live from Ars Electronica. This global web featuring streams full of sound, voice and music created an open network — fully within the radio tradition — that involved no fewer than 400 participating artists and remote locations in places like Mozambique, Madagascar, Burkina Faso and South Africa that art projects such as this one seldom reach.

Another particularly well-attended event was the practice-oriented Pixelspaces Conference at which Ars Electronica Futurelab game designers led a presentation and discussion of state-of-the-art technological developments.

From September 7th to 12th alone in Linz, a total of 390 artists and scholars from 37 countries as well as 25,000 guests attended exhibitions and participated in workshops and discussions. The Klangwolke on opening night with music by Christian Muthspiel and visualizations by Hans Hoffer brought an additional 90,000 visitors into contact with impressions of the visual and tonal worlds of contemporary media.

The next Ars Electronica Festival is set for September 6 to 11, 2003.





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