This year's Ars Electronica has Simplicity - the art of complexity as its theme. As usual, the festival has been segmented into the parts of symposium, exhibitions, animation festival, performances, e-lobby and campus.
The symposium will be curated by John Maeda, researcher and simplicity advocate at the MIT media lab. John Maeda has attempted to make the bring between programming and creation more narrow by means of the programming environment Design by Numbers and has written several books, including Creative Code and Maeda @ Media.
The e-lobby is not a passive consuming area, but a place where the visitors can engage in hardware projects and programming in a open lab environment. The disparity between the technological and artistic aspects of projects will be addressed, and all in all, one can expect to get one's hands dirty. Workshops include Python S60 - MobileNet Prototyping, Processign with sensor technology and OpenFrameworks().
At the exhibiton: The UdKer Martin Frey who will present his shoe lover project CabBoots. These shoes use inclinations of the shoe to direct the user toward his destination. Besides the threads that span the mapping, geotagging and gps projects, there is also a large section dedicated to mobile life and the use of mobile telephones in a larger context. For instance the projects As if we were alone, Song for C, and the Silver Cell. Finally there seems to also be an archaic part dedicated to the pixel, which becomes more and more dear as it is now shrinking out of sight.
related items:
www.electrolobby.org
www.aec.at/en/festival2006