While I’m about to start writing a report about the NextFest I just attended in New York, Idearium published my report about this year Ars Electronica Festival. Unfortunately it has been written only in Italian but it contains plenty of links and they can be of interest also for foreign readers.

This year Ars Electronica has been very special for many aspects. Not only because of the presence of Toshio Iwai as featured artist (great guy) and the wonderful excursion at the amazing St. Florian Monastery, but because I had finally the opportunity to meet in person one of my gurus and, from last year, favorite teacher John Maeda (who knows him knows that he doesn’t come so often in Europe), and I have been with so many interesting people. Starting from my trip mate Chris and his friends Nako, Ruairi, Seulki and Stefan, passing by friends I didn’t see for a while like Andy, Golan, Marius and Paolo, ending with people I really hoped to meet and I did, like Joel Baumann (Tomato) and Massimo Banzi (IDII). I don’t think that it could have been a more grateful social experience than this.
But what about the festival itself? You can start watching my pictures and videos from there and if you want to know more, you have to wait the detailed article I will write soon for idearium.

From a Chris‘ idea, I compiled a map with the hot spots in Linz using Google format KML. It can be watched in Google Map at this url or in Google Earth loading this file.

Is there anyone that will go in Linz at Ars Electronica this year? Just a month is remaining and many friends of mine are still unsure if to come. If you’ll be there, please drop me a line.

My friends Leandro Agrò and Matteo Penzo, with the support of important sponsors like UXnet, Idearium, and Università Milano Bicocca, are helding for the second year in a row the interesting, and FREE, seminar named “Interaction Frontiers” (in Italian: Le Frontiere dell’Interazione).This year themes will be: multimodality, emotivity, and intelligent interfaces (more info here).

If it happens that you are in Milan the 16th of June 2006, and you don’t have critical engagement, I think it would be worth a look, don’t you?

Today I came back after my first Ars Electronica. Althought Linz is a very small town, it was really exhausting walking to all the venues around trying to optimize my short trip.

It was a big pleasure to meet old friends and other very interesting people. It really seamed the place to be and fortunately I was there this time. If I will go there again the next year, I’ll try definitely to stay longer

Here the very few shoots I captured there.

Thanks to Interaction Ivrea Design Institute the 10th of November at 06:00 p.m. at Triennale Norman will discuss about his last book “Emotional Design”. In a sort of way he will try to explain why his previous books were so limited…