Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1585
10 February 2009 NEWS: CG TECHNOLOGY A Museum Unlike Any Other One of the most eye-popping, mind- expanding public facilities in the world, the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria, has unveiled a remarkable new facility. With 3000 square meters of exhibit space and another 1000 devot- ed to its R&D facility, the Future Lab, the interactive museum offers visitors a view inside their bodies as well as a peek into the future. If you're familiar with SIGGRAPH's Emerging Technology exhibits, imagine a four-story building fi lled with more sophisticated and fully- realized interactive installations, and you'll have a small idea of what the Ars Elec- tronica Center offers. This physical manifestation of the philosophy of the Ars Electronica, known in the US largely for its annual Prix Ars electronic and interactive art and anima- tion competition, the center furthers Ars Electronica's research into the conver- gence of technological innovation, art, and human society. On the building's façade, 40,000 red, green, blue, and white LEDs turn the glass shell into animated art using preprogrammed patterns; the colorful light show is refl ect- ed in the waters of the Danube River below. In the lobby, artist Julius Popp's 22-meter-high "Bitfl ow," a gigantic eye formed from thousands of thin tubes that snake through the building, introduces visitors to Ars Electronica's current focus on life sciences. Drops of red fl uid fl ow through the tubes like blood in arteries. Within the exhibition space, eight projectors can display 4 K stereo 3D images on a 16- by 9-meter wall and 150 square meters of fl oor area in "Deep Space." The system is based on a PC cluster running Nvidia Quadro cards. Among the Life Science exhibits is a camera used in ophthalmology that photographs visitors' retinas and projects the images onto a screen. A functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine connected to Linz General Hospital reveals which neurons fi re when a subject feels certain emotions. Seekid makes it possible to write using glances of your eye. HoloMan lets visitors appear to peer inside themselves. Inside RoboLab, Philip Beesley's Hylozoic Soil's meter-long transparent tentacles react to people who approach them. Inside BioLab, visitors can experi- ment with their own DNA, clone an orchid, and, using an electron raster microscope, enlarge the cells of their own body 10,000 times until they trans- form into fantastic sculptures. It's diffi cult to describe how multilay- ered these and the other exhibits are. The center isn't solely about innovation, or art, or society. Rather, its goal is to illustrate the reciprocities taking place among them. But, why not see for your- self? Linz is Europe's capital of culture in 2009—an especially good time to go. –Barbara Robertson At top, 40,000 LEDs light up the Ars Electronica museum of the future in Linz, Austria, to celebrate a recent expansion. (Bottom) At left, new interactive life-science exhibits show visitors graphical representations of the internal workings of their brain and body. At right, visitors interact with CG images projected in stereo 3D on a wall and fl oor.