The Ars Electronica Festival 1996 opened last night with a performance
by the Catalan theater group Els Comediants / La Fura dels Baus,
inaugurating the new Ars Electronica Center here in Linz. The AEC is a
so-called "Museum of the Future" designed to host a permanent
exhibition. The intention is to give the old steel town of Linz a
lasting place in the next millennium.

The Catalan group fired a large arsenal of fireworks to get the crowd
going, underlying it with seemingly unchoreographed dancing. Elemental
"wildness" was meant to offset the cool digital display flavor of the
AEC. Although La Fura dels Baus is a very important catalyst for Catalan
cultural production it was hard to figure out what the group was doing
in the Ars in a rain-drenched Linz. Everyone over 50 loved the show,
everyone below that age hated it. So it seemed to me, at least.

Great for all ages from 9 to 99 were the immense quantities of free beer
and Spanish jamon sandwiches that were handed out during the opening.
The Ars audience is composed of an interesting mixture of Austrian
insiders, the local Linz public and a selection from the international
New Media crowd. Of course, the Stadtwerkstatt was the place to be after
11:00 PM as with every year during the Ars. This time, the bar boasted a
glass bottle bowling installation called "Glassfieber." Great fun.

The Ars Electronica Symposium, moderated by Gert Lovink and prepared by
an active discussion on the web
(http://www.aec.at/meme/symp/index.html), was launched at 10:00 AM the
next day. The theme was "Memesis–The Future of Evolution." Listeners
were treated to interesting debate between some pretty key people,
including Richard Dawkins, author of "The Selfish Gene," Richard
Barbrook, UK hypermedia theorist and historian, Francis Heylighen of the
Free University of Brussels and Mark Dery, author of "Escape Velocity:
Cyberculture at the End of the Century." Suit-clad Dawkins presented his
ideas on memes trying to remain highly objective, restating that his
thoughts were only hypothetical. He was attacked on a quite personal
level by Barbrook, wearing what one could term trendy London
working-class fashion and the matching accent. Barbrock stated that one
could not discuss the transmission of cultural ideas without tying the
process into the long tradition of humanist thought. He was backed up by
Dery, who was a riot. The American cultural critic burst out without
pity for the poor German translator, unleashing a deluge of complex,
poetic formulations comparing the Unabomber with the readers and editors
of Wired magazine. He heavily attacked the visions of an elitist
Libertarian technocratic regime active in the Wired crowd.

The quality of the symposium was therefore very high, which made the
day. Not even a mushy solo performance of the cyberbody problematic and
a tacky Mind Forest adjunct to the Brain Opera could destroy this
positive impression. Time to stop typing and go back to the
Stadtwerkstatt…