"One never sees a new art," someone once wrote about new media. "A 'new
art,' may be recognized by the fact that it is not recognized." And so
the story goes with the Ars Electronica Festival, an annual celebration
of all things new in the field of art and technology, some easy to
recognize and others not so.

For twenty years Ars Electronica has stood as a global champion of new
media art. With its headquarters in Austria the organization attracts a
international audience through its exhibition center, its prestigeous
prize (the Prix Ars Electronica) and annual festival which concluded
Thursday.

Once again the Ars Electronica Festival created that most coveted of
things, the temporary autonomous zone where people interact and new
ideas are sparked, where work is developed and exhibited to the public.
The Europeans seem to have a particular knack for this. Recent criticism
of Ars, particularly their unusual selections for the "net" portion of
the Prix Ars Electronica, had left me skeptical. Yet detractors be
damned, this is a good and important festival.

Each year Ars Electronica creates a specific zone within the festival
devoted to laboratory experiments, works in progress, and incidental
happenings. This year that zone was called the "Electro Lobby," a
sprawling array of desks set up in the basement of the main auditorium.
The Electro Lobby focuses most closely on youth culture such as gaming,
clubbing, computers, and so on. TNC Network from France were responsible
for putting it all together. A small collective within the Electro Lobby
spun off to tackle the "game jam." The challenge of the jam was to
create a computer game from start to finish in just four days.
Animators, coders and other cohorts collaborated on the project for a
few frenzied days and the result was superlative, a fully functional
computer game (based in Flash) that would blow away half the junk seen
in today's arcades. Other interesting Electro Lobby participants
included the graphic design web zine Kaliber10000 (www.k10k.net), and
the Slashdot spin off site Everything (www.everything2.org) which is an
innovative technology for managing website content.

This year's winner of the Prix Ars Electronica for Net.Excellence was
PrayStation.com, the unique online portfolio created and maintained by
Flash guru Joshua Davis. PrayStation.com is organized in calendar format
with new works uploaded to coincide with particular days of the year.
Sometimes whole weeks are empty, sometimes many days in a row contain
new work. Unlike Davis's main other creative outlet, the website Once-
Upon-A-Forest which features completed artworks, PrayStation is meant to
show quick ideas, sketches, and other works in progress. While he works
in Flash, a normally closed source animation medium, Davis makes a point
of giving away all PrayStation source code for free via the website.
This amounts to what he calls a distance learning system, in which
common-minded coders may use the site as a hub to read new code, learn,
and exchange ideas.

In the main town square an unusual artwork was installed. A paintball
gun fires paint balls from a tourret in random intervals at a large
billboard. Over the course of a few days, the billboard grows to
resemble a formalist artwork, perhaps from the Abstract Expressionist
style. The top of the billboard reads "If you don't think this is art,
call 0800-123 456." Then, if someone reaches for their cell phone and
calls the number, a computer receives the call and causes the paintball
gun to fire another shot at the billboard. Ha! This is public art for
the cell phone-savvy masses.

Another piece which I arrived too late (oops!) to experience–but for
which several people gave me rave reviews–was Golan Levin's cell phone
artwork called Telesymphony. The audience arrives at the auditorium and
registers if they have a cellphone with them. Then, at a prearranged
time, Levin sends calls to all the different phones in the auditorium,
prompting them to ring in different patterns and frequencies.

The "Ridin' A Train" performance, normally a highlight of the festival,
was cancelled and replaced this year with "Container Park," a massive
site-specific installation that took place in the city's shipyard off
the Danube river. Inside a maze of shipping containers piled thirty feet
high, two forklifts drove in a slow, choreographed pattern carrying
lights and sound installations in their front loaders. At times the
forklifts appeared to stalk the audience, and at times they appeared
more carefree, wandering off into the shipping yard. The Container Park
party was capped off with a performance by Senior Coconut and his eight
piece salsa band. What made this band special however was that they
played only Kraftwerk covers. You had to hear it to believe it.

Having said all this, another highlight must be reported, a rainbow I
saw over the Linz skyline early Wednesday evening. Like the artwork in
the festival, this was a rainbow to rival all comers: a not only did the
arc stretch completely from one horizon to another but it was a
doubledecker with both a upper and lower arc, plus ripples of color
receding into the center. ("Damn, now THAT'S a rainbow," I thought to
myself.) And in my simple brain, of course, this rainbow must represent
the halo of creativity and insight that the digital art scene sparks
within the receding dot-com storm. Keep it up kids, another excellent
Ars festival for the history books.