My companion for the two-and-a-bit hours of the Vienna-Linz train ride (the connection between trains and Ars Electronica, strange though it may seem, becomes apparent in the christening of one of the ÖOB (Austrian Railways)'s fast trains) had left a few moments before. After saying good-bye, I went to the station's tourist information stand, carrying excitedly in my hand a physical reference to Ars Electronica. After all, there was no need to present the picture postcard alluding to the 'Takeover' theme for this year's festival I had found in a free postcard stand at the entrance of Vienna's Café Central. In spite of not having found a living soul that knew what is, or may be the Ars Electronica Centre - "a media facility and interface of art, technology, business, science and technology" -, the relatively small town of Linz clearly shows that museum's location in its tourist map, just across the Danube from the railway station. Maybe this has to do with the international exposure the town receives every year, in early September, when conferences, debates and award-giving (the Ars Electronica Prix) take place at the town's conference centre, right in front of the Ars building. Both constructions face the river and the town's historical and commercial centre across it.

Not even a typical early August hard rain deterred me from visiting Ars in the same Saturday afternoon I arrived at Linz. The web-cams I had consulted at home, on the "museum of the future" site, had not proved very informative, and I had to reduce my mental assessment of the height of the five-storey building, metallic-grey and glazed on top, as I stepped down of the strasse-bahn ('street-train', in a literal translation from the German). By the way, in Linz my knowledge of German was much more necessary than in any other place of Austria I had been until then. This city does not seem to profit from the hordes of tourists that invade the country in summertime, in spite of being a frequent stop on the railway line that crosses Austria, moving west from Vienna until Tyrol. I had already been warned of that by the fact that the Ars site used the German language by default, and that often the translated texts contained less information than the German originals. The site stresses the museum's "experimental" character and its "playful fashion", and this can be seen in the joviality of many of its visitors and in the fact that orange-clad guides are always ready to help in using the mysterious technical implements.

The "login gateway" (level 0)

Entrance on the level called "login gateway" is gained through a bracelet that carries a kind of original code bar. Its being scanned at the turnstile will allow us to see the two pieces this floor level has to show us. They are two robotic applications that rely on community interaction. These two pieces can be, indeed, manipulated either by local visitors or by members of the cyber-community. The Museum's sites have web-cams that web-cast the outlook of these two machines.

The first (and perhaps the most interesting) one is the TeleGarden ( http://telegarden.aec.at ), which consists of a robotic arm, whose task is to maintain a circular vegetable bed. Its most distinguishing feature is the fact that those who want to interact with the piece must engage with it. Plantation, watering, soil enrichment: everything is taken into a mechanic, virtual field of space, mapped into sectors and able to memorise and capture the state of every vegetable unit. The machine is supposed to give its human user a feeling of biologic paternity even as, in the austere sterility of a non-living entity, it gives birth to biological life. It can also be used to lighten the physical "burden" of environmental awareness. The prospect states that the piece receives "the attention of thousands of people all over the world" and, indeed, there is increasingly less arable land. We do wonder what will happen to our creation while we are away, which means the piece is successful in leaving a little "implant" in our conscience.

The same interactive ease cannot be found in the workstation that acts as an interface for the construction of a "virtual architecture" in TeleZone ( http://telezone.aec.at ). This project aims at the establishment of a kind of Legoland-style "urban community" robotically acted upon, either at the Museum or through the Net. Its design and construction are left to those who feel like piling up small, Lego-sized blocks. The people behind this project seemed intent on fostering a democratic architectonic society, mirroring those differences characteristic of a contemporary urban centre. This is perhaps best appreciated in the cohabitation of a pre-Colombian construction and a building evocative of classical antiquity. This pair is followed by a 'ghetto' made up of visitors' abandoned attempts at building. They probably became bored with the interface's difficulty (and they weren't the only ones).

The "Cibercity" (level 1)

The lift is itself an effort of immersion (and innovation?) in technology. A flat screen on its floor shows animations in the dark as it goes up or down. A remote allows us to check the available animations: a rocket that is shot from the Ars into space (as we go up) or a 'section' that allows us to see the areas of an active brain.

This level is characterised by the concern with information denoted by its pieces. This information as an interactive object appears crushingly in the form of agglutinations of the linguistic unit - the word - or, even more basically, in the elementariness of a single character. This has to do with the Print On Screen exhibition, which presents installations that relate "tipography, typefaces and text as a medium of interaction".

Visual arts and text fuse, in order to, according to the prospect, "investigate interaction as an artistic strategy", thus creating "digital wordplay in the truest sense of the word".

As a motto for the pieces shown on this level, we have Peter Cho's statement: "The first time I played with flying words was when I made my first paper plane. I haven't stopped since". Indeed, the "flying words" used by this Aesthetics and Computation Group graduate from Media Lab can be appreciated in one way or another on the computerised visualisation of alphanumerical text symbols as a starting point for artistic composition in Print on Screen.

Within this context can be placed one of this level's most appealing pieces: Life Spacies II, by Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau. It consists of a large screen, in which a sea-like virtual environment is the backdrop to the birth, life, feeding and death of beings translated through an algorithm, whose input is made up of aggregated letters. These will be typed by a visitor on a keyboard in front of the screen. Each different aggregation will, in principle, create a different being that will interact with the others until its death.

Other most interesting project, this time one with which the whole body of the visitor will be able to interact, is Text Rain, by Camille Utterback and Romy Achituv (USA). It is installed in a specially improvised room. On entering, the visitor sees a "rain of letters" that falls on a projection screen at the end of the room. These letters do not seem to instigate any perceivable kind of communication - they are rather a poem that waits for the visitor's interaction in order to reveal itself. The projector, situated behind the visitor's back, projects his/her shadow on the screen where the letters are falling. The visitor must "stop" the letters with his/her body, so that they are detained, immediately above the silhouetted shadow, time enough for words to form. When our shadow is no longer present, the letters fall down like snowflakes, disintegrating as they reach the ground. Given the different physical specificities of each body, each visitor leaves behind a kind of unique, "fingerprint-like" impression. There is also a total freedom of involvement with the piece, which easily goes beyond the simple decoding of the poem, into a purely playful (or not) balance of characters. The installation invites us to find ourselves again - do we really remember what our shadow looks like? -, accepting ourselves (or our silhouette) with an eminently practical purpose.

In another compartment, we find a project that aims at deceiving the public and demands its participation: we use a typically instrumental keyboard to interactively access the screen, where another text appears. Symbolically transmitted verbal grammar, that we read phonetically in our brain as we read the screen, undergoes thus, during interaction with the piece, a linguistic, or representative, distortion through these powerful forms of communication. We are thus cerebrally instigated to acquire a new dictionary, where each key in the electronic organ - originally associated with a tone, a musical grammar - will correspond to a change, now chromatic, now comportamental, in terms of velocity or form in the text shown. Unfortunately, I have no information on its author(s).

On the same level, we find a series of workstations in which other interactive projects use language, in alphabetical, animated visualisations, which sometimes look akin to screensavers. Such is the case of Active Text Project, by Jason E. Lewis and Alex Weyers, who have both received a honourable mention at the Prix Ars Electronica 2000, where the visitor can manipulate blocks of text through a specially programmed JAVA applet. Here we find proof that, in electronic or digital art, technique does not necessarily outweigh creativity.

The "Knowledge-net" (level 2)

Described on its prospect as "featuring state-of-the-art equipment, offers users the opportunity to try out a wide variety of different forms of group work, whereby playful learning plays an essential role". Unfortunately, this level was closed at the time I tried to visit it.

The "Sky media loft" (level 3)

On this panoramic level on top of the building, we do not descend upon earth after all the machine-mediated experiences we have been through; we rather ascend to discover "interface-free" sensations. Indeed, both sight and taste will enjoy a capital view of Linz, the mountains and the Danube while sipping a drink. Ah! All that, of course, as we wait for one of the available Macs to access our web-mail page.

The "Basement" (Level -1)

To finish, and because a virtual reality session (VR) was scheduled for late afternoon, I went down to the basement. Its main attraction is a mainframe (from the second half of the 90s) that is impressive not so much in terms of sheer size, but rather of our perception of how the standards of demand for VR applications have lowered lately. Anyway, the equipment still allows for a panoramic and collective VR immersion on a regular basis, something hard to find in museums. Pity that an Ars monitor carries out the navigation, while the audience remains "passive".

There are two possible "voyages": a tour of a possible architectonic project for some city, where we are able to know the project's size, appearance and interiors, before it is even built. The other takes us to a mysterious world, once an unknown, apparently religious civilisation, now dark and abandoned. The stage is made up of three walls upon which are projected images to be seen with 3D spectacles.
On the rest of the floor, one can access media data bases, specially designed for Ars, containing excerpts from some animated or digital materials for cinema that received the Prix in former editions of the Ars Electronica Festival like, for instance, materials taken from Fight Club or The Matrix.

Other pieces are just too close to travelling fair machines, purely playful and easy to operate. Instances of that are a virtual skip-the-rope game and a touch-sensitive, interactive screen, where figures appear and disappear.