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Since 1979, Ars Electronica
has been confronting issues at the nexus of art,
technology and society, and is the world's largest and most renowned festival
of media art. Symposia, exhibitions, performances and interventions in public
space provide the context for artistic, scientific and social approaches and
contributions to dealing with the annual focal point theme.
This years theme at Ars Electronica was "CODE - language of our time" which
fitted well together with the code oriented demoscene. Thus when
the curators of Ars Electronica asked Scene.org to participate in the event
it was an easy decision to attend the festival.
To support the theme "CODE", our team was formed to have also programming
specialists from the demoscene - namely Dierk "Chaos" Ohlerich from Farb-rausch
and Markus "Droid" Pasula from Haujobb and MFX. Other members of the team were
Matti "Melwyn" Palosuo from Scene.org and Haujobb and Ekki "sTEELER" Brüggemann
from Breakpoint Organizing.
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Friday September 5th - Arrival Day
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Droid and Melwyn were flying from Helsinki to Linz in Austria. They
reached destination and claimed the Sommerhaus Hotel at around 4pm when
sTEELER and Chaos called up to tell them that their train was late and
they were not going to make it until the following morning. The plan
was to use the evening for finetuning the proposed presentations that we
all wanted to hold at Ars Electronica. Nevertheless Chaos and sTEELER were
forced to stay a night in Passau payed by the "Deutsche Bundesbahn",
the railway company of Germany.
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Saturday September 6th - Setting Up
In the morning Chaos and sTEELER had made it to Linz. The last 130km
were made by train again and the Finnish/German bunch of sceners met together at the lobby
of the hotel. We found out that a big picture of "FR025-the popular Demo" was
published in a newspaper that was spread all over Linz. sTEELER had passed the
picture to Ars Electronica and they seemed to like it a lot.
Great opportunity that people will recognize us at the Electrolobby.
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The hotel was about 15 minutes outside the Linz city centrum and we took a taxi
to Brucknerhouse where we set up our equipment. Brucknerhaus was one of the main
venues of the Ars Electronica festival. Besides the symposia and conferences
in the main hall, Electrolobby took place downstairs. This is also where
we were placed. We met Iris Mayr from AE team immediately when rushing into the
building. She was the person that found out about the demoscene and travelled to
the Breakpoint party last Easter without knowing what she was facing there...
But it seemed that she was so impressed by the Scene.org Awards show there to
invite us two months later to Ars Electronica.
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Electrolobby is actually more of a meeting place and a forum for the artists
rather than a normal exhibition space. The area consisted of groups of tables
supplied with electricity, computers for the participants and a big screen
area "Electrolobby Kitchen" in the middle for the presentations. Actually in
many ways Electrolobby had consistency with the demo parties we're used to attend.
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The first night was filled with opening ceremonies. First the formal part
at the Brucknerhaus main hall took place. A combination of classic music,
electronic background imagery and speeches was interrupted several times
with a Japanese artist Maywa Denki whose machines of madness played various
types of music filtered with a twisted taste of humour. After the official
opening another concert started outside next to the river Donau. The stage
was built on a huge ferry while the audience watched the show from the bank.
A massive sound and light system supported the combination of classical,
ethnical and electronical music with hundreds of performers in the orchestra
and on stage.
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The last party of the Saturday night was held in an old tobacco factory,
more of a club like conditions. We heard some electro violin played and
watched 386DX megashow from Russia, playing old pop songs with 386 based
MIDI-vocoder system. On top of that James Bond like dance girls made the
whole concept interesting to say the least. sTEELER fell asleep in front of
the Russian Midi guy after getting up at six in the morning and so we finally
made it back to the hotel. That was a big first day!
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Sunday September 7th - Opening of Electrolobby
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This was the first day when Electrolobby was officially opened. A lot of
people passed by during the daytime conferences and were asking for what
the demos were, that we played on our laptops. We also caught the attention of
the Austrian radio station FM4, and Gerlinde Lang made an interview with sTEELER for a
show to be broadcasted the next day. You can listen the full sized version
here (in German).
Gerlinde was really a great company! We had some nice evenings, breakfasts
and talks with her during the following days.
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In the afternoon we had our first presentation at Electrolobby, given in reasonably
short time (30 minutes), Steeler and Melwyn were on stage going briefly
through all the main aspects of the demoscene. After the show people started to ask
question. Some of them were coming to our place and wanted to know more about the whole background.
Demos shown during the presentation #1:
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Later the evening we went to the Stadtwerkstatt to fix some technical details
for our show next evening. Afterwards we had a discussion about all this "art"
around us and while trying to reflect the situation we were into we reached
the attention of Mark from the McLuhan Program from Toronto / Canada.
After some more theoretical and philosophical discussion with him we found
out that he was actually moderating the whole theoretical symposium going
around at AE. Later we showed him some Demos and some of Farb-rauschs 64kb
intros and we found that on his blog two days ago.
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The day ended with an instant installation at the bridge crossing Donau.
We set up 2 laptops on the sidewalk and did some experiments with mixing
live demos together. That really worked out well, since after some time
we had an audience standing right behind us. We met some of the later at the
next day visiting us in the Electrolobby, too.
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Monday September 8th
Monday started pretty much like Sunday. During the day we were at Electrolobby,
showing demos and talking about the demoscene to the people passing by. Later
at afternoon we gave our second short presentation at the Electrolobby Kitchen,
this time by Steeler and Chaos, concentrating on the 64kb intros.
Demos shown during the presentation #2:
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We had a really interesting talk with a Chinese reporter (Hi Steven!) and
some guys from Radical Software group
that released a DVD with ancient C64
crack intros as a "video graffiti" contemporary witness.
We also talked to 2 museum curators from Frisco and New York that were really
keen on getting more information about what we were doing there.
We'd like to point you to some amazing research article the one,
Shirley Shor, wrote about the demoscene as a background article for beginners about
what the demoscene is. Take
a look at her page.
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Later at night we packed our stuff and went to Stadtwerkstatt - a venue for
longer presentations near the Ars Electronica center. The place consisted of
two floors, lower one being a normal bar and upper one concentrated around a
green box for filming the presentations. There were also tv's all around the
building so people elsewhere could also see what was happening upstairs. This
time we used about 1 hour and 15 minutes to have a big demoshow, keeping the
talk to a minimum. Dierk, Ekki and Markus were on the sofa giving comments while Matti
(Melwyn) was supervising the technical side (i.e. playing the demos).
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Demos shown during the demoshow:
We hope to receive the tape soon so you can see how the show really looked like.
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Tuesday September 9th
This was our first day without any presentations. However this didn't mean
we would've had the day completely free. Austrian tv and radio station ORF
did an interview with us and we were present at the Electrolobby as on any
other day. Besides this the day consisted of mostly going around at other
exhibition areas and checking out what Ars Electronica had to offer to us.
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Wednesday September 10th
ORF seemed to be so exited about the demoscene that they came back for
another interview. These interviews are going to be broadcasted via 3sat,
a cross-European channel for German speaking countries (mostly visible
in Germany, Switzerland and Austria). Airdates for german speakers: ORF2,
September 28th, 23:35h and 3SAT, October 8th, 18h.
We had also our last presentation at Electrolobby
Kitchen, this time with 60 minutes to spend. All of us were on the stage
and besides the general part of the presentation we also focused on the
Scene.org Awards (Melwyn) and A Deepness in the Sky as an example how
demos can be coded (Droid).
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Demos shown during the presentation #3:
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Dierk and Ekki went to the Digital Sparks Awards where we also got to know some
members of the Fraunhofer Institut from Germany. We also were introduced to a
Chinese whose interface design won a Nica (the Ars Electronica Award) for the
Fraunhofer Institute in the past years. He had developed a computer interface
that reacts on the electricity fields of the aura around your body. Very
interesting indeed.
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Thursday September 11th
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This was the last day at the Electrolobby without any more presentations, and
in the afternoon we had to pack our stuff already. The most interesting part
of Thursdays program happened again at Stadtwerkstatt where Ed Burton from
Sodaplay had his own
awards - chocolade nicas. Steeler also presented a
couple of works by Farb-rausch for the competition (Chaos had to leave
already earlier during the day) including masterpieces of art such as FR-minus-03
Farbomat and Rauschomat. However we didn't win a nica this time but instead it went
to a guy who had hacked the Adobe Premiere serial code. Ed really did a marvelous
job on presenting the (alternative) award and had some very fresh sense of British
humour we would say.
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Final Words
So, how did this excursion succeed? Our final thoughts after Ars Electronica
were very positive. We managed to bring the demoscene well visible in a
major festival of digital arts and people were both interested and
impressed by the demos we showed on big screen. We answered many questions
and were introduced to very interesting people from all over the world.
Big thanks again to Iris who made everything possible for us - we love you!
While most of the other
digital arts are nowadays concentrated on interactivity and in the search
for something completely new, demos present the very thing they're created
for: audio-visual brilliance that only very few other installations can
outrun on equal. Demos still keep amazing and we're always happy to find
more people that enjoy watching them. Keep on demoing, we'll be back!
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