Ars Electronica is the world’s top media art agency, based out of Linz, Austria--and they’ve curated three artists’ works to bring to The Lab at Knowledge Capital! We headed out immediately to experience it for ourselves. This marks the ninth time that Knowledge Capital and Ars Electronica have collaborated on an exhibit.

Every exhibit has a different theme, this time with the title Fun with the PLAYWARE Algorithm. There are plenty of people who aren’t quite sure what to picture when they hear the word “algorithm”. It’s a programming term that basically means a set of procedures or calculation methods used to arrive at a certain goal.
Let’s take a look at the works by three artist teams, all inspired by the algorithm theme!


The first is a piece entitled “Musical Shadows” by an art collective out of Montreal, Canada called Daily tous les jours. In this installation, music plays when shadows fall on the panels placed on the ground. And there are forty types of sounds! But don’t just pass by them... try waving your hands over them or dancing. It’s an uncanny experience to be able to create so many different sounds using shadows.
One person can only make limited kinds of sounds, but get a group together and you can create even more wonderful music. We got a group together and it was definitely a blast! If this kind of installation were set up along their daily route, people would get excited about going out on their daily business.

The second installation features four game-like works by Jun Fujiki. We’ll show you one of them. This one is called P055E5510N (“Possession”). It shows countless characters on a computer screen. It’s an incredibly unique piece that asks users to find their character while using a controller to move it around. It takes a little time to find it, but it’s so exciting and rewarding once you do--you’re instantly in love with your character.
The other three pieces are all just as engrossing for people of all ages. The hope is that intellectual games like these will get more people interested in programming and algorithms!

The third installation comes from Future Lab, the R&D department at Ars Electronica. It’s called “Flower of Time”. Everybody experiences time a little differently. Happy times seem to fly by, while ten minutes can sometimes feel like an eternity.
This piece features ten clocks with hands of different lengths representing one second, one minute, one hour, one year, and so on. Participants write down ways to have fun passing the time and stick them on the clocks.
On the one-second clock, for example, the ideas include winking or smiling. When I visited the exhibit, the thirty-minute and one-hour clocks were full of suggestions that read, “sleep!” I was curious about the half-day clock, but it was also covered with “sleep!” suggestions. Everyone must be pretty exhausted :).
The piece reminds us how important it is to have fun and to use our time wisely. Come out and see what everyone came up with and add your own ideas to make the Flower of Time exhibit even more incredible.

The exhibit is free and goes through Sunday, March 31 at "The Lab - Creating the Top in the World" on the second and third floors of the Grand Front Osaka North Building. Don’t miss it!