Ars Electronica - living in paradox

20 Sep 2005 Category: Events & Exhibitions, Features, Products, Technology, Worldwide

This year’s Ars Electronica was the theme of “HYBRID - living in paradox”. The annual festival was held in the little town of Linz in Austria for the 26th time which just shows just how far the electronic arts have come. The Ars is made up of so many layers that it is hard to take part in all of them. I was busy for four days: visiting exhibitions, going to panel discussions, taking part in discussions and most of all meeting people, professionals, enthusiasts and lots of lovely geeks. For all the virtual worlds the Ars opens up to, it is one very real experience.

Written by Reto Wettach

Visiting Ars Electronica for the first time, I was especially excited about all the people I could finally meet in person. Working in the field of interactive design for quite some time, I am constantly being inspired by the work of many artists in this area. So you can imagine how nice it was for me to finally get to meet for example Toshio Iwai, whose work had a big influence on my understanding of quality in digital art.

Toshio presented his new toy, “TENORI-ON”, a digital musical instrument, which he is developing together with Yamaha. This instrument basically consists of a 16 by 16 matrix of LED-keys, which allows the user to compose music in real-time through an abstract, but easy-to-use interface. The concept of TENORI-ON is based on Iwai’s long time research on how to compose and generate music with computers (remember “SimTunes” and his installation “Music Box” ).

At this year’s Ars Electronica “Museum of the Future”, visitors could play with Iwai’s new instrument. At the gala, which actually is an Austrian version of the OSCAR-night dedicated to digital art, Iwai-san gave a concert by using TENORI-ON. For me it was interesting to talk to Iwai-san, who is professor at Tokyo University and who has the luxury of having his own research lab (with only one assistant) and no teaching duty.

It was also nice to finally meet the two guys behind PROCESSING, Ben Fry and Casey Reas. PROCESSING is a tool, which I have been using for over two years in my teachings as well as in my own research. It is a Java-based programming environment and allows us non-engineers (artists, designers, composers, beginners etc.) to create software sketches fast and with no need for deep understanding of programming and computer science.

I was very happy for Casey and Ben that they won the Golden Nika, which is the OSCAR of the Ars Electronica, for their work. Congratulations! As with many digital art celebrities, Casey and Ben are both fun guys to hang out with and very down to earth – even though they won the Nika! We shared some ideas about PROCESSING and the future of prototyping in the domain of interaction design.

Not only the personal encounters at the Ars Electronica were important for me, but also the talks and the exhibitions. Let me pick three of those to give you an overview of my experience:

Strandbeest by Theo Jansen

The most prominent piece of art at this year’s Ars Electronica was the Strandbeest. In the centre of Linz, an artificial beach about the size of two tennis courts (some people referred to it as a huge sand pit) was set up for the Strandbeests. On this beach there were huge machines, which walked up and down the sand pit – all by themselves. Originally, the sand beests populated a beach close to Delft/ Netherlands, the home of the artist Theo Jansen. These creatures with their countless legs walk over the beach and get their energy not through food, but through the wind. (Here is a little demo!)

Theo Jansen developed the core of his creatures, their innovative legs, by using evolutionary algorithms: with his old Atari computer he wrote a program, which would create populations with random legs and make them walk. Only the best survivors would be allowed to reproduce. Over hundreds of generations this algorithm finally developed the legs of Jansen’s creatures. After that, the artist started to design his beasts himself, without the help of the computer. He said to me that now he doesn’t need the computer anymore, but this might change.

I really liked this art work, because it uses simple materials (plastic tubes and cable ties), but has a huge emotional impact. The creatures look so alive and so elegant that many questions about life spring to mind while watching them.

Ars Electronica Futurelab sessions

As an accompaniment to “Pixelspaces 2005 - Hertzblut”, the Futurelab is presenting an exhibition of participants’ research and art projects as a way to illustrate various approaches to the conference’s theme - man-machine interaction - with concrete examples of how these ideas have been realized, applied, and made visible.

The session “Herztblut – Techno-emotional interactive spaces” was organized by the Ars Electronica Futurelab, a research environment, which is looking into the future of the “tension and interplay at the nexus of art, technology and society” . In this year’s session, the “the compatibility of emotions and computer technology” was discussed by quite an interesting panel and a very concentrated audience. The hall was packed with people; it was actually so full that people were lying on the floor.

I especially liked the presentations by Zachary “Zach” Lieberman and Ken Perlin.

Zach’s current work, which he also presented at the gala, is the attempt to give emotion to abstract shapes. For his concerts (I like him using the word “concert” for what he is doing instead of something like “performance”) he is using a mixed media setting: with a brush he paints letters on paper, all recorded by a camera and projected so that the audience can see it. Then he animates these letters with his hands, by e.g. pushing them or making them jump. I very much liked his question mark, where he first made the line turn once around the dot and then the dot turn around the line, just by pushing them with his hands. In his talk he described his work as the search for “the least motion possible to make it feel alive”.

Ken Perlin’s research is based on a very interesting hypothesis: he looked with us into the future of storytelling and the difference between interactive games and narratives. He actually showed that there is no future in pre-produced interactive movies, first because of the complexity (with only 20 decisions for the viewer, over 100000 storylines need to be produced). Another reason is the fact that “people are interested in other people”. For example, we want to see how Harrison Ford is going to work out all the complicated situations he gets into in the Indiana Jones films, but on the other side, in games people are not interested in finding out how a personal story of the character evolves. A good example of this is how people like to torture their Sims.

Perlin sees the future of interactive entertainment in systems, which can support the process of storytelling. He draws a comparison with today’s software “ Microsoft Word”, which allows anyone to create a good looking document, because during the development of MS Word, experts in typography and layout developed software tools to easily create good looking layouts. The storytelling software of the future will be similar: Psychologists, physiologist, sociologists, experts in literature and animation and many more will create software, which will allow the user to easily create complex stories.

As a first step into this direction, Perlin presented some of his own research projects, which are attempts to add emotions to virtual creatures. I especially liked his “Responsive Face”, where he could change expressions by moving few sliders like “brows” or “gaze”. He said he developed this face by looking closely at his ex-girlfriend. The longer he worked on that software the more interesting became her facials expressions – until the end of their relationship, when he found out how she would look when angry…

The talk by Neil Gershenfeld

Neil Gershenfeld, who said that he never understood “the difference between bits and atoms”, talked to the audience in Austria via video-broadcast, because he could not make it to the conference.

Neil basically formulated his thoughts around the future of the internet by presenting the architectural installation, the “Media House” in Barcelona: in this house, a light bulb connected to the system has an IP-address as well as the light switch. Both are easily mounted in a rail system. So, by placing the light switch to another location, the switch would still turn the same light bulb on and off – because both are not connected through a circuit, but through the internet; the switch is programmed to switch on or off a certain light. Neil also presented a system for programming both by a simple gesture based interface. Based on this experience, Neil is asking for an “internet of things”, or as he said it: “light bulbs don’t watch broadband movies”. Therefore he and his team develop the “internet zero”: the main idea behind was to keep it simple and cheap. Their current node, which talks IP and which would sit e.g. in the switch or in the light bulb, costs less than one dollar.

Once you start thinking about what it means to have internet for things then you can see a lot of potential for new applications and interfaces.

There was also a lot of inspiring new music and art works at Ars Electronica. Here are the three art pieces, which made me think most:

Garnet Hertz, Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robot #2

Garnet Hertz from Canada showed a robot as part of his Hybrid Creatures and Paradox Machines, which was controlled by a cockroach. Since the “fish controlled robot” by Maywa Denki, this is nothing new, however Garnet had an interesting extension to the basic idea of animals controlling robots: the distance of the robot to other objects (or walls) was translated into light. It is known that cockroaches try to avoid the light and so his idea was that the cockroach would navigate the robot away from the light.

Michelle Teran’s “A User’s Manual”

I really enjoyed the concept behind Michelle Teran’s art work: she developed a low-key technology, which allows the user to “hack” into surveillance cameras and see, what they see, on his/her own screen. As an art performance, Michelle is doing tours with this system and allowing her guests to get another perspective of the city and of them in the city. Questions about private and public spheres arise through this art piece. However, the way Michelle is presenting her art piece in the look of a cart of a homeless person does – in my point of view – not really suit the purpose of her work.

Lumen by Sony CSL

Last but not least I want to mention LUMEN, a research project by Ivan Poupyrev and Tatsushi Nashida from Sony CSL. LUMEN is a display, which can change its shape: each pixel is a transparent plastic stick, which can be moved up and down independent from the illumination of the pixel. In a video they showed new forms of interaction, which explored the tactile side of this concept as well as the idea of emphasising animation through this 3d-effect.

The Ars Electronica is a very inspiring event, and everybody who works with digital technology will for sure find something, which makes him think – at least for the next 12 months, before the next Ars Electronica starts. For me the most inspiring discussion I had was in a café in the early afternoon, where some visitors of the festival just had their breakfast (I am not going to talk about all the parties at the Ars Electronica….). I met this young researcher, who told me about an investigation done with people who lost a limb: by giving those people a visual image of their missing limb, they could actually start to feel that missing limb. Wow, and now some people are trying to create the illusion of a third arm, which one could feel. That’s sounds pretty impressive and surly has a lot of potential!

1 Comment

1. Excellent. As an aspiring illustrator this article was really inspirational. Thank you Ping Mag. I love your site. :)

   Posted by: bursa evden eve nakliyat on March 31st, 2009 at 3:26 pm

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