[spectre] linz travel news

[Andreas Broeckmann]

folks,

the ars was, as always, a great place for meeting a lot of people, doing
som business, having fun, and celebrating. by now you will have heard that
marko peljhan and carsten nicolai won the golden nica for POLAR, a great
success in a weak competition, if you ask me. i was particularly happy for
yukiko and abe that their last project for the artlab won another big
international prize. marko and carsten were two very happy men, deservedly
proud. marko said to kathy and me 'you were part of this success', and i am
sure that he would have included many others from the syndicate clan.

the exhibition was better than in other years with some strong projects -
weiser's zgodlocator, de nijs/vd heide's spatial sounds, rinaldo's swarm of
robotic arms - and the regular amount of japanese interface experiments.
(POLAR was unfortunately not exhibited, it will have to be recreated in a
laborious process after having been customised for the canon environment
last november; there is interest to do this, but we might not see the work
in europe before 2003).

the symposium rather disappointing. they had a very bad start on sunday
morning - i talked to gerfried and he admitted that things went wrong,
people did not do what they had promised to do, he was completely
wrong-footed and the claims of the Takeover theme just didn't hold
together. so the hypothesis still stands, but the festival did very little
to ascertain it. the final symposium session about bio-tech art at least
held together thematically and so an interesting conflict between the
affirmative strategies of eduardo kac, and nathalie jeremijenko's
razor-blade-sharp critical work - a great pleasure to hear her. but even
here, there was so little time for discussion (like *everybody* else,
nathalie spoke for 40 instead of 20 mins) that i did not get the sense of a
real debate, but just a presentation of opposing positions.

the more tactical things happened at the kunstuniversitaet (on the lefthand
corner of the hauptplatz, when you face the danube), and although i had
little time to spend there, the venue seemed to be better than in previous
years. honor, diana, cathy and others will have to report. the pr for these
events was again very late, which made it difficult to find out about them
before actually arriving in linz, so i guess that only few people will have
been more than accidental visitors there.

unfortunately i missed the time's up party last night, probably one of the
real high-points of any visit to linz this year. i think sally went?

i'm going to frankfurt to see an exhibition called Neue Welt which seems to
look at cultural changes from an art-art perspective. it's almost on the
way, so i'll check it out. (www.fkv.de)

over and out.

-a