you Tanya Cushman Reviewer Reviewer Tanya Cushman Reviewer Hello and welcome to us, Electronica home delivery on a very sad day for all of us. A few days ago, actually on February 12th, Hannes Leopold Zeder, the founder of Ars Electronica, passed away due to the complications of his sickness that he got when he was in hospital a chain of very terrible unlucky coincidences and within a very short time suddenly he is gone and he's leaving a legacy that is incredible outstanding that probably only very few people worldwide can actually say that their ideas created such a big impact that the ideas that he created for our city here in Linz 42 years ago have meanwhile become an international marking milestone for the digital culture of the 21st century. Today was his funeral and now this evening we are trying to make a little journey back into his life for us electronica. Anders Leopold Seder was also a very successful journalist and a very important manager of the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation. But these things we will leave aside this evening and we will focus on what he achieved not only for us electronica but what he achieved with us electronica for the creation and definition of new art genres and a new approach to digital culture. Together with me here this evening are Christina Schöpf. She worked with Hannes very closely, not only in the ORF, in the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation, but in particular in these 42 years of the Ars Electronica. She was there when the first festival happened. She witnessed as a journalist the early years, and I think then, 1982, you started to bring in your own ideas, your own programs. You have been extremely influential, I think, to help Hannes to give his vision a shape, to help him to find the right artists, the right scientists, the right theoreticians that were absolutely necessary to create something like Ars Electronica. Together with us here this evening is also Horst Hörtner. So he and Jutta Schmiderer both together with me represent the next generation of Ars Electronica. We came into the universe of Ars Electronica in 1995 after Hannes and again Christine scouted us as possibly the right people to work with and for Hannes on probably one of his most important achievements, the foundation of the Ars Electronica Center. Horst went on to start the Ars Electronica Future Lab, which he developed into a major pillar of Ars Electronica, founded and rooted very much in this original vision of Hannes Leopold Seder and Jutta Schmiderer organized for many years the annual festival and then she became the Mrs. Ars Electronica books. I don't know how many books she edited in all these years for Ars Electronica, how many catalogs, but in particular she was responsible for the frequent publications that we put out summarizing the history of us electronica and everybody who knew Hannes Leopold Zeta remembers how important it was for him to make sure that all these achievements are also properly documented to make sure that all these achievements are also properly documented. Not his achievements, but the achievements of the artists, the achievements of the scientists, of all the people that gathered around us, Electronica. And together with them, we will now look at some elements, some snippets of this wonderful history of meanwhile 42 years. And I would show some videos, some photos, and then ask you to give us some comments. And of course, in particular, you, Christine, because you are now more or less the only one really knowing all about the long history. And maybe we start the whole thing with asking Hannes himself. For 20 years of uss Electronica we made a very nice video documentary and from this one I have a short interview with him where he explains the original idea and then we see some examples of this really great and exciting first festival in 1979. The computer musician from Linz, Hubert Bognemeyer, and I were basically working from two ideas when we initiated the Ars Electronica. One was the idea of a forum for experts, experts from the fields of electronics, starting from computer music, but also expanding into other fields. We wanted to focus on the raw material of the future, electronics and microelectronics. The second idea was to get people involved, to go beyond the world of experts, following the motto Culture for Everyone, which was the issue of the 70s this led to the inception of the cloud of sound the cloud of sound opened ours electronica tens of thousands of people came and that was the start of our success The people of Linz were invited to actively participate. Everyone was asked to place a radio in the window to amplify the effect of the cloud of sound. Place a radio in the window or come to the Danube Park. The first Linz cloud of sound is launched as the start of a new festival for art and technology. The organizers, Brucknerhaus Linz and ORF Upper Austria, were hoping for about 20,000 visitors as they prepared the Linz Cloud of Sound, a classical symphony amplified to the banks along the river Danube. 100,000 people came to the opening of the first Ars Electronica in the Danube Park to experience Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 7 under the open sky. Personally, I find it fascinating. Maybe I expected a little more sound or something like that. But on the whole, it's fantastic. They ought to do it more often, not just once a year, and maybe for a musical, operetta, something like that too. When it first started, there were chills running down my spine. It certainly is a tremendous experience. The people of Linz immediately took the cloud of sound to their Herzen genommen und weiter mit Ars Electronica zu identifizieren. Die Pioniere der Elektronik in der Wissenschaft und der Kunst treffen sich, um Ideen zu verabschieden, in Symposien, Workshops und Multimedia-Konzerte. Christian Cavadia demonstriert seinen Grafikcomputer. Das Festival ist ein pioneeres Erlebnis. Der Computer als Werkzeug für die Künstler wird das Thema. computer. The festival proved to be a pioneering endeavor. The computer as a tool for artists becomes the theme. In the same way that you can use a computer screen to generate images, these memory screens are especially good for recording these kinds of simple processes. Three-dimensional images are still every computer artist's dream, but that has not been solved yet. It will probably take another 10 to 20 years to find a satisfactory solution. ten or twenty years ago. Every harmony, every compositional theory says something about the kinds of arrangements that are needed in order to achieve specific aesthetic effects. The computer is an excellent instrument for putting these kinds of arrangements into a system. Using programs we can define the arrangements. Then a person can introduce a certain idea about the applications of these systems of arrangements. The computer, the computer system, provides a certain style, then the artist can freely and creatively develop an idea within this style. Software that is easily available to use for composing or creating images has yet to come. The weird sounds and image worlds of the 70s are still produced in the artists' own ateliers, using mostly hardware and software that they have made themselves. sondern Sie hören mehr Naturgeräusche, die von der Elektronik produziert werden. When we look at this very early videos and then here we see the cover of the first catalogue of Ars Electronica, what we can see and feel here is already the whole universe that Ars Electronica would develop in the coming 42 years and the universe that the digital transformation will bring into our world. We see this special recipe of us electronica, not only to understand the importance of these new devices, the computer, but to understand that it will become that driving force for a new social cultural development and we see this incredible boldness and braveness to bring all these things together i mean imagining the stuff here with the klangwolke and bruckner well i mean yeah put some laser to it a great. But then at the same time have this super experimental artistic steps. I mean this was really the baby steps of electronic art and computer art. Bringing these things together, not being shy to bring the experiment and the provocation as well as not trying back to bring also the things that could address the large audiences. Looking at this and still thinking about, you know, 1979, I mean, this was 1979. This was two years before the personal computer came to the market. The Sony Walkman was the latest technical gadget that was just coming into market. It was a few years before even CDs arrived. So at the time, that was technologically as well artistically yet so underdeveloped. How did a person here in Linz, in Upper Austria, in Austria, in the middle of Europe, start to have the idea that was such a brave, long and genius vision. Hannes was interested from the very beginning in not in the new technologies at electronics that time to serve the industry, about robots to manufacture cars and so on. No, he was convinced that this new tool will infect our society, our technology, our arts, but also our society. And this together was his main interest from the very beginning. And as you mentioned before, the thing like Ars Electronica, Klangwolke, he was a media man. And he knew exactly if a festival like that, because this was his focus when Hubert Burgdermeyer came with a proposal of a symposium on electronic arts within the Bruckner Festival. He realized that this new tool could go into the future and is a body for a festival, a real festival. But he understood that a festival cannot exist if there is no acceptance in the audience, in the population of Linz. So, as Klangwolke was the fact, and without Klangwolke was the fact. And without Klangwolke, us Elektroniker would not have had any future because the politicians wanted to keep Klangwolke, Soundcloud, and let's forget about us Elektroniker. And Hannes, as he was a political journalist he was really clever really clever in how he convinced politicians at least a politician himself did not really know what happened to him but he was convinced what happened to him, but he was convinced. I know this story very well, actually, of course. I mean, since 25 years we have been, 26 years we have been working with Hannes together, and this is always the way how he told it. But nevertheless, there is so much behind it. Because just to convince the politicians to make a crowd-pleasing event would be very easy. But in particular, we have seen this project with the radios in the window. I mean, the vision of social media 42 years ago and also using his possibilities as director of the ORF to announce this event weeks ahead. And then thousands of people actually followed the invitation and they put their radios. I mean, this is, I think, the extra thing, which, I mean, he was always proud to be the one who convinced the politicians and the kind of manager behind it. But I think whether it was intuition or really a very great visionary plane he knew exactly the difference between the old world and the new world that was just coming about he was always very interested in the future he liked to read science fiction novels and Hannes was a real book reader he he read everything and scientific and artistic and so on but his main focus was how will this lead us into the future? And what can we do that the future is positive? So he was very strong involved in this positive thinking of a changement of society to a better status. And he was very aware of the importance to bring along everybody when you want to change the future. And whether it was because of the great success of the first Klangwolke or also because of this vision, I think the success of the Klangwerke somehow defined very much the course of us electronica, because at the same time this was a new dimension of something that was very little developed at this time. The understanding, the idea of culture, art for the public, even going into public space with art was very rare, but also the political vision that art and culture should be there for everybody was of course extremely appropriate for a city like Linz, an industrial city, a worker city, situated in the cultural no man's land between Salzburg and Vienna. And I would like to show now some short videos from the second festival in 1980, where we see again very strong examples for this commitment to really go out into the public spaces. And let's have a look at this. is. Culture animation in this scene is thought music, a creative that's used to go to the first big join in concert in the main square Linz invites everyone to take part the main square becomes a concert hall the conductor stands on a crane directions are given by waving traffic men and traffic lights everyone is making music. Once again the festival goes public and is well received. Local politicians do not remain as onlookers, but take homemade instruments in hand and join in too. This is the main square in Linz. Thousands of people have come here with homemade musical instruments and thousands have come join in concert will work. Locations are linked in a fascinating event. The German pop electronic musician Klaus Schulze includes live sounds from the first Alpine steelworks in his Steel Symphony at Brucknerhaus.... And the symposium revolves again around electronic technologies, around the responsibility of scientists and artists. Is it art, that which comes out of machines and is made with the help of machines, and or should we fear the powers we have unleashed ourselves? It depends on what you call art. I think computer images and so forth have not yet earned the appellation art. If you look at computer art in this way, then you can look at the way artists use computers and talk about that. But of course, I certainly don't think that necessarily means the end of art. Fortunately, the technical devices are still so prone to disruption that they are capable of producing surprises at any time. To that extent, they are still human-like. Should they ever start administering themselves, in other words, if the programs reach that stage of technological development, then I am certain that external forces would ensure that they quickly become functional ruins again. That wouldn't necessarily be accomplished with violence, but rather this technology would probably produce such boredom that no one would want to use these devices anymore. Instead, everyone would be glad to be, that we have to remain intelligent. And remaining intelligent is very much a question of sensibility. Keeping this sensibility alive is partly, and it may be an essential part, the job of the artist. What a wonderful definition of the role of artists in our time. And what we have seen here is really a number of, you know, really the high shots, the top people of this time in philosophy, in art and science. And at the same time, we saw the mayor of Linz and the governor of Upper Austria playing with self-made instruments I mean how did Hannes where did he take the confidence that he would go through with it I mean probably everybody else would have been totally afraid you know they will kill me they will hate me if I bring all this together and here we have Batson Brock here you know the pope of art critics in this time participating in a event where Ottobine was the time a hero in electronics with the Center for Advanced Visual Studies no, but It was Hannes. He was convinced by the idea of Mahmid concert The idea originally came from Hubert Bubnermeyer, but he could convince Walter Haupt to play a role in the concert, in this crazy concert, who brought in ideas. And he also convinced a couple of high-ranking politicians to play in this politician orchestra. It was really funny. On the other side were people like Pienaar, Weizenbaum, Batzenbrock and so on came and this was the focus on the theory of art and technology. So this was the scene of art, technology and society. We will not find out the explanation. It's illustrated by those facts. I tried for 25 years to understand how did he do this? Because it's actually, it's like the golden recipe for everybody who wants to create an impact based on ideas to work with culture and the audiences. All the buzzwords that we have nowadays about interdisciplinarity and going beyond your garden fence I mean for him it seemed like normal it was never something where you had the impression that he needs a special energy to convince himself about this and he was wonderful I mean we just saw some photos when he wanted to convince somebody then he was focusing on the person and you had anyway no chance i mean at the end you were convinced about his ideas and i think this is really uh this this great thing that that we can say about him i mean which is and this is why i'm showing all these these pictures of the early years because you see in the extraordinary setting that was possible. You see the greatness of his idea and I think also the greatness of his person, the way how he was able to do this. And again, for me, it's being brave. I mean, how brave do you have to be to put programs like this together? And we will see much more examples than later that are even more radical in this sense. And maybe Horst, from your perspective as somebody who is also very much into media technology, when you see these early interfaces of musicians, do you think, and we are all too young for this so we know this only from documentation but seeing the documentation would you have believed that this crude simple technology is something that is so important so to say to put a bet that your festival should deal with these issues instead of doing something that everybody else would have done because there is the vision in terms of society, there is the vision in terms of art, but I think also the visionary power in seeing in the technology something that just was not really there which was only a potential. On the opposite side, these CREP instruments were not really something promising at the moment of time. The power was that he was not only focusing the technology because of the technology. The power is that he has managed to contextualize this positive vision towards the future to a way broader audience. He was convincing the techno geeks at the same time when he was talking to broad families and the non-expert groups as well. and the non-expert groups as well. And this, I think, is the fundamental, really hard-to-copy part that he has achieved, to get this ability to speak all the different languages for all the different communities to address. And from seeing these examples and the documentaries, of course, it's a fantastic legacy with the ORF in the back that we have these documentaries. We know now and can see now what was going on in these times. This is also an outstanding opportunity, of course, looking back from now. And this was even earlier than I purchased my first Apple II, of course. So it was like mind blowing in these times. And just to get it right we were about 14 to 15 at this time and the good thing is other people understood it there was this very important person from Japan Itsuo Sakane, a journalist from one of the largest newspapers in Japan who happened to come to us electronica in 82 and 82 was also a year with lot of mitmach concert and and steel opera stuff and Zakane a few years later when I came here at the RINS in 1982 for the first time I was so much impressed because so far many people are talking just art and technology but here besides art and technology your skill have the special message for the city city people in our societies it is very great things and when I came here I was surprised to find so many in a modern 70 southern people gather the for the your you know sound crowd species I was impressed so many people enjoyed such as a big scale of the event and also you know it's very funny but they two interesting experimental works was done by the iron have a cold or I am opera was still opera which was done by the professional you know amateur workers in iron factories that's how to have the plants and so many people gather so in that sense you know such a new type of the art connecting art and technology already accepted many citizens so I was impressed impressed, you know, such kind. So I made stories. At that time I was a journalist for the newspaper Asahi Shimbun, so I wrote three columns for that, you know, for the 82. When I came here at the RIN... Then imagine there were this long article in Asahi Shimbun and suddenly people in Tokyo could read about us electronica. And the festival year that he is referring to was 1982 and here are some images of what happened in this year. It was the famous synthesizer inventor Bob Moog in Linz. Many, many musicians in the city still remember that they had the wonderful chance to meet him. And this was the year when the Sky Conference from Otto Wiener was brought to Linz. The year where Concorde, the supersonic passenger plane, was like the icon of modernism and future. And these were, so to say, the answers and remarks of artists that always had been very critical in terms of what will be the development of our future. I think it was you, Christine, who brought Nam June Paik and Margaret Moorman to the festival. No, it was, they came within the Sky Art Conference and did this wonderful performance. It was the last performance the two did together with all the marvelous pieces they had performed before. And let me see if I find this, I think you had a lot of fun doing this project. Mal sehen, ob ich das finde. Ich glaube, dass du viel Spaß gemacht hast, dieses Projekt. Es war im Foyer, in der Entfernung des ORF Studios. Ich mag den Partner-Look hier. Sehr faszinierend für die 80er Jahre. Very fashionable for the 80s. And I think it's a nice thing because Hannes always really enjoyed this kind of project. He was so happy when these things were taking place. And he really loved the kind of provocation also behind it. Because still we have to see, we are talking here about 1982. have to see we are talking here about 1982 this is a small town in Austria in a radio studio that usually was rather presenting folk music and this kind of thing and then suddenly these people from all over the world could look at the nerds of this time. This was Bob Adrian's The World in 24 Hours. Nobody I think really understood at this time what are these guys doing. They were using telephones, fax machines to connect Wir haben uns mit Fax-Maschinen 24h lang über die Welt verbunden. SlowScanTV war die Fax-Maschine, die damals High-Tech war. Die heutige Informationstechnologie bindet sich an uns. Die Leitungen zwischen Leben und Information The connection between life and information is like a snowball. A young scholar of Pina. That's time. And again, I think it's just incredible to see where the game comes to mind, the braveness and the confidence in that if you want to go for the future you really have to be brave you don't have to have doubts you need to work also with provocations and here a few years later this is a project from the ORF regional studio also forms the node for two TV projects in conjunction... The ORF Regional Studio also forms the node for two TV projects in conjunction with the Media Village at Brucknerhaus. The motto is not Art on TV, but rather artists making television. A European premiere in the media landscape. Broadcasting live every day via the public broadcasting channel Dreisat are two groups. Stadtwerkstatt Automaten TV and Van Gogh TV. Ein Bankhof-TV. weil es ist ein Filter. Das kümmert euch nicht. Ponton, Ponton, Ponton, Ponton, wir überbrücken den Fluss der Medien, der Information mit einem Brötelschlag. new park with their container city. Reports and films are made there, which are presented in the evening. Before I give you the word, Christine, again, just to make sure that everybody got this right, these programs, Hannes took care that they were broadcasted on real television. On official television. This was not just let the artists do their crazy things and hide them away. He gave them the big stage. He wanted to give the artists an additional space, a bigger space. And it was television. And he convinced Dresat, Dresat, the European cultural channel, to broadcast this. It was every evening for hours. And when Van Gogh TV called the former German Chancellor Kohl an asshole Hannes wanted to cut everything and Hannes then had to sit night and night and night for hours and hours and hours in his office to watch and if there was something again like that there was a red button to stop everything I don't know how often like that, there was a red button to stop everything. I don't know how often he had to use the red button, but I'm sure he didn't do it very often. And what we also saw in this video, these experiments with television were not only possible for already rather established media artists at this time, uh ponton media but also as electronic encouraged the local community of artists here to do similar projects so start one of the really super vivid independent art communities here in the city, in particular at this time, created their own programs and also to them he gave the space and the opportunities and in terms of provocation let's have a look at this here. The squams invade Linz, recently discovered humanites that resulted from a failed genetic experiment? It's terrible. Where were these people found? And Stadtwerkstatt TV alarms Dreisat viewers. Das ist eine merkwürdige Welt hier. Das ist eine totale Chaos. Das ergibt auch keinen Sinn. Ich glaube, wenn man das abschaltet, zerfällt das alles. Nichts bleibt da. Das ist ein großer Unfall. I think if you turn it off, everything will fall apart. Nothing will remain. I should keep it out of my mind. And all other events that humans have to develop, to detect. A TV program set on a crash course. If you are able to do that, then you can do that. Wenn er in der Lage ist, das zu tun, dann tut er das. Nachdem ein Hund geblieben ist, muss ein angrierter TV-Autor sich aufhalten. Es war alles ein Trick. Für den Zuseher schockierende Wirklichkeit. Für die Fernsehmacher ein Griff in die Trickfilmkiste. Erster Schritt, eine Videoaufnahme von Niki. Dann wird der Hund entfernt. Zweiter Schritt, vor der Kamera bleibt eine Fellertrappe liegen. Dann wird eine Sprengung fingiert. Eine Tiersprengung, Video und Computer machen es möglich. The fires of hell and music by Zev and Lydia Lunch in the first Alpine Steelworks production halls. A really fascinating world that speaks to us from these old video documents. What I think is so important to learn from this, I think, for all the people today working on this big challenge of the digital transformation and how to cope with these fast, disruptive changes in our society. Think about fake media and then you have programs like this. It shows clearly, it it proves it's evidence that the only way to prepare society and to also to help and support society to cope with these changes is of course challenging them and i think the important point is that for hannes this was not the fun of provocation but but the new challenge is important. You have to push people into a confrontation to think about how the old is changing to the new. Yeah, people should learn from the challenge. Yeah, definitely he was a very strong educator. And probably listening to us, he would have made something like this. I often remember when we had our discussions and we were kind of spacing off into too much theoretical reflections. He just laughed about us, but not in an arrogant way, but in a way of a person who said, well, you know, you can talk about it, but I know how to do it I think this is really definitely one of the great things of Hannes, that he did it himself he made it possible and, I mean, I'm just looking at the clock now. We have only 15 to 20 minutes left and I have shown only 10% probably of the videos that I prepared. And there is one person I think who knows better than anybody else how much material has been piling up in these 40 years of Ars Electronica. Jutta Schmiderer not being a festival producer for many years, but then also being the person to organize the archive of Ars Electronica in the beginning. So the archive has very interesting multiple forms. So the archive has very interesting multiple forms. We have digital versions of his semantic mappings often in our exhibitions. This is a great work by Dietmar Offenhuber and Gerhard Diermoser, who really worked on the whole thesaurus and lexicon of Ars Electronica and visualized it. There was even a Japanese group of students who made a second live version of the Ars Electronica archive. This is an example of Gerhard Diermoser's work, who in painstaking details really do the individual projects. We see here the contextual universe of all these projects and all this ended up in boxes at the beginning and then there was suddenly the point where i got the information there is a big crate with old material in front of your door or if original studio wanted to get some space for new material and they sent over a few crates with old stuff and then we started to treat it as what it actually is. Probably the biggest treasure of Ars Electronica and the biggest proof of the wonderful legacy of Hannes Leopold Zeder because the documentation of Ars Electronica due to the collaboration with ORF goes back to the very early years. We have tons of this old one-inch tape still in our archive. Meanwhile, everything is digitized, everything is cataloged. It's probably the best documented festival and considering that it's now going on year by year since 42 years it's probably the best documentation that we have about the whole development of digital culture but also digital technology and every time we had an anniversary Jutta tried to make a comprehensive list of every event that happened in Ars Electronica and she brought some of the books that were published in this time and I think the photo that we choose as a title photo for this evening is very appropriate because Hannes was a man of radio and television he became a man of computer and internet but he always was a man of radio and television. He became a man of computer and internet. But he always was a man of books. And he really loved it to have his words printed in books. Books and magazines. Yeah, but books were... He must have read tons of it because his list was really very, very long all the time. So as you have seen, I think as electronic is the best documented media festival all over the world, not only because of the books but of course also because of the TV programs and videos and documentation films. And Hannes, he was very eager to publish a book every year, at least one book every year. And he contributed always a text. So for every single book since 79, he contributed at least one or two texts. And then for his 80th birthday, we wanted to give him a nice present and to compile all his texts he has edited in 40 years and when I compiled and edited and I worked on these texts again this was a kind of time journey he was really visionary talking in 84 already about the impact of information technology on our society. And he was really interested how the young generation will act and will transform our world, having grown up with all this information technology. And I really could recommend this book. It is unbelievable what he really had in mind already in the very, very early years. And I think I'm the only person who read it from the start to the end, every text. But if you read it, it's really incredible. to the end, every text, but if you read it, it's really incredible. So he talks about artificial intelligence in 82. He talks about information technology, about InfoWallet, about, I don't know, everything which is really our reality now. And of course, he was a media man, a man of media. He knew how important images are. So he always collected photos, TV programs. He documented every single event. And so there was a nice collection at the ORF. And I think in 2007, at the end of 2008, when we knew that we get a bigger Ars Electronica Center, we finally had the space also for a real archive. And so we started to compile all the books and different media formats distributed all over Linz, I would say. I have seen many, many dark rooms in that time. And then we started to digitize everything. And Hannes was also very interested that the legacy of Ars Electronica will also be published, will be available also for the public and for the bigger audience. And that's what we did, I think, in the last years. I would like to go through at least three more stations. I mean, of course, a very important one is 1987. This is the year where the Golden Nightcast for computer Graphics, Music and Computer Animation are awarded for the first time along with 1.25 million shillings prize money donated by Siemens. The first Golden Nika in the category of Computer Animation goes to a future superstar in this field, John Lasseter for his unforgettable Luxo Jr. and that despite strong competition from the USA and Japan. An honorary Golden Nike is awarded in 1987 to Peter Gabriel for his creative use of new technologies. I love the technology. Initially I'm like a kid in Toyland. Peter loves the new technology and feels like a kid in Toyland. The Prias Elektronika was intended to give two trajectories, two basic ideas. One was the idea of an international competition with a very large sum of prize money. We wanted to be able to award over a million shillings to artists and scientists. It was not just the money per se though, but rather we wanted to emphasize the relevance of artists and scientists' use of digital media. The second point was to bring together a jury of internationally recognized experts in order to further emphasize the significance of this award. Building on these two ideas, we have succeeded over the past 10 years in making the PRIAS ELECTRONICA the focal point of the festival. the focal point of the festival. And it's actually this idea of the pre-Ars Electronica that became probably the strongest and most important, I would even say lifeline for Ars Electronica. Because the more the whole community and the development of media art, digital art, and in particular also digital culture grew, the more important was of course how to bring these people to the small town here in the small country of Austria. And Hannes understood again in a very visionary way you have to offer something. Create a platform where they can be celebrated, where they can exchange and communicate. And this is now in times of digitalization and full speed has become probably the most important thing for us electronica. Having this tradition and understanding of being a platform. Hannes was convinced that with Prius Electronica, that with Prius Electronica, there would start a grassroots network of artists, of scientists, and I first didn't believe, but as usually, he was right, and this really was happened. And it was first at the beginning, it was a high-priced money, that's correct, but it was first at the beginning, it was a high price money. That's correct. But it was also the presentation. They had stage on TV and symposia and, and, and, and. And I think what also convinced many of them to participate was that it was a very open format. So it brought together different sections of art, of digital art. And this was definitely very new. And this was highly interesting for many artists. Many of them told me that it was, for instance, when somebody came for animation, he said, oh, it was so interesting to see what the interactive guy did. And yeah, and this worked pretty well. Yeah, and I'd like to add here something, just a little bit of perspective. John Lasseter got his first Golden Nika here in Linz in 87. The first time that the Academy came to the thought that we should give away an Oscar to animation shorts was five years later. So in 1922, again, John was the guy who got his first Oscar. And I think this again shows how far in the future this perspective that Hannes had was reaching here in Linz finding John Lasseter at this stage there was the thing that Hannes was convinced if you want to give a future to an event, you need to reinvent and to reinvent all seven years. And this had been really the step. First it was the creation of festival, then came the Prius Electronica, and the next thing, what he always said, if usronica can have a continuous future, it has to have an own house, a home. And this was the Ars Electronica Center. And then you know, you developed all together all those new formats with Ars Electronica, a solution and export, and I don't have to say you. And this is, again, one next step that has to be done to give a permanent future. And he was working hard for this this was a process that started actually in 1991 already with his first ideas and convincing again the city of Linz and the mayor in 93 the city board decided all together with no vote against it to build this Ars Electronica Center zu bauen. Und 1994 hatten wir das Grunddecken. Und ich denke, ich habe hier ein Video vom Grunddecken. Das Ars Electronica Center in Linz ist eine Investition in die Zukunft. Zur Verwirklichung des ASC-Centers setzen wir zugleich einen Schritt in das beginnende 21. Jahrhundert. Dieses Haus wird die gesamte Bevölkerung dieser Stadt in Zukunft fordern. Das ASC-Center fasziniert mit seiner digitalen Wunderwelt, jung und alt. Es ist ganz faszinierend, also wirklich allerhand. Ich habe früher noch nichts gesehen, das ist unbeschreiblich. The Ars Electronica Center opens its doors. The city decides to give its festival a permanent house. And those leading the way in the classroom of the 21st century are the leaders of tomorrow. Since then, the AEC, the Museum of the 21st Century, has been playfully familiarizing the people of Linz and their guests with the technologies of the future. In addition, the AEC is a laboratory for artists and a nexus between business and science. At the center of this is the cave The Ars Electronica Center is from the idea here The Ars Electronica Center was intended to be a center of education for the people of Linz, especially young people but also where people from art and science could come together to explore the possibilities of the digital age. The idea was to popularize these possibilities, on the one hand, but also to provide room for the development of new research ideas, prototypes, to address the issues of the digital age from artistic, scientific and social perspectives. And of course this was at this time really the top of the development of the ideas and in particular his understanding how important it is to create a permanent location meanwhile as you can see the earth's electronica center is already in a new shape in 2009 when linz became cultural capital of europe the city of linz decided to build a new building on top of the old one to give us Electronica a proper house and an extension that was necessary because of the big success of it. And one hour has passed and still there would be so many interesting things. I would like to, because I'm so excited always about the visionary aspect, which is of course Hannes, but I think in general also a great example of the visionary power of art when it comes to look into the future and to understand what the driving forces will be. And one of the, I think, really very famous and successful festivals was in 1990, where everything was about virtual reality. The attempt to comprehend the world with the help of numbers has a long history. Creating digital images and sounds on the basis of numbers and the internet has resulted in a new term, cyberspace. Cyberspace is understood as a site of communication and information, as a place where you can dive into artificially created worlds using new interfaces. You can make yourself not human in a way that is more profound than putting on a costume. For instance, you could become something like a praying mantis, where the proportions of the joints in the body are vastly different than in a human body or even more radically you can take on a body that has different numbers of limbs than a human body would and there's a very interesting area of working with algorithms that allow people to control very different types of bodies in the virtual world if we're going to civilize cyberspace and deal with its conditions and introduce humanity to a region that has none intrinsically, we're going to have to be able to inhabit information. We're going to have to be able to experience. We can do that there. Or wrestling molecules. Or smelling Beethoven's Ninth. Or playing games of tag where you hide inside your partner's head. We're going to use these technologies just like the Berlin Wall went down. We're going to knock down the walls of nationality and of a class. Because language, as Foucault and the French sematician pointed out, language is the ultimate tool of enslaving people. Who owns the press? The press is free for him who owns the press. And the new language is going to be a language of icons. It's going to be graphics. In other words, Ars Electronica, dear Christine Schaaf and the ORF, thank you for this topic, because... Yay, Christine! Cyberspace offers a window of opportunity for radical technical change, but the window will not remain open indefinitely. The window will be carefully shuttered, lest chill winds disturb the paying customers. Genuinely radical antics in cyberspace will become rare, like a radical movie from Hollywood. What are we going to do 50 years from now? What are we going to do 50 years from now? We're going to make a little operation and insert. There's lots of room inside. In the middle of the brain there's the wire goes in there and it rearranges itself then the computer sends out a billion let's say 10 to the ninth little wires and these go to the different parts of your brain where the thinking is happening but also meet the pedal is demand is a tempo omits them link in 1990 the free as electronica also focuses especially on a new direction in cyber arts, interactive media installations. One example is demonstrated by the presenter of the TV Gala. It's Geoffrey Shaw's Legible City, a virtual bike ride through Amsterdam. It is all made possible through real-time programming technology. possible through real-time programming technology. The winner of the first Golden Nika for interactive art is the American Myron Kruger for his work Video Place. I don't know how you see it, probably many people would disagree, but I love it so much more to listen to these very visionary ideas for virtual reality so many years, decades ago already 1990 then compared to when we talk about virtual reality today we hear just ideas well maybe you could sell this to Ikea or BMW and you could make money here and money there of course this is where the technology is always ending up we need it as applications in our economy in our industry but to go there and to go there in a humanistic way, we need the ideas and the contributions of artists. And I think this is what Hannes' foremost achievement is, that by supporting art in this triangle with technology and society, supporting art in this triangle with technology and society. He created a strong place and a strong word for human, for humanistic approach towards not only the development of technology, but to the development of the future of our society at large. And I would still love to talk much more with you but anyway we will do this afterwards here. I think for our streaming that's it. Please use the opportunity to go to our websites. All these books can be also downloaded as PDF and we can really provide a lot of super interesting material, not only about the history of our wonderful Hannes Leopold Seder to whose memory this evening is dedicated, but to the history of a vision that was truly the core vision of Hannes Leopold Seder to find the humanum as he called it to findeder, to find the humanum, as he called it, to find, define and protect the human position in the development of our future. And again, I think we can only pay respect by thanking Hannes and remembering the wonderful things that he did, that he told us, that he taught us, and with this we hope that we can continue the legacy of us electronica for the future as well thank you very much for joining us this evening in memory of Hannes Leopold Sida thank you you