Peter beat me to it, but I’d like to share my impressions of the Ars Electronica Festival 2007, the “festival for art, technology and society”, that is being held every year in Linz, Austria. I was there on Monday and Tuesday (September 10^th to 11^th).

The festival isn’t about the latest of technological achievements, as I first expected. Rather than that it’s an exhibition of modern art. It’s about the artists who find drawing or painting boring and try to express themselves in alternative ways. For me, the technologies used were not new. Most abused concepts were definitely the Graphics tablet, 3D glasses and object detection.

A large part of the festival was the so called Second City, a real life imitation of second life. Seems ridiculous, how not long ago we were trying to bring real life into computer generated worlds. and now we’re doing the opposite? Another thing I didn’t quite get was this. People met at a sand beach in the center of Linz to play second life and talk to each other on that same beach, but digitalized. Hmm hmm hmm.

I did really like some projects. Here are a few of my favorites:
I never did quite understand musical notations. But this project did it in a more user friendly way - by putting objects of different shapes and sizes on the desk and adjusting the beam speed we were able to produce music. yay.

A futuristic looking water dispenser. This thing was nothing special but it looked so damn cool. Usage photo

A sculpture illuminated by a single projector. This was 10 minutes of animation which showed an artificial light source movement. Just like playing with 3D software, but more real.

A simple 2D projection showing a still image and some moving camels. I’m not sure why, but I really loved this.

All in all it was a good festival. If nothing else, to show that art is evolving too. Mona Lisa is great, but she’s been smiling at us for centuries now, we’ve seen it. Maybe it’s time for something new. And Ars Electronica shows that this “something new” isn’t necessarily a filter in Photoshop.