frankfurt impressions

what a week. i'm still stunned by all the impressions from Frankfurt Book Fair. yesterday, i put a larger photo essay with links up in Daily s-Press:

Frankfurt Book Fair - themes, sights, links

i really enjoyed putting the post together, and it grew longer in steps. i guess it was both about sharing the place and the themes with all those who don't have a chance to visit the fair, and parallel to that, a way to digest the overload of impressions - after sending out the link, i received this note: "I can't imagine how you take in "authors and publishers from more than 100 countries"!

if you look at the photo above, you can see my approach to visiting the fair: on the left side, in the middle, there's a fair / hall plan, with some red marks: that was my rough plan - an itienary in dots of places i wanted to visit (for example: the hotspot "e-books", the Argentina pavillon, the art books, the storydrive convention). apart from that rough plan, i just went with the flow. which basically is the way i travel, too.

also, i don't try to see everything, and try to find a pace of browsing through a hall / focusing on some spots / browsing / focusing / and taking pictures, to get back to the impressions later.
.

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".