Here on the last day at Ars Electronica – currently sitting in on the last conference with Alexei Shulgin, Christiane Paul, Amy Alexander, and others… talking about art and software. So far the fest has been a wide array of talks and some interesting installations – mostly discussing how art and code can co-exist. The Maywa Denki beat machine (pictured above) that switches 100 volts with every switch and controls an automated drum machine is truly inspiring..

Main questions: Is code a viable language? Is the art the code or vise versa? Despite the emphasis on creation of code, there seems to be little dialog on people who actually use the code or resulting artwork that has been created. Is this not as important as the code itself? In my opinion this is the most important aspect and hopefully as the discussion continues, this dialog will surface.. I’m in the process of writing an article for Rhizome on the whole festival and will post a link to it soon up here…