morgan

And Nick is right. We spent most of the day waiting. We woke up, paid an astronomical amount of money at the checkout counter and had our last breakfast. I surely will miss the bread.

After hauling our lugage all around Linz to find Helen’s postcard, stamps, Nick’s teapot and bracelet, we draged ourselves – and our belonging – the OK square. There we played UNO and a couple variations on the game. The rest can be summed up as: Tram, Bus, Waiting.

We are grabbing our plane to Vienna in 1h, then 1h flight, 1h waiting in Vienna, 9hours to Beijing, 6hours waiting there, 3 hours down to HK and around 1 to 2 hours back home by bus.

Let’s not forget that we will have to go to classes the next morning.

This is not the end of the blog since we will add a couple articles as we decypher the content of the DV tapes and write the transcripts of the interviews.

All the best,
the last time from Austria,

morgan

Today we can take a break since we already acomplished our objectives. Sadly Nick and Morgan needed to go to the lost/found office in the morning to report the loss of Nick’s laptop.

In the afternoon we went to Postlingberg. It was a nice place to see the whole of Linz and surrounds. We went there before since the All Inclusive event opening the Ars Electronica Festival hapened there. We took a lot of photos of the view as well as the blue sky. We then went to the Grottenbahn. It is a train going through cement grottoes and dispaying all the fairytales famous in the area. We also took a lot of pictures and videos of what we say. We learned about the fairytales and walked through a reduced size city. It was a small world showing us the story. We had a lot of fun there.

We then went to the supermarket to shop fo food and souvenir snacks. YEAH!

It is out last dinner here saw we bought fresh pasta. Thanks to Andy for always taking care of the cooking and brinking your cooking plate.

This is the end of our trip. We will start flying back tomorrow night and arrive on Thursday night!!!

See you in HK!!!!!

Helen

In the future lab, it is not that I expect, with some outfitting of science-fiction, as it is moved to a temporary office due to the construction of new Ars Electronica building. Within a couple of minutes, a man with pony-tail came to our desk. He is called Michael Badics , the director business development. Mr. Badics is indeed a nice person as you can feel from the conversation. From the beginning, I did not know that he is one of the director of future lab until I get his name card. In the more-than-an-hour conversation, he introduced the background of the future lab and the idea behind all of these, and we surely grab the chance to ask what ever we had in our mind.

From the conversation, he showed us the future lab got 4 main areas of focus. First one is media art and architecture, exhibits, information design and media performance. Also, he showed us some insteresting demo clips which I never see it before.

The size of future lab is about 70 people and Mr. Badics said he will not fix any one to the lab and let the lab researchers goes as they want. He claimed that it is in fact an advantage for future lab as they can get in touch with different people, culture and experience at the same time.

Mr. Badics also mentioned that the nature of future lab is quite complex as they need to finance the works on their own budget. Therefore, future lab can be commercial and artist. Mr. Badics emphasised that the boarder of these two aspect have to be carefully handled. They want to be not too commercial, but being able to feed on their own, so that interesting works can never die out.

Future lab is an excellent example for every media company in term of human resource and development approach. The lab is packed with people from different culture and professions. With rich knowledge shared among the researchers, technical part is no longer a focus problem. As they got connections from various artist, they can just ask them to come and help out the project and make use of the skill they already got. This may reduce a great deal of time for researching. Moreover, with rich technical support, they still want to stay in the media art field and not going to fully commercial as their goal is not doing art work for money, but making money for doing more art work. I think this is the point that many companies had along lost.

Beside making their own projects, they also sometimes help out some interesting projects. For example, they got a special request from China, and doing media performance for a Chinese opera. Apparently, they never get the chance to have a look at this culture. However, they overcame it by communicating with the performer herself. To them, Chinese has a totally different culture with them. Mr. Badics said as long as the project has the challenge, then the future lab is more than willing to do such great project.

By talking to Mr. Badics, I think they has the positive attitude and powerful support. With these two positive powers, future lab can bring impact to new media art that no one can foreseen.

Nick Wan

Just got back from Sonorous Embodiment at the Brucknerhaus. It was raining for the first time since our arrival.
The event was a mix of traditional music forms and visualisations (VJ style). The results were quite interesting and even tough we had to leave early due to the early closure of the tram system, we enjoyed every minute of it.

Today, as every day, started with the morning call that was apparently 30 minutes late. I guess we are all a little tired from the late nights, early morning and tiring days. The day started with a trip to the Art on the Move exhibition. We had met Tiago Martins at the OK centre the previous day and we said we would meet him at the gallery in the morning. While waiting for the opening of the gallery we met Mauro Arrighi that is also one of the poeple we wanted to meet and interview. Both people had been giving talks the previous day and had been captivating us. Helen, Nick and Andy chatted with Mauro and another student from the Linz Kunstuniversitat while I runned to the Bruckner haus to pick up our tickets for todays events. Apparently there was no need to do so since the Festival passes granted access to those events without extra tickets. It saved us 150 euros.

When coming back, the keymaster was still not there so we kept on chatting with Mauro about the life in Linz and his studies. Mauro is originally from Italy and has a strong art background. He is now studying in Linz and finds it quite nice to be able to study with people form such different backgrounds.

After interviewing Mauro and Tiago (when he finally arrived) we tried both DADAgear and Wolves and Sheeps. Dadagear is a set of wearable computers (ie: bluetooth arduinos) that produce sounds or words when touched. Wolves and Sheeps are a tool for ubiquitous gaming. They use Nokia mobile phones and software written in Python to guide us through the city in the quest for sheeps. The pack of wolves is attached to the phone through a GPRS connection and a GPS chip. It was quite funny to run around the city with such a device.

After lunch we went to the OK centre to see if we could grab any award winners to interview. Sadly that was not the case, but we left our contact details and we luckily got to interview them. We met the MobileLab outside the OK centre and they showed us the “rain coat” of their troley as well as the types of reports and measurements they make. Off we went to the Brucknerhaus, to meet someone form the OpenFramework team. We were lucky enough to grab Theodore Watson, one of the co-founders of the OpenFrameworks programming framework. His framework is cross-platform and he recommends Xcode for Mac, Eclipse for Linux and VS for windows.

We also went to see a couple of forums during the afternoon. They were conducted by the award winners so we could simply pick them as they exited the forum and get a couple of words with them. We successfully interviewed Markus Kison from the touched echo, Clement Picon that animated Musicologie and Sergi Jorda from the reactable.

Now, nostalgic as we are, or simply because all the shops are closed on sundays, we are earting cup noodles and dicussing the upcoming events.
Tomorrow we will go and meet some of the people from the future lab, then we will try to meet some of the people form Linz Kunstuniversitat. Hopefully we will also be able to get some souvenirs and postcards and have a little more relaxed day on wednesday.

bye for now,

morgan

The Ars Electronica Campus Exhibion’s Internetional Conference we went is titled Crossing the Boundary Between Art and Technology. Here is some of the talks given in the conference:

• Marika Hayashi – Flesh, skin, and tactile sense of robots
  
  She is the one working on the project on a robot, which have dynamic movements with its flexible body (You see the picture, Helen was hugging the robot, see so soft and warm it is).
• Ryuma Niiyama – Artificial Musculoskeletal System for Bio-Inspired Robot
  
  The one talk about some project like making a jumping robot or as the photo, simulating muscles (the white things).
• Tiago Martins – User Interfaces for Ubiquitous Gaming
  
  He is the speaker we are going to interview tomorrow, so we talk about his work later.
• Peter Gassner – Fingertip: Applications for Vibrotactile Touch Sreens
  
  Personally I like this project very much. It is implementing sense of vibration on touch screen. It make touch screen’s weak feed-back much better.
• Jeremy Stucki & Christoph Schmid – Retype: New Text Entry Methods for Mobile Touchscreen Devices
  
  I think this one is useful. They redesign the text input method of iPhone-like devices, so that the input penal would not get too much space on the already too small screen.
• Risa Suzuki – Proposal for Slow Interactive Media Art
  
  Her works are quite interesting that have a lot of focus on the use of bubbles in installation. The one that exhibited here in Linz is that one use bubbles and wind to make musics through electric devices. (And we have got an interview with her)

And the animations showing near OK Centre are really great stuffs. That kinds of animations or VFX can only be done by a lot of great people and with a lot of efforts. Spider Man 3 and I am Legend were also shown, so you know how high the technical standard of the overall movies shown. Moreover, not only the technical skills, there are deep meanings inside some of them. Also some of them are reflecting the dark (or bright) side of this world.

Hope there will be more exciting stuff to see tomorrow. BTW, don’t forget to have a look to our album.

Andy

The ideas and the proposals made by the students were of great interest and kept us entertained the whole day. We hope that the few key talks that we have captured will be of interest when shown to our classmates.

We then went to the OK centre at night for some outdoor cinema showing us the award winners of the animation and VFX sections. The OK night started straight after. We walked through the OK centre meeting one of the speakers of today’s talks (and that thanks to Nick we will be able to interview him tomorrow morning).

We are not back to the room and realised that all the shops, including the supermarkets, will be closed tomorrow. This is a huge shock for us that are used to the HK life style. Tonight we will have to keep on planning our upcoming days. Figure out how to find one of the award winners in order to interview him, figure out who to approach in Linz U and meet more people to interview.

Tonight is Andy’s turn to blog, so let me keep it short.

morgan

Today , we have went to Lentos for the ” Ecology of the Techno Mind “, the Brucknerhaus for the “openFrameworks Lab”, the Ars Electronia Centre for the “Future lab”, the OK Offenes Kulturhaus Oberosterreich for the “Ars Electronica animation festival 2008″ and Cyber Arts 08.

First, about the Ecology of the Techno Mind exhibition, it makes us understand that the ideas and format of artworks can be very creative and different. There are many artworks related to humans, plants, animals, natural elements in the environment. For example, there is a work called “Wing Code Image” which is using wind to generate the image. I think this work makes something that we can not see to become visible. Also, a work called “IVE TABAR” which is a human experiment work. Although it is different to understand the message behind the work, it can give a strong feeling and reflection to us.

For the openFrameworks Lab, we have flexible time for seeing the video about artworks they produced before.Their works are amusing and interactive. We hope that we can interview them tomorrow.

Then we went to the Future lab in the Ars Electronica Centre. In the Future Lab, all of us are very happy because we can see or try many works. It is very impressive and there is a variety of works that promote Linz, are fun or are for children. There is a work that simulates flying in a paraglider which is a wonderful set up for letting people sightsee the virtual environment of Linz aloft. I tried this work and the feeling was very nice. By moving our hands, we can change the direction, altitude and speed. Also, there are some works that are very colorful and beautiful and which remind us that the look of the artwork is one of the important elements. It not only attracting the people and making them want to try using it, but is will also enable them to remember the work. In the future lab, there were several works suitable for children to play and develop their creativity. I think the future lab plays an important role to bring fun to the children and increase their creativity. It made me realise that artworks are not only for adults, they can target any age group.

After a tasty lunch, we went to the OK Offenes Kulturhaus Oberosterreich to see the “Ars Electronica animation festival 2008″ and Cyber Arts 08. It was really really really excellent! The animation festival collected the great animation works from all around the world. We all felt we could’nt leave the screening room and move on. We wanted to see more and more! But there are many more artworks of CyberArt that are awaiting us. We hope that we can see some more later.

For the CyberArt exhibition, it brought us many ideas or new concepts. We were apreciating the ideas of the artists. Their ideas can be funny and creative. Most of the ideas, were new to me. We took a lot of documentation of the works. For example, there is a work called Optical Tone invented by Mutoh Tsutomu, his work can create different colours and never fall down, it is not only an artwork , it can be a toy. In another work, we discovered a new way of listening. A work called touched echo by Markus Kison needed us to listen to the sound by putting our elbows on a metal bar and touching our jaw bones with the hand. There are still many interesting works. Hope can we can share with everyone when we come back.

At night,we went to the Lentos to see performances. It was my first time to see artists performing their work in real time. It was also a good experience to see how artists cooperate with their own artwork!

Have a nice + well planned day!!!Yeah!!!

Helen

The view from the panoramic terrace was amazing since we could really see the whole of Linz and the neighbouring area.
We could even see the university residence form afar. Once the night set in, and we finished ingesting the pizza we bought downtown, the lights of the city shone our way and the Lentos museum switched to a purplish-pink tone.

The performances we attended were nearly all musical. The first one was SoundSet, a duo of DJ’s playing with electronic music and slipping us into the electronic mood. The second one was in the rose garden. It featured a group or artists using tesla coils, powerful currents and electicity bearing fishes to create a soundtrack.

Other sounds were not humanly bearable since they were hardcore techno and featured strong stroboscopic lights. We retreated to the outside and talked in the view of the city.

that’s about it for this even,

time to sleep. long day ahead.

morgan

Other than the Open Framework, we made our first interview with Sux from bank of common knowledge, which aims to provide a public knowledge pool to all. In the exhibition, they asked people to leave what they want to learn and want to teach on a single memo. By using this form of presentation, they tried to make use of these contact and information to build a knowledge bank. Although Sux spoke in Spanish, I am still thankful that she could give us an interview chance.

In the Brucknerhaus, many other works interested us, such as Godmode, briefly a scanner that can read the drawing and make it comes into life. Also, a huge 100 dollar US bill costs 10000 cents, which made up of 10000 pieces of drawing. The last one would be the new cultural advertising project, one chooses his own word for printing on the T-shirt. We will return to the Brucknerhaus for one more look on these interesting projects.

After the Brucknerhaus, we went to the pfarrplatz. I guess the first day is not a good day for visiting, many works were still under preparation. I reckon the Koduo would be good to re-visit sometimes. It is about showing people the sound inside your organs. I wonder what would that be.

The following stop would be the Lentos opening. The exhibition which is held at the same day as the opening, showed us some special perspective of art. For instance, wind code image, which detects the wind and air conditioning in the room and visualizing them. For the opening, many artist were there and celebrated the grand opening of Lentos Ars Electronica Festival.

After a break, we went to Ars Electronica Campus:Hybrid Ego- The University of Tokoyo. Indeed, it was an excellent show from Tokoyo University students. The first one was really beautiful which using bubble colliding with the metal bars and produce melody. Also, various of virtual reality works were presented there, which similar to our SIG projects. Other than VR, they also showed us some high quality robots which need a great deal of complex physical programming. Among all outstanding projects, there are two projects really drawing my attention. One uses no projector and camera to make the red laser to follow the black color. I am still thinking about how to achieve such effect. The other one is made by an exchange student from Tokoyo University.It is kind of a head wear that people can wear without using their eyes and they still can sense if there is an obstacle before them. However, too many people queued up to try it, so maybe I will come back later for another try.

The last thing we did today was going to Postlingberg for All inclusive event. I think Morgan can share some experience with you.

Personally,  I think Ars Electronica Festival is organized pretty well with the support of the government. Maybe there is chance for Hong Kong government to support the local art festival with a large scale.

More photos will be uploaded for this sweet day!

Nick