As the sun sets over the Danube on a balmy Saturday night, the main bridge in the Austrian city of Linz is thronged with thousands of spectators jostling for a view of the city's biggest party of the year.
Two giant screens shaped like sails float above the water, while ships are illuminated by a dazzling array of fireworks and lighting. Banks of speakers suspended from cranes hang over the river and in the adjacent Brucknerhaus, an orchestra performs a special score by Christian Muthspiel. It must be the biggest multimedia extravaganza of the year.
Linz is the setting for the opening night of the Ars Electronica - the biggest and oldest digital arts festival in the world. The week-long festival was established in 1979 and features hundreds of exhibits spread across seven sites.
Since 1984, the festival has also held a prize ceremony for the cyber arts. A staggering 1,373 artists from 80 countries submitted 2,326 works this year, competing for the six Golden Nicas - statuettes that look like molten angels - awarded for digital art and music. There are 18 cash prizes worth a total of €109,000.
They take digital art seriously in Austria. The grand prize ceremony is screened live on Austrian public television and most of the national papers print special supplements for the festival. In recent years, Golden Nicas have been awarded to Linus Torvalds (the chief author of the Linux operating system) and to the makers of the Hollywood movie Titanic.
This year, the top prizes went to Canadian David Rokeby, for his installation n-cha(n)t, and the film Monsters Inc. Crispin Jones, a graduate of the Royal Academy of Arts, represented the UK with An Invisible Force, which won an honorary mention in the Interactive Arts category.
The festival is focused around Linz's unique Ars Electronica Centre. Dubbed the Museum of the Future, the centre is dedicated to new technology and is the only place in the world where members of the public can visit one of a handful of Caves (cave automatic virtual environment).
Unlike other virtual reality applications, which rely on complicated headsets, the Cave is a box-shaped room - not unlike a primitive version of the holodeck in Star Trek - where several people can experience virtual reality together. Through the use of special motion-tracking 3D spectacles, visitors become immersed in a virtual environment. When the program runs, the walls seemingly expand, while objects fly about the room. A wand-like device controls the Cave and adds to the sense of magic.
One can't escape the digital arts in Linz in September. In the attractive main square, a man in lederhosen and a feathered hat talks on a mobile phone, unaware that his shadow is projected six storeys high against a giant white screen obscuring the city hall.
There are hundreds of other works on show, and dozens of talks, club nights and live concerts to attend. You could spend a whole week in Linz and not see half of it. Some is ponderous, some is old, but if you want to experience the future of digital culture, there is no better place to be. As the curator Timothy Druckrey once wrote, Ars Electronica has become responsible for "a generation of committed but dispersed artists, engineers, writers, curators and theorists [that have] found a focal point in the improbable city of Linz."
Pushing the boundaries
Jam-O-Drum: Circle Maze
www.etc.cmu.edu/projects/jamodrum
The UK's Tina Blaine and Clifton Forlines created a musical game for children that promotes collaboration. A round table allows four people to make music together by directing a virtual ball to the centre. Inspired by experiences of communal music-making in non-western cultures, the pair developed the game while on a residency at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania.
Faust II Hybrid Version
www.vision.co.jp/66b
In a converted tobacco factory, a performance by a Japanese dance troupe dressed in futuristic costumes -66b/cell - revived Goethe's myth to a soundtrack of techno music: a seamless marriage of contemporary dance and cutting-edge computer graphics.
Painstation
www.painstation.de
Painstation, a version of the arcade classic Pong, won an honorary mention. On a two-player console, players compete by placing one hand on a metallic sensor. For each lost point, the console administers a small electric shock. Lose three times in a row and a tiny wire whiplashes your palm. Sound a terrible idea? In Linz, people queued up to get hurt.
The Crossing-Project
www.crossingproject.net
A virtual exploration of Hindu mythology, Ranjit Makkuni's The Crossing Project is a journey through the Indian city of Banaras, on the banks of the River Ganges and the legendary home of the Indian deity Shiva. The exhibit's e-rickshaw, complete with monitor, was a talking point.
