Their purpose with the next machine was to reduce the risk of activism. Painting their slogan on the wall is the basis of demonstrations, but it’s regarded as an act to destroy public facilities and they have to take the risk of being arrested. This ‘GrafittiWriter’ was created to reduce this risk. The robot employs 5 spray cans to write text messages at a rate of 10 miles per hour. Since 1998, they’ve held more than 200 demonstrations in America and Europe, but it has not been arrested yet.

This ‘GrafittiWriter’ has a kind of a function to communicate as well as ‘Little Brother’. People come to enjoy ‘committing this minor offense operated by remote control’ with their interests in the robot itself. In past demonstrations, some audiences who were interested in this robot actually operated this ‘GrafittiWriter’ on their own initiative. ‘People regardless of sex and age from roadmen and the homeless to policemen and the girl scouts enjoyed operating this robot. This would never happen in ordinary demonstrations’, one of the members said.

At the award ceremony of Prix, ‘GrafittiWriter’ made the biggest impact to the audience. Though it was a live broadcasting at the studio of ORF (Australian public broadcasting), the robot suddenly started painting the url of ‘Public Netbase‘ which was the influential media-cultural center facing a crisis of life or death, and called attention to support them. In the passageway of the TV station, I found the painting said ‘no one is illegal’ in German. This was a slogan of the movements of fundamental human rights of illegal immigrants in Europe.

This year’s interactive art section showed us that really attractive new forms of art were created using interactive technologies.

Since last year, the theme is getting to be unclear. It’s also getting difficult to understand the prize-winning works at Pris Ars Electronica.

This years Ars Electronica was totally contrary to our expectations in both good and bad ways. But this is the only festival that can collect a number of artworks and projects together in the world. And it gives us lucky finds and disappointments we’ve never expected. It should not be interesting enough if there are only things we expect, so do not expect anything and just go there.

However, the present situation in which the so-called latest technology is becoming commonplace, should we leave everything to Ars Electronica? Like Zai who is the CEO of Etoy and a network artist visits this festival regularly says, ‘Ars Electronica needs a new idea’, the earth and people still need more incubators of ideas in order to make electronic art more attractive.

Ars Electronica 2000
Date: September 2nd – 7th, 2000
Place: Linz, Austria
https://www.aec.at/nextsex