Ars Electronica 2006

August 29th, 2006

I'm off on a small holiday tomorrow to the Ars Electronica Festival held in Linz, Austria. I say holiday, infact its more research, never the less I'm looking forward to seeing a number of projects in the flesh that I've seen online.

The opening gambit for Ars Electronica Festival this year by John Maeda – SIMPLICITY is a complex topic that has no single, simple answer. We live in an increasingly complex technological world where nothing works like it is supposed to, and at the end of the day makes all of us hunger for simplicity to some degree. Yet ironically when given the choice of more or less, we are programmed at the genetic level to want more.“Would you like the big cookie or the smaller cookie?” or “Would you like the computer with ten processors or just one?” The choice is simple really, or is it? For the Ars Electronica Symposium on SIMPLICITY we think together about what simplicity (and complexity) means in politics, life, art, and technology. Expect more than you can ever imagine, and less.

One talk in particular that I'm looking forward to will be 'When Cybernetics meets Aesthetics'  especially because Jasia Reichardt the curator of the famous exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity held at the ICA in 1968 will be speaking.  Below is information on the talk

When Cybernetics Meet Aesthetics is the title of a conference that will bring the revaluation of cybernetics to bear as a potentially decisive contribution to the dialog focused on the necessary redefinition of the status of media art. Can the ever-more-blatant contrasts between the “two cultures” attain convergence in artistic work with media? Can the modern-day “art of complexity” of simulating social networks, natural systems of rules, and the dynamics of feedback effects at work in the economy be understood as cybernetic processes? Which current prospects are opened up by reviewing the theory and practice of the cybernetic art of the 1950s and ‘60s?

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