worlds

this weekend, i came across 2 links that kept me returning to their webpages. one was the Ars Electronica festival with the prize winners of this year. the funny thing was that the Ars website itself doesn't directly link to the winning works, or has them even directly embedded. so i went on a web search. found a stellar short film (Nuit Blanche), sound and light installations, and then clicked to the hybrid prize - which i expected to be some hybrid web installation, a merge of image and text and sound. not so. the hybrid turned out to be "Ear on Arm: a modification of body architecture". yes. this literally is an ear transplanted into an arm, and with it, a controversial crossing of artistic (and bodily) borders.

the second link is also about borders - an Afghan Women's Writers Project. reading through the pages, i imagined myself caught in such a situation: growing up and living in a country that comes with so many physical and intellectual restrictions. where as a woman, you aren't free to leave your house alone, and have to veil your whole body. where writing down your thoughts is a dangerous act. where education is limited, out of your reach. it's hard to imagine.

the Ars Electronica almost feels frivolous in contrast - but then, art is about having the freedom of being frivolous - and about the freedom of crossing lines, of being "unappropriate", of challenging expectations and established objectives and perspectives.

and on the other hand, a large part of the Ars Electronica is very much about this world: REPAIR is part of the Ars, a world project that "invited visionaries in the arts, sciences and business who have begun to do their part to fix what’s broken, and who aim to make us aware of the fact that we already possess the knowledge, techniques and tools to get the job done."

more notes and links about Ars Electronica and the Afghan Writing Project are up in Daily s-Press: ArsElectronica festival + The Afghan Women’s Writing Project

and funny. now, at the end, i finally found the subpage of Ars that i looked for from start: a page with introduction / summing-up videos of the Ars event. it's filed under "Showcase".