The ORF, the economy and her "property"
It was the day at which the Schmach should be eradicated by Valencia, the 0: 9 of the Easter-Rich Fubball National Team against the Spanish. O 3 reminded me of this debacle when I drove Gene Linz. It delivered – interrupted by the best "Hits for the last twenty years" – News about the team job, statements on tactics, motivation and fitness of the players, interviews with players and coaches about the possible game output.
On this day, the Ars Electronica also celebrated its twenty year. And right. Hardly any event has accompanied the evolution of electronics and technology in the last two decades, their effects on society, science and culture thus commented so comprehensively and reflects as they. At least in Alturopa. Who came to Linz, found there a pronounced greeting for the latest scientific modes and trends that had already been diffused into society or soon arrived there.
The leadership of the festival managed not only to bring the conflicting social groups and interests, industry, subculture and science to a table, they would also have been successful for a long time to answer the question: what is avant-garde? At least, as long as Peter Weibel in Linz the scepter swung, determined the selection of topics and objects certain and the Linzer meeting a hegemonial meaning missed. from "Networked systems", "Virtual realities" and "Endophysics", from "Artificial Life", "nanotechnology" or "Infowar" learned a broader public first, because Linz took himself – and the pleasing and pleasantly free of ideological glazes or German restrictions. Although the organizers followed the discourse sometimes behind. Thus, the development and revolutionary importance of the Internet for the global society was almost oversleved, or the one or the other topic set in the sand because the audience was overburdened with the world of thought Peter Weibel.
Nevertheless, Ars Electronica in all the years mostly worked trend or agendas. Gave Intel in the semiconductor area Takt and rhythm of technical evolution, certain Linz about goals, content and direction of media discourse. Headhunting also functioned mostly. Whether Baudrillard or Virilio, Lanier, Gibson or Leary, Kittler, Dawkins or Haraway – none, who had acquired prominence in recent years in high tech or organic sector celebrities, adorned himself as it strikes him to study the map and travel to the Oberosterreichian province.
In the sun of success
This success of the ARS Electronica is remarkable, certain – and in Central Europe without any exam. So reason enough, let them live up and organize a birthday party that has washed. But not the organizers who celebrated artistic direction, how to think. Or the juvenile audience, the year for year into a jeweled Donaustichchen, gives the imbing driving of their resident Stort and the cityscape a gray-black basic tremidity. That had been moved to the night, in Peter Behrens Haus, the Linzer Students had quietly lined up quickly for the party guests.
Who first celebrated, and the tracking light of cameras were the ORF and DR. Leopoldser, moderator, calls and ideas. He visibly enjoyed sitting in the light of cameras to see the success of his idea of all. This was created at the end of the 70s when the region was hit by the steel crisis and looked out the ORF man after a spectacle that the city of Linz drove out of depression, give her an inimitable trademark and she from other regions, Salzburg and Vienna about, should distinguish. It’s hard to give him a certain wide view as he fell on the high tech area and found fellow combatants who discovered a rewarding project in the mixing of technology, science and art with a cultural program for the Linzer Volkecker.
For this Celebration Day, the ORF had transformed the Middle Hall of the Brucknerhaus into a television studio, the audience draped as a build school. A congratulation coal in the short run should be, a valley with protagonists and former dragging. Program and arrangement of the room love it. Small round tables, with lots of drumrum and mineral water bottles on top of top, transped the bean, which adorned a semicircle of leather armchairs. Three rough television cameras were ready to track and record the events on the bean. Dr. Leopoldseder’s grandfather does not take it, with Dr. Screw, his co-partner over the years to drove the audience through the eventful history of the ARS. In three talks they thought, tense, but in played relaxation, along with their gastles the individual development stages of the Ars Electronica: the six-year departure, the ten-year regency Peter Weibel and the sell-off of the festival to ORF and industry.
Amusant was this snap-in tour from video clips and small talk already. The Performances of Kraftwerk and Peter Gabriel, Club Voltaire or Stelarc, the larm and fire spectacles, which were organized in the Danube Park or in disengaged halls of the Voest Alpine works, to review the Videoskulturpen Num June Paiks again. You have to admit that. Amusant was also the Fundervater, Pioneers and Protestler of the Ars, Scientists, Artists, and Curators, gathered on the bean, as they were subdivided by the invisible direction of the ORF, a two-minute statement to their motives or goals donations, off and Paid on an action, but otherwise only Das or around as a staffage of the ORF, for several aged aged, dicked and disilused. Herbert W. Franke, for example, that it was about to combine the material conditions of technology with the creative pages of their opportunities. Or Otto Piene, who anticipated a new quantum leap from the advance in the electronic space. Or Eduard Bannwart, who missed the Festival’s AEC, today’s sloping sign of the festival, its architectural face.
Misstone excluded
Klartext was not to be expected among these circumstances from the participants, also no substantive dispute over the screwed paths and art paths and goals of the festival. Although there had been sufficient reason for hard words, giving zasures time to reflect and retreat, one did not want to know about it because the ORF wanted to know nothing. The medium had prescribed holiday mood, cemetery rest, and not Knatsch.
So one knocked each other on the shoulders, good mood and evoke, wherever it went. Even Peter Weibel stopped to these specifications. He also avoided to play the miesepeterich. Although occasionally laughingly laughing, when a tare was fell, or even asked Gerfried Stocker at his term of office, he was tuned to shelter the prescribed harmony of the ORF community and to infer the scope image of the event with misstones. He had just had that the dispute with the ORF had cost the post of artistic director a few years ago, to get rid of some critical word. For example, how the disposable medium tried to interfere with all the years in his work, and thanks, because at the time did not succeed in presenting the Prix Ars Eletronica on television. (Like stiff, wooden and dilettantically performed this honor to this day, and how the prize brags are now abused as a papfigur cabinet for the sponsorship, the observer could live live on 3sat in the evening live.) Or as the construction of the Ars Electronica Center made the allocation of a business administration and this was the city of Linz and the ORF a welcome opportunity to get rid of the uncomfortable forecast and to occupy the item with a younger, willing and less edgy and bulky art managers.
Such a stop and self-awaisage had certainly done the event well, the dasor offered a welcome opportunity to do so. But no one was interested in that. Nobody spoke about quarrels; Nobody tapped the indiscoming influence of the economy on topic, pricing and form of the festival; Nobody noticed that the festival now operates now: the coarse part of the audience consists of experts and press representatives, which is why one "Culture for all" can not be mentioned; Nobody guessed that the media art has not succeeded in the present day, despite the full-bodied envision really substantially new to create new; and nobody sees it seem that the same media artists are invited again and again and make up the prize.
Change is the normal, not the exception
Certainly, every time, society or generation paid their history, new or different. Especially when they are exposed to accelerated change and stably testimony of this evolution. What was ten or twenty years ago, is out today. Expression of this time change is the change: the drawing of the old, the rule of the boys. At the same time traditions and old self-esteems. Other topics and mentalities order the field. Especially an event like the Ars Electronica lives, an event, which was once attributable to the trail of the new and still unknown. Since the industry has explained to the spearhead of the new, avant-gardeism is not a matter of artists or groups. Not in the studios or writing, in the research laboratories, all those visions and utopias find their homeland and application. They learn their realization, couples with market interest rates and benefits calculus.
This is reflected in the appeal of Grurried Stockers to the artistic leader. Since then, in Linz, it is more about the analysis of those conflict zones, which arise at the seams of technology and culture, the company overshoots and form them to the global society. Or it’s about sustainability ies to accuse responsibilities in dealing with the new organic and media technologies to identify and publicize the consequences of those consequences and effects that the digital revolution is socially and culturally causes or culturally. The Ars Electronica of Media Official offers a stulse forum and interface for this. For subcultures, avant-gardes and protesters there is little space.
And it was still plain text
And yet there was away from the Brucknerhaus, where again only the well-known pros and kons were exchanged for organic and genetic engineering, the spirit Michel Foucaults (bio-power) unattentably absent, for that the guidelines and ominous environments Jeremy Rifkins had been snubbed, but still plain text. And in the loft of the AECS. Novartis, currently next to Monsanto LifeScience actor on the world market, had loaded the press language. There, the Swiss Group completed the media representatives his long-term commitment for the Linzer event.
One hope so the managers, with the sponsorship the term "Lifescience" to make known and at the same time to increase social acceptance for biotechnologies. In contrast, Grurried Stocker declared that in return from Novartis expect the opening of his research laboratories for media artists. If the artist is able to play on the keyboards of the latest systems and machines, Novartis in Linz finds everything a bio-group needs, but on the public market only gets hardship: namely creativity. And that is known to be Dunn Gesat, even if all the world speaks of her and asks them, but especially asked when it comes to shapes and asthetics, the art design of plants, animals and humans, to flavor, health and intelligence.
This clarity of the language was only surpassed later from the notification, which should not be debated further in the next year along the biosciences, contrary to the envision of Novartis and Stocker. Microsoft and Siemens and other coarse companies of the high tech sector had different in mind. This did not just remove prere on individual jury members, so Linus Torwald and Linux the most important prize, the Linz has to be awarded, they had already had a few weeks ago that the next year was over "Opensource" be talked.
Should this message be more than a boser joke, as was suspected – in fact, he has been seeing for months in the industry, which speculates over an undefriendly take-over of the enemy – then Kame Linz with this topic plenty of spat. Yet again. Elderly, one was faster – for the chagrin of the Linzer. The abrupt and unexpected interest for open systems has been a lot of explanation. Not only the surprising sponsorship of Siemens for Linux. Also the creeping disempowerment of the artistic direction. What once started as the implementation of the 68 protest culture in the electronics area (video, graphics, music), warranted the game ball of lobbyists and global interests. What happened in Linz Kunftig, which will be negotiated there, decided the sponsors and the ORF.
On the way home I learned from the 1: 3 defeat of the Easter Rich Fubballer on the radio. The press revealed this defeat tags on it as a victory. The national team, so was to read one "Victory for the future" achieved. Then it fell my eyes like sheds. I suddenly had the answer to what I was looking for in Linz the two days, but somehow did not find. Oh, Osterreich.
