storytelling the future
 
Follow the river

Follow the river

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Wednesday, September 07.

As promised, the Noema Staff landed – in time – in the cozy city of Linz.

On thursday morning we reached the main festival location – Postcity – and started our staff tour shepherded by the enigmatic artistic director GERFRIED STOCKER.

Ars Electronica artistic director GERFRIED STOCKER

Please, be patient, we will cover this and the works description in details in the next posts (ok i guess you just switched to a new tab…).

From the beginning, the atmosphere at Postcity looked very informal and familiar.

My first impression was: “so where’s the festival? I might get lost in some hackerspace…”

This is – in my opinion – the first distinctive question: in fact, i realized that the 2016 festival was NOT going to be a boring-institutional, self-replicating or self-celebrating event, but a living creature where humans, machines, bits, cells (and beer) could interact in unpredictable ways.

So, after i got few times lost in the ground floor thinking i was really coming from the underground, after fixed some POI and learrned that different doors and stairs could bring to different corners of the same room… I developed the winning strategy to explore the main festival location: turn off your phone GPS, use the map only as a sustainable towel for your bio-snack, close your eyes, then breath, hear, smell, listen to the vibe and go. (yes, open your eyes again, please…)

So, later, moving around, anytime i met people lost in the corridors asking if i knew the magical coordinates to find that secret somewhere or maybe the holy bathroom, my answer was: to be polite, i would suggest to “smile” to the infographics and follow the river.