On the opening night of digital art festival Ars Electronica on Monday, Australian performance artist Stelarc attached six electrodes to all his major muscle groups, strapped on a VR headset, and introduced his new work, "Parasite." For the next 45 minutes, a specially designed search engine hunted down images of the human body from the Net and sent a corresponding 60 volts of electricity into his body every time it made a match. "It's like constructing a crude and external nervous system for the body," says Stelarc. After all the involuntary jerking of his limbs, Stelarc admits he's "fatigued."
In context, Stelarc is just one of the attractions in the wild circus of digital artwork, ambient music, and radical theory taking place at the 18th annual festival in Linz, Austria, themed "FleshFactor" this year. Almost rabid with experimentation, "FleshFactor" may not be the biggest international festival, but it's certainly the most boisterous. From open-air techno concerts to zaps of stray voltage, the festival proves to be a staging ground for both micro- and macro-level revolutions. "In one afternoon, we went from bacteria, to cell ganglia, and ended up talking about the soul," says organizer Tom Sherman. "It's very athletic in an intellectual way."
Though the 250 artists present have claimed center stage, "FleshFactor" is intended to allow for a directed dialog about the evolution of our relationship to computers. In essence, the symposia and lectures that occur simultaneously with the exhibitions are asking the same question, says spokeswoman Maria Falkinger: "What does is mean that the computer is so integrated [in our lives] that you hardly realize it?" To answer such a weighty question, the organizers have culled some of the world's most rigorous and visionary thinkers, including MIT professor (and Agents Inc. board member) Patty Maes, Snow Crash author Neal Stephenson, and Mark Weiser, the head of research at Xerox Park.
Sherman, an American artist and academic who co-moderates the festival and its vibrant online discussion forum, says the purpose of "FleshFactor" can seem slightly at odds with its methods - meditation through sensory-overload. In this time of rapid cultural acceleration, "we're not asleep at the wheel, but we have forgotten ways of refreshing ourselves" in relation to technology. The festival calls attention to our control of and submission to computers, Sherman says, but "the main thing is to go through rituals to allow people to get some insights into how things are changing."
Some of "rituals" can seem like explicit shock tactics. Huge Harry, a Dutch artists' consortium, performed a kind of human, electronic ventriloquism Tuesday afternoon, wiring a human face with electrodes and allowing a robot to distort the facial expressions at its will. Mexican Guillermo Gomez Pena and American Roberto Sifuentes presented their plans for Latino cyborgs as a kind of cultural "antidote" against racism. "It was very heavy ... because of the history of racism in Austria," says Sherman. "They just injected the information into the audience."
The attitude of the festival is to go public, essentially to "invade Linz" with art, says head organizer Gerfried Stocker. The artists themselves have purposely designed their work not to fit inside conventional exhibition spaces, and the organizers have made ad hoc galleries in parks, tunnels, and shopping malls. Like one of Gibson's "consensual hallucinations," the facade of an Austrian castle became the desktop for a projected architectural exploration of another castle in Mexico. A single user navigated the site using a small sensor attached to an index finger. "The castle [in Mexico] is from a former emperor of Mexico - who was Austrian," says Stocker. "We're discovering the history together."
From the Wired News New York Bureau at FEED magazine.
