“Goodbye privacy” is the motto of this year’s Ars Electronica Festival. The festival is held by the Ars Electronica Center which is the most famous technology institute in Austria with many young programmers and artists who collaborate with programmers and artists from all around the world. The main goal seems to be to explore new ways of how to use modern technologies and often artistic usage.
This year the size of the festival is incredible. There is a street where all the empty buildings are occupied with special exhibitions. The main theme seems to be second life as you can see many connections to the virtual world. For me “Goodbye privacy” affects me somehow twice as hard as other visitors as the whole Pfarrplatz (the big place in front of our flat) is rebuilt within Second Life and re-connected to the real life. If you have a conversation in second life you can hear it from speakers within the real world. On the other hand you can watch the virtual world on several screens around the Pfarrplatz beach area.
Today I’ve quickly walked through “Marienstraße” and I will be back tomorrow to see all the cool exhibitions. It really is worth seeing. The festival will end on Sept. 11th. So there is still some time left. I’ve also been to both Pfarrplätze (in the virtual and the real world) and here are the images. Maybe we’ll meet in the next days…

So what is keeping me busy? Basically it is our new company. Now legal things are almost through and we expect to get our commercial register entry within the next weeks. Of course pulpmedia is not new but it’s legal form will be brandnew soon. Expect to see our new webpage (which will replace the placeholder page) online within the next four weeks.
The most recent project was the Car Jet Calculator of Alpha Airways which brought us into local television too. Hooray… we are famous.
Besides the private stuff many things happened. Dr.Hu built a DataMatrix J2ME application which works like the qrcode application but with the DataMatrix.
And guess what: Adobe managed to release their Flash Player 9 for Linux.
Linux community in general is very vivid at the moment. Probably you want to read on the homepage of my favourite distribution about some new eyecandy for graphical desktops.

PS: Did I mention that we are going to Paris next wednesday. Expect some gallery update within the next two weeks.

PPS: Is it just me or did you too realize that I keep announcing things within designated time ranges too often?

Short update: obviously I am back from Japan. We stayed more than twice as long as last year and it was fun from the first until the last second. We saw so many fascinating places and got to know many people; natives… not tourists V(^_^)V
In the next days I am trying to reduce the images we took (about 2000) to an amount which is web-presentable. Come again in two weeks or so to get a visual impression of our trip. Sorry… it will take that long because our company is keeping me busy since the first day of our return. But it is so good at work. Just a bit less time to hang out on my blog.

Yesterday we enjoyed our last movie of the Crossing Europe film festival 2006. It was Kontakt, a Macedonian/German production. A very funny and entertaining movie which won the “Ray” audience award of the festival. The audience was glad to hear some statements of the main actress of the movie (who revealed the major secret of the main actor of the movie).

The festival was quite successful and very very interesting and entertaining for the audience. We are already looking forward to the next festival, taking place from 24th to 29th of April 2007.

Kontakt movie, imdb.com