ARS ELECTRONICA - A NETWORK OF SYSTEMS OR
TOO MUCH MEDIAHYPE?

by Ray Gallon

The Ars Electronica Festival is sponsored jointly each September
by the Bruckner Haus, a major state-supported concert-hall in
Linz, Austria, and ORF, the Austrian state radio system. 1989
was the tenth year the Ars Electronica Festival has been held,
and its reputation is as a very prestigious festival of the
cutting edge of the technological arts.

I received an invitation to attend, through my colleague Heidi
Grundmann, who produces a program on ORF entitled "Kunstradio" -
literally "Art Radio." The program focuses on audio art, to the
exclusion of projects rooted in the more traditional forms of
music and drama. To my knowledge, there is not another radio
program which is so rigorous in its support of audio art,
anywhere in the world, including the Hoerspiel Studio 3 of
Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne, which may be the major
commissioner of audio art work in the world.

The invitation was to come to the festival and be able,
informally, to present to colleagues the work done in the audio
art field by students in Creative Sound courses at New York
University's department of Film, Television and Radio, Tisch
School of the Arts, and as presented by WNYU-FM Radio program,
"Headphone Theatre."

The Festival had, as its declared theme, "A Network of
Systems." Included in its statement of theme, was a de-emphasis
on formal presentation, 24-hour operation of the festival
exhibits, and the idea that the entire festival was itself a
network, an organic communications system in itself.
Unfortunately, the festival did not live up to its grand
pronouncements. To begin with, the components at the Bruckner

performances, seemed to lack focus, and some seemed more
concerned with using as much technology as possible than with
having something to say with that technology.

These were run concurrently, but seemingly without reference to,
presentations of computer music, video, computer graphics, and
other related work in one of the studios at ORF. It seemed that
rather than a complex intertwined network, we had two parallel
but separate events running. The presentations at ORF, which
were of winners of the annual "Prix Ars Electronica" offered by
ORF, were more interesting in many cases than the installations
at the Bruckner Haus. I found myself spending more time at ORF
than anywhere else. I had the opportunity to view and hear
pieces by artists from Austria, France, Germany, Australia,
Hungary, Canada, the U.S., Jugoslavia, Poland, Holland, Finland,
and Portugal. I was also able to meet some of the artists
personally, and discuss various aspects of the work presented,
which included video, computer art and animation, computer
music, and a variety of hybrid electronic forms.

Unfortunately, despite the idea of the festival as a "Network of
Systems," there was nowhere for people to really "Network."
That is, there were lounges, a bar, places to eat, drink, and be
merry, but no room with computers, video players, audiotape
players, etc. where artists could informally share their work
with each other outside of the official selections of the
festival committee. In short, the whole thing smacked much
more of Official Art (Capital letters emphasized) than of the
freewheeling, open communications that the theme title
suggested. It was very difficult to do the very thing I had
been invited to do, namely informally share the student work I
had brought with me, with colleagues, because there was
absolutely no venue in which to do it.

There was a major contingent of Australian audio/radio artists
at the conference, under the leadership of Andrew McLennan,
producer of the ABC national program, "The Listening Room,"
which focuses on experimental audio pieces. A 4-hour broadcast
was organized by Heidi Grundmann with McLennan's help, featuring
the work of many of these Australians, and other artists
including some from the U.S. I participated in a live radio
performance organized by San Francisco installation maker Bill
Fontana - an old friend whom I see more at events in Europe like
this one, than I do back in the States. This segment of the
broadcast, called "Music for Ordinary Instruments," involved
soliciting listeners to call in and make sounds with ordinary
household objects. Some of these were recorded before the
broadcast began.

In a studio, the ORF had assiduously assembled an array of
soda-pop cans, pieces of stone and brick, paper, whirligigs,
hardware, spray cans, and other miscellaneous household objects
which could be used to produce sounds. Hank Bull, director of
Vancouver B.C.'s Western Front Multi-Arts center, and I, were in
the studio with these objects, and began making sounds with
them. As we did so, Bill Fontana passed them through various
tape loops of different lengths, so that the repetition of
sounds happened on different schedules. Listener sounds which
had been pre-recorded were added, and live calls from listeners
were mixed in, all using the variable loops as controlled by
Bill. The result was a wondrous cacophony of ordinary sounds,
ever-varying, rich, and amazing in the new juxtapositions of
sound which were created.

ENA member Carl Loeffler, and his associate Fred Truck, were
there demonstrating Software as Art, and Roy Ascott, from the
Gwent College of Art in Britain, was there with his "Aspects of
Gaia" installation, which included images and messages from
people connected online all around the world, in a presentation
which was interactive with the spectators in Linz. You can read
more about Roy Ascott in my other article in this issue of
Netweaver.

Another of the more interesting events was a live nightly
broadcast, 3-hours long, conducted by a German group named "Van
Gogh TV." They managed to secure the donation of 3 hours per
night of time on SAT 3, a Europe-wide cable satellite channel.
They filled their airtime with live programming, originating
from a "city" of cargo containers out back, with highly
energetic, often raw, often involving very sophisticated image
processing generated on the spot on an Amiga computer,
responding to telephone calls they received from viewers all
over the continent. Not always polished, but interactive and
exciting.

With the exception of a few interesting pieces, including those
mentioned above, the festival came out a great disappointment to
me. The seminars were occasions for the most abstruse, academic
nitpicking, rather than a place for artists to really exchange
in a stimulating, dynamic multi-log. I have seen a few too many
installations which had, as their focus, drowning out the other
installations in the area, or overwhelming the spectator with
the number of monitors and images it is presenting. One
installation was really nothing more than a series of video
arcade games. The purpose of this installation was a mystery to
all and sundry, since coins were not required to operate them,
(leaving out the profit motive) and there was nothing special
about the images in the games, they were off-the-shelf.

The media arts are still young, but not so young, in my opinion,
that we need to see more pieces which are catalogs of effects
with nothing to say behind them, and then bill and coo over how
wonderful they are. I have experienced this at all too many
media festivals. Curators and critics, all too often are more
concerned with documentation of the event - how it will be
recorded for posterity (how prominent their names are in the
catalog) - than in the event itself, and so various aspects of
fashionability and Art Marketing often take over, even in the
State-Supported realm of Western European art. The one thing
that was hopeful at Ars Electronica was that some of the artists
present were upset by this state of affairs, and felt that much
of the work was dishonest or superficial, and that the festival
needed more focus. This was new for me, where at some earlier
events I have attended, everyone was so concerned with
self-congratulation. If the participants feel this way, we
have the beginning of change, before the Philistines of art
fashion (sometimes also known as critics) cement this
superficial stuff into the annals of Official Art History. Then
the enormous potential of this new form of expression - which is
ably related by other articles in this issue of NETWEAVER - can
more readily be realized by humans of clairvoyance and
clairaudience.