Gallery: Hallucinatory Art Snags Attention at Ars Electronica Festival
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Robots, phantom limbs and a nostril-powered digital painting take center stage at [Ars Electronica 2010](http://www.aec.at/festival_about_en.php). Organizers for the digital arts festival, a longtime magnet for madcap interactive designers, describe this year's exhibition as "a response to impending doom." They extend the idea by quoting French artist Yann Arthus Bertrand: "There’s no time left for pessimism." As the curators say on the event's official website, "What we have to do now is proceed as quickly and consistently as possible in the direction we have known all too long that we have to move in—towards renewable forms of energy, sustainable regulation of the global financial market, reorganization of the way we work. Repair, rethink, reinvent." The show, titled [Repair - Ready to Pull the Lifeline](http://new.aec.at/repair/en/), runs Thursday, Sept. 2 through Saturday Sept. 11 in Linz, Austria. Staged in an abandoned tobacco plant called the Tabakfabrik, Repair features more than 200 installations and events. Here's a sampling of some of the art pieces. ASIMO / Honda ------------- Honda’s humanoid robot [ASIMO](http://tinyurl.com/23u8xlm) was designed to serve as another set of eyes, ears, hands and legs for people lacking full mobility. It will be on display at Ars Electronica.
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crowd2cloud ----------- [NYU Movement Lab](http://movement.nyu.edu/), inspired by Woody Allen’s Sleeper movie, created so-called "pleasure orbs" that track movement with motion capture sensors. Visitors can interact with the system through their own laptop computers.
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Gyre ---- American artist Chris Jordan used 2.4 million pieces of plastic collected from the Pacific Ocean to construct this collage. The material in the painting equates approximately to the number of pounds of plastic pollution that enter the world‘s oceans every hour.
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Phantom Recorder ---------------- Revital Cohen's device induces hallucinations by projecting cold, damp sensations onto the surface of a subject's skin. This produces a "phantom limb" sensation. Peripheral nerve activity is captured and recorded by a neural implant and external wireless equipment.
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plant ----- Japanese designer Akira Nakayasu found inspiration for this interactive installation by watching grass blowing in the wind. The robotic plant has 169 artificial leaves. They move in response to a process called shape memory alloy actuators, which function a a kind of virtual wind when a person's hand approaches.
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As an artist I need to rest ---------------------------- Italian artist Sonia Cillari exhales through a cable connecting her left nostril to the center of a big screen. Her breathing defines the contours of a digital creature called “feather.”
