Ars Electronica: Linz, Austria - September 2-6, 1996.

The fabulous thing about Ars Electronica is that as an annual festival and symposium, and now a permanent museum, it so strongly supports electronic artwork, experimentation and research. The organizations that began the festival in 1979, which include ORF (Austrian Television), remain firmly committed and, together with a level of municipal, state and corporate support unheard of in this country, have not only continued to produce a highly professional festival and symposium, but this year also erected a permanent facility dedicated to electronic art: Ars Electronica Center, Museum of the Future.

Over the five-day festival (Sept. 2-6) held in Linz, Austria I saw exhibitions of award-winning interactive work, installations and performances, and attended lectures and seminars (led by theorists, writers and researchers) with titles such as "Robotix," "Mnemonics" and "Memetics." Many hundreds of people from all over the world participated and shared ideas, a simple concept that occurs far too rarely. This year there were 826 entries from 38 countries, 468 of which were from Europe. There were citations and prizes, individually worth $5000-$30,000 (totaling $125,000), the highest award being the Golden Nica. The Golden Nica prizes are given in the areas of Computer Animation, Computer Music, World Wide Web projects and Interactive Art. For the second time, John Lassetter was awarded the Golden Nica for Computer Animation for his work with Pixar in the film Toy Story. In the WWW category, the winning project was "Digital Hijack," created by the witty agitprop group etoy, with servers in Vienna, Manchester and Zurich. In this digital labyrinth, the technology tourist was lured into a trap configured by the etoy gang, whose motto is "always online - sometimes lost." The "Digital Hijack" project was terminated after the 600,000th hijacking because the etoy Web servers couldn't cope with the traffic - as many as 17,000 hits per day. (You can still visit the scene of the crime at http://www.hijack.org/) American Elizabeth Goldring received an honorary mention for her installation "Eye to Eye: Interactive Cybervision Environments for the Visually Challenged." Kazuhiko Hachiya's "Inter Dis-Communication Machine," also an honorary mention in the Interactive Art category, involves two participants who wear head gear that enables them to see things through the other person's view. The gear also includes an angel-winged backpack that contains a battery, a TV tuner, an antenna and a transmitter. The machine uses radio waves to transmit the video image.

The city of Linz augments the festival by holding events and exhibitions at diverse locations including the Design Center, the Offenes Kulturhaus, the Landesmuseums Francisco Carolinum and the Parkbad (indoor pool), where an interactive audio installation entitled "Liquid Cities" by Michel Redolfi of France acoustically linked swimmers with Internet participants. At Stadtwerkstatt, a local bar, Peter Donke, Peter Hauenschild, Thomas Lehner and Georg Ritter of Austria created "Glasfieber," an interactive bowling piece in which glass bottles were knocked down by a stainless steel ball, the sounds of which were amplified in the space, with pictures and sounds simultaneously transmitted live to the Net. Don Ritter installed his piece, "Intersection," under the bridge near the Ars Electronica Center. As they approached the bridge cyclists and walkers encountered the sounds of four lanes of traffic emanating from hidden speakers. As they rode or walked in the path of these programmed "lanes" they heard the cars screeching to a halt, accelerating or smashing. For some this was amusing, for others confusing. After a day of attending the symposia and viewing exhibitions in more sterile environments, "Glasfieber" offered, in Ritter's words, a playful barrage of "real-life action as a sociable counterpart to the time spent in cyberworlds."

At the Voest, the steel factory/scrap metal yard at the edge of town (founded in 1938 by Goring, an armament producer for the Third Reich), Just Merrit organized this year's Salon des Refuses, entitled "Contained: Rearview Mirror Towards Reality." Performed within the physical ruins of the ideals of the Industrial Age, "Contained" provided a symphonic conglomeration of rusty iron and noise in which the factory workers played their 'instruments' (giant cranes) as the backdrop for other highly animated projects by Survival Research types, techno-parasites and kinetic machine artists. A marked contrast to the polished, efficient, indoor spaces of the centers and museums, and the cool cybernetic art exhibited there, "Contained" commemorates an earlier model of production.

The official logo for the Center and festival emblazoned on flags flapping across the bridge over the Danube, on pins that were required to gain entrance into the museum and on all published materials is so graphically akin to a swastika that it is amazing that it could have been overlooked, especially when the Mayor at the opening ceremonies remarked that if ever there was a town that needed an image change it was Linz. (The Center was built on the site where Hitler had wanted his culture museum.) This kind of blatant ignorance is disturbing in the face of the ambitious, daunting title and theme of this year's festival: "Memesis - The Future of Evolution."

Despite this oversight, the organizers of this year's festival deserve commendation for their inclusive selection of speakers representing a multiplicity of styles and points of view, ranging from the "father of robotics," American Joe Engelberger, Chairman of HelpMate Robotics Inc. to Sandy Stone, a transgendered theorist and artist who performed a brilliant monologue on identities in the age of cyberspace.

One of the speakers at the symposium was the popular neo-Darwinian sociobiologist Richard Dawkins who coined the word "meme" in his book The Selfish Gene (1976). In his introductory statement at the start of the Internet's Open Forum on "Memesis - The Future of Evolution," which proceeded Ars Electronica '96, Gerfried Stocker, Managing Director of the Ars Electronica Center, said "memes describe cultural units of information, cognitive behavioral patterns that propagate and replicate themselves through communication." Dawkins proposed an analogy between genes and memes as independent, fully functioning elements capable of replication and busy at evolution. He was hard-pressed to define a meme with the same kind of empirical evidence that would assure us of the existence of genes, for example, but tried to demonstrate his theory with the rather innocuous example of this cultural equivalent of gene: the backwards baseball cap. This fashion statement, he contended, while it may have originated in a particular culture for a particular set of reasons, has now replicated itself around the world devoid of its original intention and meaning. Media theorist Simon Penny argued that the construct of memesis was just one facet of a general argument against the body, which has been an ongoing characteristic of western philosophy and Christian theology. In other discussions at the symposium there was talk of racist memes that were purported to have existed since the dawn of humanity, of impostor memes and big-budget ad memes.

Following directly on the heels of Dawkins, Richard Barbrook from the Hypermedia Research Centre at the University of Westminster in the U.K. presented a paper titled "Never Mind the Cyberbollocks." He acknowledged the positive uses of digital technology but strongly objected to the mystical positivist religion he sees emerging in the cybersphere. There was some irony in the idea that Darwinism in its original form tried to examine society outside of the confines of religious belief, whereas this new Darwinian theory using the computer virus as an analogy, has adopted the language of memes, self-replicating human society like DNA reproducing itself through a species, as a central article of faith for cyber-mystics. Continuing what felt increasingly like a demolition derby - as Village Voice writer Perry Hoberman remarked - Mark Dery, author of Escape Velocity: Cyber Culture at the End of the Century (1996), followed suit in an amusing, multi-adjectival talk on the difference between wild nature and wired nature, personified by the Unabomber's media transformation.

When there's so much to see and do in such a short time, one is forced to choose among a number of compelling works, lectures and seminars. It was my impression, nonetheless, that this year's theme didn't necessarily focus attention on the art, which is after all, the raison d'etre of Ars Electronica, but instead focused a surfeit of attention on a theoretical subject that for all of its futuristic speculation, ignores the horrific implication of the cyber age. This is not based on invisible meme-ideas, but more the reality of the subjugation that's being developed, now covertly, but with our tacit approval, for a level of corporate control and invasion of privacy that is truly frightening. There was, in the dawning of the cable television age, a similar window of opportunity for collective action that would have preserved at least some of the airwaves for non-commercial use. Unfortunately, despite the activism of public-access groups, the general public was out of the loop. We find ourselves in that same anarchic realm, just before multinational corporations have managed to convince the government and the public of the need for overt control. Does a discussion of memes help us to focus our attention and organize for continued freedom in cyberspace, or is it already too late?

ARDELE LISTER, a video artist and critic, is an Associate Professor in the Visual Arts Department at Rutgers University, NJ.