»Linz – Laboratory of the Future«: that is the motto the former steelmaking city is using in its bid to be the 2009 European Cultural Capital, and the chances are good that its proposal will really be able to undergo a reality check in five years’ time. The Ars Electronica festival, founded 25 years ago, may well have made a not inconsiderable contribution to this image. This year again, as was not otherwise to be expected, its success could be measured in superlatives. There were 587 journalists present, compared with the 555 invited guests, and the festival estimates the number of visitors this year at 34,000 from 43 different countries.
So this is a global mass event – or is it just a self-congratulatory show for an insider audience? At any rate, Ars Electronica successfully demonstrates year after year how to effectively stage the media-art community’s rituals of self-confirmation. The recipe: take a polyphonous stroll across the disciplines around some free-floating keyword (Code, Unplugged, Takeover etc.), and at the end, as usual, filter out the same unmistakeable voices – that chosen handful of »digerati« who always see so much future that they could supply all the media art festivals between Transmediale and ISEA on their own.
This year, Ars itself took the fact that the inevitably approaching future as prognosticated by these solitary heralds is itself subject to a permanent historical shift as the festival theme The aim was to look both forwards and backwards, according to the motto »Timeshift – the World in Twenty-Five Years«. What came out was, to put it briefly, once again the same highly topical mixture of barely verifiable specialist discourse and equally irrefutable commonplaces that has so long dominated the festival’s image of the future.
As has always been the case, most contributions to Ars fall into a Manichean pattern that serves not least to mutually immunize the standpoints presented: on one side, the techno-optimists who are always seeing the next revolution coming round the corner; on the other, those whom the misery of the world makes more restrained in their euphoria and who contribute a sort of social conscience. Joichi Ito, an old regular at Ars, clearly belongs to the first group. Eight years ago, he painted a picture of the then much-cited »start-up economy« in vibrant colours. Now he is taking up the cudgels for the »Pro-Am Revolution«: »Pro-Ams« are those »professional amateurs« who are allegedly using filesharing, a forced barter economy and, above all – as the latest novelty – weblogs, which are meant to completely revolutionize the old media and information monopolies. According to him, it is the new »blogger sphere« that, by creating both alternative public spaces and an undreamt-of degree of participation, circumvents the diktat of the four or five global media giants. What he didn’t mention was the privilege that makes weblogs possible in the first place, that is, the economic and social advantages that allow a tiny (on the global scale) elite to filter, link and blog the info sphere however much they want. No matter what concrete purpose this is meant to serve.
But at the other end of the scale, too, that of the global social conscience, there is some crude one-sidedness: for example, Ismail Serageldin, the vice president of the World Bank and director of the Library of Alexandria, reeled off the long litany of the world’s woes, before ending up at the panacea of digitization – from book knowledge to the entire national Egyptian heritage. What he left out was the long way in between: that is, how one gets from the digital recording and presentation of old cultural assets to combating global starvation. Just then the image of Serageldin, who was speaking on a video conference line, was shredded by bizarre alienation effects – like a intervention coming from the ether that formed a biting counterpoint to his »We have to…« rhetoric.
Such future-oriented counselling discourses were presented during the entire Ars festival in numerous forms, sometimes more in a reflective, edifying vein, as in the case of Esther Dyson or in Sherry Turkle’s Tamagochi psychology, sometimes in a more pseudo-apocalyptic way, as in Bruce Sterling’s show tirades against RFIDs (Radio Frequency Identification Tags), the new »gizmo« of a now completely trivialized discourse of surveillance.
In view of this, it is good that there are artistic contributions like Thomas Köner’s »Banlieue du vide«, this year’s winner of the Golden Nica in the digital-music category. Köner’s sublimely soundtracked surveillance images of deserted, snow-covered streets suggest that perhaps the world cannot be comprehended simply according to the techno-romantic scheme, mixed with a little stern moralism. And also that the future is always just a wee bit old hat.

http://www.aec.at

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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