ARS ELECTRONICA PLAYGROUND FOR CORPORATE STRATEGIES

We, the "net." jury, have just learned that next year's ars electronica
festival will be titled "OPEN SOURCE". This has been inofficially agreed
on by the direction of the ARS ELECTRONICA and the sponsors Siemens,
Microsoft, Oracle and HP, e.a. From reliable sources we also learned
that the decision was made weeks before the ".net"-jury decision on
"linux".

WHY WE ARE GOING PUBLIC

Because we have also just learned that the above-mentioned IT-companies
are involved in a linux distribution joint venture and a strategic
alliance. Their joint venture startup will most probably become one of
the leading linux distributors, directly attacking Red Hat and SUSE.

This is the classic oligopolistic strategy. They cannot buy linux,
nevertheless, they will take control over the distibution of the
competitor.

We were suspicious before, but now we are strongly convinced that there
was indirect but heavy influence by corporate and ars electronica
executives to reach the "linux" decision…

THE JURY WEEK-END

For the jury welcome dinner, a few corporate people had been invited,
too. Everybody was discussing about where Ars Electronica could or
should be going. For the corporate people the main hype was of course
the .net category, e-commerce and the commercial impact of the "mass
communications" medium internet… and they were all constantly talking
about the creative potential of linux and its open source strategy.

Then, at the actual jury meeting, deciding on a winner appeared to be
quite a hard decision (not to say compromise). Whilst the majority of
the jury had a clear favourite in the russian info- intelligence startup
"etxtreme.ru", another juror started talking about "that we need to
decide on something that is really taking two steps ahead, not some
arty-farty stuff". So "linux" just came up as a smart solution. we took
this path, we formulated our statement and came up with the source code
as art work, with our position against "beautiful" web-sites. it was a
strong moment. And we saw linux as the perfect continuum to the
corporate artwork of etoy.com, the Ars Electronica winners of 1996.

TERRORVISION AND THE LOGICAL CONCLUSION

But the information about the secret linux distribution joint venture
between Microsoft and Siemens in combination with next years topic made
us alert.

Our conclusion: the industry has strongly lobbied and put pressure on at
least one jury member to award "linux". We now have to interpret this in
persepective of next years ars topic. They pushed the topic. The idea is
to use the art and science community to soft launch their linux
activities and control open source strategies. They do understand that
open source has evolved into a stronger development strategy and they
have to jump that train early enough, in order to avoid another
"internet" desaster.

So as artists writers and scientists we are used as lab-rats and cheap
alternative researchers. This is NOT what artists need and it is
certainly not what Ars Electronica should be aiming at.

NEXT STEPS

We believe that investigative journalism is needed to further describe
and interpret this incident.. We definitely want to engage in bringing
transparency into the "who's, when's, where's, and for how much money"
of this years decision making process of Prix Ars Electronica.

For the press, we are available for background information and extended
infos on the topic via email or at our on-the-fly press conference:

sept 8, 1999, 1630h
brucknerhaus in linz

Regards,

Derrick de Kerckhove
Lisa Goldman
Joichi Ito
Marleen Stikker