1. Linz is a parallel universe.
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The opening act of the ars electronica festival and centre was an
absolute odd experience. In front of a crowd of local hot shots clearly
not understanding a single word, the Austrian Minister of Finance bandied
around cyberbuzzwords. A promo video featured corporate sponsors'
cyberblurb underlayed by the _Mission: Impossible_ theme. The Linz Mayor
pointed out how he mastered the transition of his town – a small
peasant's village some sixty years ago, a Nazi-founded heavy industry
center then, suffering from the steel industry crisis recently – into
Information Age. Two priests, a Roman-Catholic and an
Evangelic-Lutherian, blessed the festival and the center, and the hole
audience said the Lord's Prayer, obviously becoming impatient while
waiting for the buffet that followed the gathering.

2. Linz is boring.
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The _ars electronica center_, also featuring as _The Museum of the
Future_ is a major disappointment. Any computer or arcade game has more
advanced virtual reality than the applications in this center.
Technically interesting, however, is the famous CAVE, a VR installation
reminding on the holodeck of _Star Trek: The Next Generation_. But still,
CAVE's content is pretty straightforward: you can walk around in a
virtual gallery, pick up a spray can and improve the exhibits by your own
graffittis. Yawn.

3. Linz is a time travel.
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Another part of the festival was the symposium _Memesis. The Future of
Evolution_. The odd mixture of industry, science, and artistic
contributors with the usual suspects of the cybercritique-intelligentsia
beared the typical mark of the chairman Geert Lovink. Amazing to have
Mark Dery on the same panel with Joe Engelbert, the latter being a
robotics pundit of the MIT, proposing a bright future provided by helpful
household robots. What Engelbert presented reminded me of a big, heavy,
glossy Time Life book called _The Future_ I enjoyed when I was a child.
Like this book's, Engelbert's future was a shiny happy place where people
wouldn't work more than like 20 hours a week, leaving the dirty,
repetitive tasks to robots. The fact that, at least in Germany, everybody
is talking about the _prolongation_ of the working day came to mind, but
apparently not to Engelbert's.