Ars Electronica is the world's largest festival of electronic arts. Founded in 1987, the week-long performance and exhibition fest is held annually, at the beginning of September, in Linz, Austria. Marina Rosenfeld, composer and Ars Electronica participant (and MediaChannel staff member), spoke to Media Arts editor Robert Atkins about "Next Sex," this year's edition of the festival.

Robert Atkins: How does Ars Electronica work?

Marina Rosenfeld: It's both a festival and an exhibition. Everything gets organized around prizes, the Prix Ars Electronica. There're five of them — digital music, computer animation, visual effects, interactive art and .net, which is online art. The festival is a blitz of screenings, lectures, performances and symposia. The main exhibition space is called the Ars Electronica Center or, get this, the "Museum of the Future."

RA: This year's theme was "Next Sex"?

MR: Yes. But the entire title was "Next Sex: Sex in the Age of Its Procreative Superfluousness." By which they meant an extremely wide range of attitudes toward sex, biotechnology, gender and bodies.

RA: Was there an exclamation point in the "Next Sex" title?

MR: No, but there could have been.

RA: What was the sexiest work you saw?

MR: That was [cyber-identity-theorist] Roseanne Stone having an orgasm in front of 300 people by scratching her palm.

RA: More, please!

MR: Since her sex reassignment surgery, she studied the way paraplegics redirect sexual feelings to other areas of the body. It was a very smart way of bringing theoretical ideas about sex and gender to a human level.

RA: And she actually had an orgasm?

MR: She said that everyone always asks her that, and so her reply is always: "I'm a woman, so either I did or didn't!"

RA: What were you doing at Ars Electronica?

MR: I was invited. I hadn't applied to be in the competition for a prize, but I was tapped to create a soundscape for an event there called "Ridin' A Train."

RA: That's the late night train through the steelworks?

MR: Yes. It's an event that's been going on for five years and it's very popular. Linz is a small and mainly working class city. It has a huge steel mill with its own railroad tracks running through it, which was built in 1935 and made munitions for the Third Reich. It was bombed and rebuilt and now makes steel for European car makers like Volkswagen.

RA: It sounds like a very dramatic site. What was your event like?

MR: I did three runs of an audiowork you experienced sitting in a curious monorail-like train chugging slowly though this enormous industrial park, called Voest. It's a very sinister setting — you pass by ovens and steaming cauldrons.

I bring in a lot of sound fragments in my work. I usually record them on acetate, which is a turntable medium like vinyl, though if you're not a DJ you're not likely to know it. It's a technology for making records without making a master, so you can do one-offs — something like a direct recording à la reel-to-reel tape. But since the train would be bumpy, I couldn't use turntables like I usually do, so I made digital replicas of my acetates on mini-discs.

RA: You've referred to your music as a "promiscuous mix of the analog and the digital." Can you say more about your soundscape for Ars?

MR: Technology is a tool for me. I think my work is hard to classify. You could call it simultaneously composed and improvised electronic music, but the improvisation has less to do with jazz than with giving the sound lots of room to come apart, to unravel. I mix different kinds of sound processing — effects pedals, the computer — because every machine, given the space, causes a different kind of transformation to happen.

My intention at the Ars was to make the site transparent, not create an ode for a 20th-century industrial theme-park. Being Jewish, I had more complex feelings about the history of the site than that. I didn't want to either accentuate or ignore them. My music can be very still, and I wanted the site to peek through it.

RA: What about the Jörg Haider factor? There was some discussion among artists about boycotting Austria after his neo-fascist coalition won power. Was it business as usual in Linz?

MR: Not at all. Boycotting Haider, or dealing with the FPÖ in general, was one of the main topics of conversation there. Haider's ascendance has really energized social and progressive activism in Austria. I had to take a position on this because I'm working with a label based in Vienna, Charhizm. The guy who heads this label, Christof Kurzmann, also someone I collaborate with, is among the leaders of the formerly daily, and now weekly, protests against Haider and his party. I'd rather support them than isolate them. Their Web sites are all vociferously anti-Haider.

RA: When you tour in Austria, is there a way to make your sentiments known to audiences?

MR: There was the suggestion that Haider might come to Ars Electronica. He's anti-art and has been scapegoating artists whenever possible. I made it clear that I wouldn't "entertain" if he was on the train.

RA: So he didn't come?

MR: No. People thought he might because a work that got a lot of attention was called "The Sperm Race."

RA: Which was?

MR: This was hysterical — it was a project by people calling themselves the "science education team." They created a public "Container Lab" where men could donate sperm, which would then be tracked for speed and hardiness. Women could participate by betting. I didn't bet, but I visited and checked out the info on sperm performance.

RA: Ars is well known for its interactive media experimentation. Sometimes these lead to artistic breakthroughs, sometimes to mass-media-related technical ones. What caught your eye?

MR: There could have been new technologies here and I wouldn't have known. But there was a major emphasis on interactivity. Many artworks were based on a game model. Some were very poetic. Camille Utterback and Romy Achituv created a work where you were literally rained on with poetry cascading between screens. A lot less scintillating for me were the works where you could be a character in a game-like environment. Too intellectual and too-information heavy. Participating wasn't at all intuitive.

RA: So the point is to have more active interactivity? Not just clicking between a few options?

MR: Yes. There was also documentation of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's laser installation in Mexico City that showed how visitors there could control an actual laser show over the city from a modem-connected computer terminal. The piece I probably liked best was by the Israeli artist Orit Kruglanski, called "As Much As You Love Me." It's all about guilt: as you moved a cursor across a screen you got more and more guilt-laden messages. Each began: "Don't forgive me…" The more text messages you got, the heavier the magnetic mouse got. Talk about experiential!

RA: What about art-science collaborations?

MR: Science-wise, the coolest piece was "Artistic Molecules and Audio Microscope" by the Americans Joe Davis and Katie Egan. It was constructed from synthetic molecules of DNA, which were exhibited in a microscope that also allowed you to listen to their amplified "signature" sounds.

RA: What did they sound like?

MR: Not much exactly, but it was a very resonant idea.

RA: Where was the mass media in all of this?

MR: There was a "Free Speech Camp" every day in a tent where discussions were going on and an "Open Access Jam," featuring a radiophone for visitors to broadcast their views. There were representatives there from Austrian anti-racist and resistance groups "M.U.N.D.," "get to attack," "Volkstanz" and "gegenschwarzblau" ("against black and blue," which means the colors representing the far-right and conservative coalition in power).

RA: What did you think?

MR: Unfortunately, too much of that part was in German for me to really understand much. Fortunately, the audience was mostly young people. They seemed much more committed than the entrenched, eighties crowd.

RA: Thank you.

- Robert Atkins (robert@mediachannel.org) is MediaChannel's Arts Editor and a Research Fellow at Carnegie Mellon's STUDIO for Creative Inquiry