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Ars Electronica 2010: Sidetrack or Crossroads? LEA Magazine Article

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The robot Dirk by Electric Circus at the Ars Electronica 2010. Photograph: Erkki Huhtamo

LEA Volume 17 Issue 1
Senior Editor for this issue: Lanfranco Aceti

Reference: Erkki Huhtamo, “Ars Electronica 2010: Sidetrack or Crossroads?,” ed. Lanfranco Aceti, Leonardo Electronic Almanac (Mish Mash) 17, no. 1 (2011): 196-199.

Ars Electronica 2010: Sidetrack or Crossroads?
by Erkki Huhtamo
Article DOI: 10.5900/SU_9781906897116_2011.17(1)_196

After the Ars Electronica 2010 festival was over, the press office triumphantly touted in its communiqué: “90,227 visitors at the greatest Ars Electronica Festival since 1979.” For someone who has visited the festival every year since 1989 (with only two exceptions), it is easy to simply reverse the statement, and claim that this was the poorest – or to put it more nicely: the most mediocre – Ars Electronica of the past twenty years.

Full article is available for download as a pdf at the bottom of the page.

The first issue of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA) is published on line as free PDF but will also be rolled out as Amazon Print on Demand and will be available on iTunes, iPad, Kindle and other e-publishing outlets. As the Mish Mash issue becomes available on the different platforms we will send out announcements via LEA’s mailing list and through LEA’s social networks. To view the full list of articles in the table of content please click here.

Lanfranco Aceti is known for his social activism and extensive career as artist, curator, and academic. He is a research affiliate and visiting professor at ACT @ Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the Arts Administration Program at Boston University. He is also the Editor in Chief of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac, The MIT Press. He has exhibited numerous personal projects including Car Park, a public performance in the UK at the John Hansard Gallery; Who The People?, an installation artwork acquired in its entirety by the Chetham’s Library and Museum in Manchester; Sowing and Reaping, installation artworks acquired in their entirety by the National Museum of Contemporary Art of Cyprus; and Hope Coming On, a site-specific choral performance he designed for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, with the collaboration of the Boston Children’s Chorus, and realized in front of Turner’s Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On). In 2017, Aceti prepared a series of new artworks for an exhibition entitled Shimmer and curated by Irini Papadimitriou (V&A) at the Tobazi Mansion in Hydra, a new large choral performance titled Accursed for the Thessaloniki Biennial in Greece; and Knock, Knock, Knocking a public space installation in the Mediterranean Garden Pavilion of the New Sea Waterfront of Thessaloniki.