We're T-minus 100 days until the Ars Electronica Festival opens in Linz Austria, and the Golden Nicas winners were just released.
COMPUTER ANIMATION / FILM / VFX
Ben Hibon’s Codehunters is an action-packed, apocalyptic work of animation. It’s set in the distant future in the slums of Lhek, a Far Eastern city that’s being plunged into chaos. Here, might makes right since the evil Khaan eliminated Krai, his last adversary, and installed his reign of terror. But resistance rears its head again with the emergence of Shen, Lawan, Zom and Nhi. They’re the Codehunters and their aim is to triumph though all who’ve gone before them have failed. In a final, decisive battle, their mission is to free the land and its inhabitants from Khaan’s stranglehold and to help Krai regain power and reestablish just rule ...DIGITAL MUSICS
Mashiro Miwa’s Reverse Simulation Music is based on composition structures developed by computer and then played by musicians, performers or mechanical devices. Depending on the concrete movements and actions of the performers as they go about this, prescribed rules and calculations are acoustically reproduced in a particular or a random (improvised) order. In contrast to traditional compositions, “Reverse Simulation Music” is not an effort to intonate and acoustically recreate natural phenomena; it rather does just the opposite: transform “artificial,” computer-developed rules and structures into natural phenomena.HYBRID ART
Located at the School of Anatomy & Human Biology, University of Western Australia SymbioticA is an artistic laboratory dedicated to the research, learning and critique of life sciences. SymbioticA is the first research laboratory of its kind, in that it enables artists to engage in wet biology practices in a biological science department.
SymbioticA sets out to provide a situation where interdisciplinary research and other knowledge and concept generating activities can take place. It provides an opportunity for researchers to pursue curiosity-based explorations free of the demands and constraints associated with the current culture of scientific research while still complying with regulations. SymbioticA also offers a new means of artistic inquiry, one in which artists actively use the tools and technologies of science, not just to comment about them, but also to explore their possibilities.INTERACTIVE ART
Ashok Sukumaran’s Park View Hotel opens up a dialog between human beings and architecture. The setting is the César Chavez Plaza and the adjacent Fairmont Hotel in downtown San José. A specially constructed telescopic sight makes it possible to focus in on and “mark” individual windows of the hotel building as well as street lamps on the plaza below. Variously colored light impulses follow the “route” thus established, jumping from window to window and across the street to the street lamps on the plaza. Human being, park and hotel building communicate with one another.DIGITAL COMMUNITIES
Overmundo was developed by Hermano Vianna, Alexandre Youssef, Ronaldo Lemos and José Marcelo Zacchi and is both a community as well as a software tool. The Web 2.0 platform focuses on Brazilian cultures in all their diversity and complexity. Texts, images, videos and pieces of music reflect the age groups, genders, ethnic groups, regions and languages of Brazilian society/societies. Overmundo is an open and transparent online discussion forum that bridges geographical and social barriers. It conveys culturally and sociopolitically relevant discussions and scenes from large urban centers to rural regions.u19- FREESTYLE COMPUTING
VoIP-Wiki is a voice-over IP system that can be used for a variety of different purposes. For instance, it makes it possible to acoustically access information in a wiki system like Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. The voice connection is made either via voice-over IP, cell phone or landline. The project was realized in cooperation with the Carinthian Association of the Blind. Its many potential applications promise to substantially improve the quality of life of people who are blind or have impaired vision.
