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A pneumatic robot/sculpture called ‘Tumbling Man’, which adopts contorted
poses and plays its own body as a percussion instrument, was one of the
runners-up in the interactive art section of the Prix Ars Electronica, the
‘Oscars’ of computer art, announced in Austria last week.

The robot, devised by Americans Chico MacMurtie and Rick Sayre, is controlled
by two people simultaneously who both wear body harnesses to communicate
their movements to the robot. Each participant controls half of the robot’s
movements, explaining its schizophrenic behaviour.

The theme of the Ars Electronica festival of computer and technological
arts in Linz last week was ‘Out of Control’. Citing the Gulf war as an example
of technology used in violent conflict, the festival organisers stated that
they did not want to raise a finger in admonition, but rather to ‘lay it
into the open wounds’.

Paul Sermon, British winner of the £7500 Golden Nike for interactive
art, constructed a highly political, interactive simulation on an Amiga
home computer, beating people using computers costing 100 times as much.

The system allows the user to revisit the scene at the Cenotaph in London
on Remembrance Day 1990, when a man set fire to himself and ran towards
the monument shouting ‘Think about the people now’ – the title of Sermon’s
creation. It is subtitled ‘Think about the media now’.

Another runner-up in the same category was the Canadian David Rokeby.
His ‘Very Nervous System’ encourages a user to jump and dance in front of
two television cameras, linked via an image processor to a Macintosh computer
which produces sounds. The result is a musical instrument which is played
by the user’s body movements.

The festival also featured a violent electromechanical ballet inside
a giant steelworks. The performance involved electronically synchronised
flame throwers and the apparent near-destruction of huge overhead gantry
cranes that lunged and crashed at each other like rutting dinosaurs. Swinging
wildly below them were yowling artists and musicians in cages, playing gramophone
records with dentists’ drills and detonating mortars so loud that many spectators
had to run away.