GraffitiWriter
Technology for urban guerillas...true urban guerillas. GraffitWriter is a remote controlled vehicle with spray cans on the back. Enter a message via a wireless device or the web, and off it goes, spraying whatever your tag is on whatever surface it's on.

Borderland
The Mortal Kombat-style combat genre has been done to death...but never has it been done with such outrageous style and humor! A good lesson in what can be done cheaply with today's digital video editing tools.

TextOrgan
Of course I'm going to tell you to go check this out. TextOrgan showed quite well, with numerous people camping out for extended periods and coming back two or more times. The most interesting lesson we learned from watching them is that a MIDI keyboard is a great interface for promoting collaborative play, to the point that many people simply ignored the mouse. We also learned that people respond strongly to being able to manipulate text in the ActiveText way.

Vectoral Elevation
A fabulous melding of large-scale public art and internet participation from all over the world. Vectoral Elevation shows how individuals sitting in front of their computers at home can actively participate in events in public space.

AudioVisual Environment Suite
Most instruments for creating sound from visuals fail at either the sound or the visuals...or both. This piece manages to handle both quite well, even beautifully at times.

U19 Freestyle Computing
One of Ars Electronica's true innovations is the inclusion of a competetion for 18 year olds and under. If you're looking for the new talent that's going to drive the net into its next mutation, this is a great place to start. NetDump, which places a recycling bin on your desktop which uploads your recyclables to a common 'compost heap', gets my award for the most interesting of the lot.

Ars Electronica is the premiere interanational festival for interactive art. It is sponsored by the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria, and takes place every September. The festival hosts a symposium, called Next Sex this year, a juried competition called Prix Ars Electronica, and an exhibition of selected prize-winners called Cyberarts 2000. TextOrgan, Arts Alliance Lab's submission to the Prix Ars Electronica, was awarded one of 10 third prizes (honorable mentions) out of a field of about 300 applicants in the Interactive Art category. TextOrgan was one of even a smaller number asked to exhibit at Cyberarts 2000.

Why Go?

Ars Electronica regularly showcases some of the most innovative and provocative digital media work in the world. The projects on display often incorporate unique technical solutions to commonly encountered problems as well as creative approaches to communicating via the technology. The festival is also fertile ground for finding talented people of both the creative and technical varieties.

We went for all of this, as well as to install TextOrgan in the O.K Centrum for the CyberArts 2000 exhibition.

CyberArts
In general, not as strong as I had expected. The pieces with intriguing depth are listed above; while the rest had some compelling details (most notably the neo-50's kitchen environment of Free Range Appliances in a Light Dill Sauce and the haptic-feedback interfaces to Asymptote and As Much As You Love Me) I didn't come away with the feeling that I was seeing some substantially new and provacative.

NextSex Symposium
Because of set-up issues, I missed most of the symposium. I can recommend speaker Carl Djerassi's essay "Sex and Fertilization: Ready for Divorce", which appears in the symposium book, for the way it confronts deeply held beliefs about the primacy of fertilization, and the irrationality of privaleging it over simple pleasure when discussing sexual intercourse. The installation Sperm Race took the issues of the conference out of the lecture hall into the main square of old Linz, where any male could enter his sperm into contest with other donors; women participated by placing bets on who they thought would win.

Several commentators were deeply disturbed by the way the NextSex discourse around eugenics was carried out. "Profoundly Shocking Ars Electronica", written by William Osborne and published by MSNBC, is one example of this viewpoint. A series of letters between concerned artists and the festival's organizers can be found here.