Ei Wada is a Japanese artist/musician. This year at Ars he gave probably one of the best performances at the festival. Wada's band is composed of him and a set of old Braun tube televisions, of the type that nowadays you see dumped in the trash.

Using these tube televisions and a hacked videocassette deck Wada translates visual patterns into sound. He plays sets of VHS tapes which produce the visual patterns and uses his hands to trigger the sounds from the old TVs. It's a authentically home-made Theremin-tech-percussion system that is at the same time loud and mesmerizing. In his performance, the artist taps the televisions' screens, producing percussive sounds that are combined with his sampled image rhythms.

Wada's raw setup –wires, old TVs and videocassette decks add to the piece a strong DIY aesthetic. It doesn't look finished and doesn't feel polished. On the contrary it's clear that Wada has made the system himself
from toying with electronics.

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Ars Electronica is a conceptual and practical hackspace where designers, scientists, engineers, artists and researchers come together. This year we went to Ars for 3 days to see good work, and it was truly amazing. The festival's choice of the venue for this year –was the grounds of what used to be Linz's Tobacco Factory. This was already interesting in itself: an industrial complex of several well-maintained buildings that seemed to carry a lot of memory from its past. This setting fitted really well with the festival idea of repairing the broken world.

On the top of one of the buildings, we saw Benjamin Bergman's suprising basketball hoop. His work 'Never Ever' plays with the absurd. It presents something that is impossible or most likely not to happen, as you can see in the picture above.

As you walk around the multiple buildings and get lost in the innumerable floors and exhibition spaces, you stumble across a number of good pieces of work in art, science and technology. The following posts on the blog feature our thoughts and experiences at Ars Electronica 2010.