1/9/2000
Next Sex: Ars Electronica 2000
Different venues, Linz
Sex in the Age of its Procreative Superfluousness. This year's Ars Electronica once again gives free rein to visions and utopias, and promises to sate festivalgoers' cravings for a look into the future. Last year, LifeScience began to address modern biotech and genetic engineering as the key technologies of the new millennium. NEXT SEX - Sex in the Age of its Procreative Superfluousness will carry on and intensify this thematic focus. But this concentration on a specific field of modern biotech is not the only essential feature of Ars Electronica 2000.
Sex in the Age of its Procreative Superfluousness.
This year's Ars Electronica once again gives free rein to visions and utopias, and promises to sate festivalgoers' cravings for a look into the future. Last year, LifeScience began to address modern biotech and genetic engineering as the key technologies of the new millennium. NEXT SEX - Sex in the Age of its Procreative Superfluousness will carry on and intensify this thematic focus. But this concentration on a specific field of modern biotech is not the only essential feature of Ars Electronica 2000. The task at hand is to consider this technology's social policy background factors and the framework within which it is developing, being fostered or thwarted. And the point is to recognize the consequences and the changes that are coming in its wake.
Ars Electronica, as a festival for art, technology and society, is programmatically committed to exploring the ways in which artists deal with technology-induced social and cultural change, and, as a festival of contemporary art, has been striving since its very inception to make this visible as a form of political work as well. The artistic as well as theoretical contributions to this year's festival will take up again the process of dealing with current political issues on which international attention has been focused as the result of events taking place in Austria.
NEXT SEX
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Ars Electronica 2000 shifts the cultural and social perspectives of current and future reproductive technologies into the centerpoint of artistic and theoretical consideration. Leitmotif is the highly controversial set of issues surrounding the social and biological stipulation of fixed gender differences, trends and lifestyles, and moral and ethical values that are being raised and impacted by the discussion of possible future scenarios of artificial, technological reproduction of human beings.
In the future, who'll be having sex how with whom-and why?
Genetic engineering is the key to the planned redesign and custom tailoring of the material basis of life. Outfitted with this tool for the manipulation of life itself, the human will to design our surroundings has at last arrived at the human species itself. Modern reproductive medicine and technology are going about removing the process of human procreation from its naturally haphazard state. Simultaneously, technological intervention into reproduction is radically and finally decoupling sex from its indispensability to begetting children. From birth control and artificial insemination (IVF: In-vitro fertilization), to sperm data banks, egg donation and surrogate motherhood, all the way to technologies of the distant future like asexual procreation by means of cloning and the artificial womb.
Symposium
NEXT SEX - Sex in the Age of its Procreative Superfluousness
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September 3 - 4, 2000
Brucknerhaus, 10:00 - 13:00 and 14:30 - 18:00
NEXT SEX directs our view to the new potential for conflict in the zone of interplay and tension at the nexus of modern reproductive technology, culture, ethics and society. With critical alertness and the courage to transgress taboos, Ars Electronica will enable the social and political confrontation with the possibilities and limitations of reproduction by means of genetic technology to reach a level of intensity befitting its explosiveness. In speeches and discussions, a series of eminent experts will set forth their highly controversial views on these hot issues.
Robin Baker/UK - The evolutionary biologist and author of the bestsellers "Sperm Wars" and "Sex in the Future" was reader in Zoology at the University of Manchester's School of Biological Sciences from 1980 to 1996.
Nobuya Unno/J - The medical researcher working at the University of Tokyo's Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology created a furor with his development of an artificial womb.
Jens Reich/D - The molecular biologist and scholar at the Max-Delbrück-Centrum for Molecular Medicine is well known as a candidate for president of Germany in the last election, and is a member of the scientific commission of the German Human Genome Project.
Bruce Bagemihl/USA - The biologist and author of "Biological Exuberance. Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity" served at the University of British Columbia.
Carl Djerassi/USA - Djerassi, who achieved fame as "Father of the Pill," is an author and professor of Chemistry at Stanford University. He is one of the few American scientists who have been awarded both the National Medal of Science as well as the National Medal of Technology.
Randy Thornhill/USA - The author (together with C.T. Palmer) of the controversial publication "A Natural History of Rape: Biological Basis of Sexual Coercion" is professor of biology at the University of New Mexico.
Artistic positions will be represented at the symposium by:
Joe Davis, Katie Egan/USA - Davis is an artist and scientist specializing in molecular biology, bioinformatics, genetic data bases and new biological art forms. Davis teaches and conducts research at MIT.
Natacha Merritt/USA - The artist was born in 1977 and grew up in San Francisco. She recently published "Digital Shots," her intimate sexual diaries photographed with a digital camera.
Cultural and specifically gender-related aspects of these issues will be treated by:
Monika Treut/D/USA - Treut is a director and the author of "The Cruel Woman: the Portrayal of Women in de Sade and Sacher-Masoch." She directed the films "Die Jungfrauenmaschine," "My Father is coming," and "Gendernauts."
Marie Luise Angerer/A - Professor of media and gender studies at the Academy of Media Arts, Cologne, her publications include "Body options. Körper.Spuren.Medien.Bilder" and "The Body of Gender."
Joanne Finkelstein/AUS - The social anthropologist has taught sociology and cultural studies at several universities in America and Australia. She is the well-known author of "Slaves of Chic," "Dining Out" and "The Fashioned Self."
Representing non-Western points of view are:
Xin Mao/PRCH/UK - The cancer cytogeneticist, scientist from West China University of Medical Sciences in Chengdu, conducted the important 1998 study "Chinese Geneticist's View of Ethical Issues in Genetic Testing and Screening: Evidence for Eugenics in China."
Veena Gowda/Indien - Lawyer, working on gender issues at the Legal Centre of Majlis.
Website NEXT SEX
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News Service
http://www.aec.at/nextsex
Focusing specifically on the NEXT SEX theme, Ars Electronica offers a daily update featuring international press coverage, a detailed and comprehensive collection of material, and links to other sites having to do with genetic engineering and reproductive technology.
Online Editor: Karin Rumpfhuber; Web-Design: Ars Electronica FutureLab
Art & Events - Ars Electronica 2000
Ars Electronica understands art as an interface, a source of stimulus, and a catalyst for the interaction of the public with the world of science. Ars Electronica also assigns art a place far beyond the role of moral authority. The full-throttle intensity and dynamism with which art can approach explosive issues make artistic encounter an ideal driving force behind social discourse and social innovation.
In a packed schedule of events, installations, performances, exhibitions and network projects, Ars Electronica 2000 will put this claim into practice and enable art to fulfill its promise as a catalyst of social development processes.
Next Sex - Installations
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September 2 - 7, 2000
Brucknerhaus, 10.00-19.00
The challenges that are materializing as a result of the emerging revolution in human reproduction are also challenges to art. The "design" possibilities and "creative" potential opened up by modern biotechnologies give rise to ethical and moral border conflicts involving the operating system of art itself. Ars Electronica 2000 presents installations focusing on specific aspects of this year's theme that artistically treat a broad spectrum of highly explosive issues having to do with NEXT SEX.
With the Audio Microscope of American artists Joe Davis and Katie Egan, users can observe living cells while at the same time listening in to their highly amplified, species-specific micro-acoustic coloratura.
Tissue Culture and Art (TC&A) by Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr (Australia) and Guy Ben-Ary (Israel) is a research-and-development project currently in progress. The artists utilize tissue cultures and tissue technology as a medium for artistic expression. In Nature? Marta Menezes (USA) investigates changes that go beyond sexuality. Targeted interventions into the development process of butterflies produce specimens whose wing patterns do not occur in nature. Although designed on the drawing board, these new patterns are nevertheless completely natural. Instead of "Next Sex," Nature? rather illustrates an alternative to sex-that is, evolutionary modification totally without sex!
Ars Electronica 2000 also presents Natacha Merritt's (USA) Digital Diaries, works of photographic art that exemplify the eroticism of the Internet generation; Dieter Hubers (A) computer-generated Klones, which treat in a way that is both subtle and radical the recreation of mankind as well as the tension between naturalness and artificiality; and Tit for Twat, photographic collages by Kaucyila Brooke (USA), which, under the title Madame and Eve in the Garden, retell the story of creation in a way that leaves the conventional heterosexual pattern far behind.
Events & Performances
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The line-up of (musical) performances and events, compressed into six Ars Electronica Nights, will provide for exciting NEXT SEX artistic evenings. Highlights include:
Opening Party - Ars Electronica 2000
September 2, 2000, 22:30
Ars Electronica 2000 gets into a party mood, with the festivities celebrating a principle of the future and the quality of the visionary view of it-featuring artists, scientists and friends.
Night 2
OMV Klangpark - with Alexander Balanescu and others:
Opening: September 3, 2000, Donaupark, 20:00
Intercourse - The File Cabinet Project - Istvan Kantor (CDN)
September 3, 2000, Brucknerhaus, 21:00
Machinery and raw emotion collide in this performative encounter of the human body with its technological enhancements; the filing cabinet as socio-sonic noise machine and interactive sub-monument.
Night 3
Hearing Monkeys - Lawine Torrèn, Hubert Lepka (A)
September 4, 2000, Posthof, 19:00
In this conceptual ballet, five scientists investigate the biologically-socially ambivalent construction of sex on the threshold of the Biotech Age.
Night 4
Active Score Music
Scribble - Golan Levin (USA)
Small Fish - The Performance - Masaki Fujihata, Kiyoshi Furukawa, Wolfgang Münch/J
September 5, 2000, Brucknerhaus, 20:00
The synesthetic bonding of sound and image is the central artistic motif of this concert performance. Ars Electronica has invited the two artists to premier their installations and software modules as digital media instruments.
D.A.V.E. - Klaus Obermaier, Chris Haring (A)
September 5, 2000, Brucknerhaus, 21:30
A dancer as a virtual character switches effortlessly between young-old-male-female, distorting and reforming his/her body. D.A.V.E. takes a close look at the manipulation and redesign of the human body via biotech, genetic engineering and computer technology.
Night 5
Ars Electronica Quarter Night
Audio-Visual Quicksand
A Contemporary Evening with Jomasounds (A) und Visuals by Dietmar Offenhuber (A)
open air event 20.00-22.00 Ars Electronica Quarter
Sky event 22.30 Ars Electronica Center
A.V.Q.'s listeners will slowly sink into the capriciously shifting underground of visual stimuli and endless waves of sound. Performers including video artists, DJs and live acts from Austria and abroad will provide the unstructured, driving audio-visual underground, and Jomasounds will supply the accompanying survival manual.
Night 6
20' to 2000 - Concept: Carsten Nicolai (D) - Goldene Nica Digital Musics
September 7, 2000, Posthof, 21:00
Current goings-on in the musical domain between techno-club and experimental digital music, featuring performances by the 12 artists who collaborated on the prize-winning project. With: Komet/D, Ilpo Vaisanen/SF, Ryoji Ikeda/J, coH/RUS, Beytone/D, Senking/D, Thomas Brinkmann/D, Scanner/UK, Noto/D, Mika Vainio/SF, Wolfgang Voigt/D, Elph/UK
Social Club - Stadtwerkstatt/A
September 3 - 6, 2000, Ars Electronica Quarter - Stadtwerkstatt, 23:00
The human body occupies the spotlight-the body as the object of science, the body as the object of desire, the body as cultural product.
Program
NEXT SEX Symposium
NEXT SEX Projects
openX - Electrolobby
Prix Ars Electronica 2000
Exhibitions
Events & Performances
Free Speech Camp
For a more detailed overview of all projects, locations and dates please check also the timetable
http://kultur.aec.at/festival2000/timetable/timetable.asp
Places:
Ars Electronica Center Virtual Reality, CAVE, Network projects, Installations
Ars Electronica Quarter Events, Performances
ORF Landesstudio OÖ Prix Ars Electronica Gala, Prix Ars Electronica Forum
Brucknerhaus Symposium, eXtendedX, Installations, Performances
O.K-Centrum für Gegenwartskunst Cyberarts 2000, U19 Cybergeneration, Performances
Posthof Performances
Press Information
Ars Electronica 2000 e Center
Hauptstraße 2
4040 Linz
Austria
Gabriele Hofer
fon: +43.732.7272-780
fax: +43.732.7272-77
gabriele@aec.at
Ursula Kürmayr
fon: +43.732.7272-16
fax: +43.732.7272-2
ursula@aec.at