Tech festival of dazzling displays but no big picture

Kat Austen, CultureLab editor

The festival featured a huge light show on the banks of the Danube (Image: Ars Electronica)

This year's Ars Electronica festival lost its way in search of territory where science and art are truly integrated

IN THE late 1960s the world was obsessed with going into space. Yuri Gagarin had become the first man to go into orbit and the Soviet Union was pitted against the US in the race to the moon. In this exhilarating atmosphere of scientific breakthroughs and changing global and social frameworks, writer and biologist Stewart Brand launched a campaign for NASA to release the first picture of the entire Earth from space.

Brand prevailed with his artistic call to arms, and the released photograph shook the world by illustrating the apparent fragility of our tiny rock, floating in the vast nothingness of space. He put the image on the cover of the first issue of the Whole Earth Catalog, a counterculture publication described by Steve Jobs as "one of the bibles of my generation". The image changed how we view our planet.

Brand's Whole Earth campaign was a key instance of artistic reflection on the way science was changing our social and political world. Now, nearly half a century later, we are bombarded with images, data and scientific innovations that alter the context of our lives. But is there any one image - or work of art - that can similarly shift our perspective?

That was the big question posed at this year's Ars Electronica festival, an annual event dedicated to art, technology and society. Now in its 33rd year, the event encompasses topics as diverse as privacy and bioart, and last month drew more than 30,000 visitors to Linz, Austria. This year the ambitious aim was to explore how the worlds of art and science do more than simply overlap at their edges, and instead are converging to create a distinct new culture.

At night the banks of the Danube were lit up for a display around the theme of "The Cloud in the Net" - which included projected images of changing technology and an airborne ballet performed by a swarm of remote-controlled LED-adorned quadrocopters - a more manoeuvrable, four-bladed incarnation of the helicopter.

Elsewhere our evolving relationship with data was explored by works such as Memopol-2 by Timo Toots. A huge, mission-control style hub presented the viewer with an overwhelming amount of personal information scraped from the web and, for Estonians like Toots, from government databases.

Yet perhaps more informative than the piece itself was the reaction it evoked in the audience, who jockeyed for position in the long queue for the exhibit. The crowd was clearly more fascinated than concerned when confronted with the wealth of personal data accessible online to all and sundry.

Other pieces, such as the bacterial radio made - or rather grown - by artist Joe Davis from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, looked at the blurry line between the organic and technological in these changing times for bioengineering.

The impressive mix of speakers included senior curator at New York's Museum of Modern Art, Paola Antonelli, roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro of Osaka University, Japan, and exoplanet specialist Lisa Kaltenegger of Harvard University. I was hopeful they would enlighten us about the tectonic shift supposedly closing the chasm between art and science.

Yet nowhere in this mix of discussions, exhibitions and displays was there a coherent argument for the emerging phenomenon that is not art, not science, but something more.

Sessions explored the idea of a big picture and the rise of cultural awareness of complexity, and discussed visualisations and mapping techniques that change how we view our territory. Yet sadly these extraordinary parts did not come together into a whole that could support the festival's overarching premise.

Ultimately it was a shame that a festival as well placed as Ars Electronica did not provide more answers - or bring that promising big picture into focus.

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Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/243e2aae/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Cculturelab0C20A120C10A0Cfestival0Eof0Edazzling0Edisplays0Ebut0Eno0Ebig0Epicture0Bhtml0Dcmpid0FRSS0QNSNS0Q20A120EGLOBAL0Qonline0Enews/story01.htm

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