Boston Cyberarts Festival

two very different takes on the 2005 Boston Cyberarts Festival:

my favorite snippets:

From the NYTimes: "Interactive art is irritating... machines make no bones about their own flaw, but are unbending about yours... is every piece of interactive art designed to make you feel like a fascist, a dupe, a cult member or someone cornered by a pervert at a party? No, of course not... Scott Snibbe's 'Shadow Play,' a four-part installation of video projections linked to camera sensors... Hooray! Here's a machine that is not your enemy or your superior... Alas, some cyberworks combine all the annoyances of interactive art (prurience, ritual, ungraciousness and moral superiority) to produce a mega-annoyance: total frustration. Case in point: John Klima's 'Trains'... "

From Wired: "The Cyberarts Festival's 70 exhibitions combine computer technology with dance, poetry, music and digital images... 'The living world -- us -- is becoming embedded in the software of the virtual world,'... Many of the artists contributing to the Cyberarts Festival are exploring the new media literacy, in which stories are told and received in a nonlinear fashion... Corporations such as Intel, which has an employee participating in a Cyberarts Festival panel discussion next week, are eager to see the uses that artists come up with for mobile phones and other devices with location-tracking capabilities... 'Everyone is a broadcaster of information and self-expression,'... 'We have access to more information than ever, we are self-confident and we have the tools to create.'