Takeover!
Brian McGrath

Every year, the premiere international electronic arts festival Ars Electronica takes over Linz, Austria, during the first week of September (www.aec.at/takeover). As mid-size, regional European cities redirect their economies towards cultural production, Linz, the center of the Upper Austria region, has found a unique formula in striking contrast to the "Bilbao effect": a consortium of public institutions and private enterprises have joined forces in linking cultural and educational institutions to informatization and globalization in remaking their gritty industrial city. Web designer Mark Watkins and I, as recipients of a Prix Ars Electronica award for a project for the Skyscraper Museum (www.skyscraper.org/timeformations), were invited to participate in this years festival. Takeover: who is doing the art of tomorrow was the theme of this year's event organized by Gerfried Stoker and Christine Schopf. For them, it is art that has been taken over by electronic technology. However, as the lone architect among the musicians, artists, scientists, hackers and web designers present, I would like to reflect upon the festival as indicative of an electronics takeover of architecture, urban design and daily life.



How is the architecture of the city taken over by this electronic version of a medieval European fair? For a week, this rather quiet, insular, regional city is rewired to an international network of artists, designers and scientists. On the one hand, this high-tech takeover of a prim and ordered city located on a bend in the Danube between Munich and Vienna is part of a larger state-sponsored effort to retool the city and region for a 21st century information economy. Following the collapse of the iron curtain old Imperial transnational links are renewing the economy and challenging entrenched post-war nationalisms. Polish iron ore arrives to the local steel plant, which manufactures chassis for the Bavarian Motor Works, and Viennese bankers take the short flight to Budapest and Bucharest searching for new investment. Funded by state and corporate partnership, the weeklong celebration and awards ceremony in Linz are a media and promotional component of this concerted effort to reprogram this manufacturing city towards a new economy quite different than the titanic cultural tourism economy of Bilbao.

However, controversy inevitably has emerged, both as the boundaries of art are redefined during this festival, and as the local and the global clash culturally. In spite of the subversive activities of young hackers in the ongoing "game-jam" that produced new work during the week, the true challenges to national and cultural boundaries occurred when Neeraj Jhanji, the inventor of ImaHima, the location-based mobile group messaging service in Japan, couldn't demonstrate his invention without breaking through the fire-wall at the public television station, ORF, which hosted the prize presentations. This temporary inconvenience pointed to a larger issue, mostly ignored during the event, yet omnipresent to this visitor, which is the challenges these new technologies pose to the walls of architecture, cities and nation-states. This rather rational and well-planned effort allowed for certain artists to begin introducing techniques for taking over the architecture of the traditional city through embodied experience in daily life.

The most public presence of this festival was the Danube River "sound cloud" which engulfed most of the river valley and bounced off the water surface echoing Vladislav Delay digital music through the fragrant green hillside. Austria is a culture of music and sound, as is evident even in the Marriott Courtyard Hotel where we participants stayed in rooms silenced with felt cushioned door jams. Therefor it is no surprise that some of the most popular events were concerts, most notably the classical and minimalist electronic music and video performance by Ryoji Ikeda in the Brukerhaus concert hall – a magical music chamber designed by architects Kaija and Heikki Siren.

The conquest of the soundscape is a profound event in a city and introduced our bodies to the reflective potential of the electronic occupation of art and architecture, and that is the takeover of the sensorium of everyday life. Installation and interactive art projects in and around the OK Center for Contemporary Arts, located in Peter Riepl's striking renovation of an old Ursiline school in the historical center of Linz, bring soundscapes to our attention in a much more intimate way. In the plaza outside the OK Center, a young woman guides a butterfly net in graceful swooping curves. The net has a six-foot long pole and she has a pack on her back. The artist, Haruki Nishijima, assists her in hunting for her invisible prey. It is only in the gallery that what is captured is put on display: Remain in the Light is a visual representation of ambient analog sound waves captured using an "electronic insect-collecting kit". Another sound installation is located along the forecourt to the OK Center. RainDance uses modulated drops of water to produce inaudible sound vibrations that can only be decoded by the surface of an open umbrella. An ordinary umbrella is transformed to a loudspeaker, and people strolling under the water jets can mix different sonic material as they walk and dance along to their private concert. These were profound works that, like all great art, heightened sensorial awareness. After experiencing these works the city itself became a giant acoustical instrument demanding greater attentiveness.

While concerts and installation art effectively created a new embodied cityscape, recent contemporary architecture is altering the way this city looks at itself. The Bruknerhous, the OK Center and the Ars Electronica Center's "Museum of the Future" (Klaus Leitner/Walter Michl, architects) itself are modern icons in this otherwise uniform city. All these buildings' public spaces were invaded during the festival, and each provided free internet access. A casual vertical public realm appeared in lobbies, terraces, and most notably in glass rooftop cafes, bars and lounges. Looking over the Danube from the Ars Center or across the moldy roofscape of the Ursiline Church from the "brain bar" at OK Center (a computer determines the drink you need after your brain waves are read), one could reflect upon informatization and globalization among physical reminders of other historical events and changes while reading e-mail from around the world. I can't imagine a visitor to the new Guggenheim having a similar understanding of body, self, history and culture in touring Ghery's new museum, for the Ars Electronica Festival points to informatization as a take-over of mood and affect in every-day life. The electronic revolution is a somatic one. It's a charge and a force operated on the body, and Linz's network of institutions scattered throughout the city provides, I believe a better model for urban design in the electronic age than the cultural neutron bomb of one giant institution.

Perhaps the most interesting example of this potential is in the WIFI Upper Austria Building. A new regional government educational center designed by Franz Kneidinger has engaged young artists and architects from the Ars Electronica FutrueLab in interactive public art works completely integrated within the building. The architects and artists have linked the buildings systems and its extensive network of analog and digital sensors to several systems of display. This building - primarily a re-educational facility for working adults - senses data, heat, sounds, atmospheres, movement and words from users. The building is programmed to digests this information and display it back according to a predefined code. (www.ooe.wifi.at/unitm) From outside the building, diagonal fluorescent light columns flash cool or hot colors calmly or erratically. Words stream across the floor in response to traffic and data flows. The building diplays a delayed reaction to users' emotions. Our exhaustion, confusion and calm are interpreted by sensors and our actions and reactions are fed back to us in lag time. Our bodies are energy fields, our senses electronic impulses. Informatization potentially remakes buildings into performing bodies as well, bodies we have relations with. Does this daily interaction with our houses and work places modify our behavior? Does it enable modern society to develop an ethical relationship to its environment? Or do we "play" with our environment to elicit colorful reactions?


I walk down the main gallery of the OK Center, a large black spherical helmet covering my head. I carry a silver zeppelin shaped helium balloon that carries a small video camera with a fish-eye lens. The video image is projected within the sphere. This project in separating vision from the body is the work of Hiroo Iwata. All I can see from my floating eye is my earth-bound body groping for bearings in this unfamiliar terrain.

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