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Dazzling displays, exciting insights, but no big picture
CULTURELAB
Just out of reach The Ars Electronica festival dazzled, but did not deliver on its promise, finds Kat Austen 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
ArS Electronica
The festival featured a huge light show on the banks of the Danube
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
Yet perhaps more informative society. Now in its 33rd year, the than the piece itself was the event encompasses topics as reaction it evoked in the diverse as privacy and bioart, audience, who jockeyed for and last month drew more than position in the long queue for the 30,000 visitors to Linz, Austria. exhibit. The crowd was clearly This year the ambitious aim was more fascinated than concerned to explore how the worlds of art when confronted with the wealth and science do more than simply overlap at their edges, and instead of personal data accessible online are converging to create a distinct to all and sundry. Other pieces, such as the new culture. bacterial radio made – or rather At night the banks of the grown – by artist Joe Davis from Danube were lit up for a display the Massachusetts Institute of (pictured, below) around the Technology, looked at the blurry theme of “The Cloud in the Net” – line between the organic and which included projected images of changing technology and an “There was no coherent airborne ballet performed by a swarm of remote-controlled LED- case for the phenomenon that is not art, not science, adorned quadrocopters – a more but something more” manoeuvrable, four-bladed incarnation of the helicopter. technological in these changing Elsewhere our evolving times for bioengineering. relationship with data was The impressive mix of speakers explored by works such as included senior curator at New Memopol-2 by Timo Toots. A York’s Museum of Modern Art, huge, mission-control style hub Paola Antonelli, roboticist Hiroshi presented the viewer with an overwhelming amount of personal Ishiguro of Osaka University, Japan, and exoplanet specialist information scraped from the Lisa Kaltenegger of Harvard web and, for Estonians like Toots, University. I was hopeful they from government databases. 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. n Kat Austen is an editor of CultureLab
46 | NewScientist | 6 October 2012
Just out of reach The Ars Electronica festival dazzled, but did not deliver on its promise, finds Kat Austen 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
ArS Electronica
The festival featured a huge light show on the banks of the Danube
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
Yet perhaps more informative society. Now in its 33rd year, the than the piece itself was the event encompasses topics as reaction it evoked in the diverse as privacy and bioart, audience, who jockeyed for and last month drew more than position in the long queue for the 30,000 visitors to Linz, Austria. exhibit. The crowd was clearly This year the ambitious aim was more fascinated than concerned to explore how the worlds of art when confronted with the wealth and science do more than simply overlap at their edges, and instead of personal data accessible online are converging to create a distinct to all and sundry. Other pieces, such as the new culture. bacterial radio made – or rather At night the banks of the grown – by artist Joe Davis from Danube were lit up for a display the Massachusetts Institute of (pictured, below) around the Technology, looked at the blurry theme of “The Cloud in the Net” – line between the organic and which included projected images of changing technology and an “There was no coherent airborne ballet performed by a swarm of remote-controlled LED- case for the phenomenon that is not art, not science, adorned quadrocopters – a more but something more” manoeuvrable, four-bladed incarnation of the helicopter. technological in these changing Elsewhere our evolving times for bioengineering. relationship with data was The impressive mix of speakers explored by works such as included senior curator at New Memopol-2 by Timo Toots. A York’s Museum of Modern Art, huge, mission-control style hub Paola Antonelli, roboticist Hiroshi presented the viewer with an overwhelming amount of personal Ishiguro of Osaka University, Japan, and exoplanet specialist information scraped from the Lisa Kaltenegger of Harvard web and, for Estonians like Toots, University. I was hopeful they from government databases. 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. n Kat Austen is an editor of CultureLab
46 | NewScientist | 6 October 2012