My last night (meaning beers) in Linz was quite surprising. After a good meal, and finally a goulash (something I was long desiring for), Christian Giorgiano, Chris O'Shea and me headed to a last round at O.K Centre.

As all other situations here at Ars Electronica, once you arrive at a "social pole" like O.K Centre, we started to run into people that at least one of us knew. Suddenly, we are seating in a table with an amazing crew, former members of the group Antirom: Andy Cameron, now head of the interaction department at Fabrica, Andy Allenson, now with his studio Pickled Onion, and Joel Baumann, later one of the founders of Tomato Interactive, now teaching at Kassel University, Germany. Summing up, a big, big table.

Don't forget to check John Maeda's blog, where he's developing what he calls "The Laws of Simplicity".
lawsofsimplicity.com

The research was formatted into a book as well , recently published by MIT Press. The project is sponsored (?) by Philips.

Ars Electronica 2006
Simplicity - The Art of Complexity

view more pictures at my flickr (slideshow)

Simple, simplify, simplistic, and keep on going. To understand this year’s Ars Electronica theme “Simplicity – The Art of Complexity” was definitely not simple. It wasn’t simple for me, it wasn’t simple for Wolfgang Bednarzek, one of the festival’s organizer, it wasn’t simple for John Maeda, the MIT virtuous genius; simply, it wasn’t simple.

Oil Standard a web browser plug-in that converts all prices from $ Dollars into the equivalent value in barrels of crude oil. When you load a web page, the script seamlessly inserts converted prices into the page. Visit Oil Standard

'Shirley Bassey Mixed Up' is a collaborative biography: an illustrated biography of the legendary diva, where the reader helps to 'mix' the illustrations online, using Internet searches.

To conquer new votes, politicians use from YouTube, communities at Orkut up to the creation of new icons for MSN

Originally published at “Estadão” Newspaper, São Paulo, Brazil (08/2006) by Maurício Moraes and Silva
Translated by Nako (Google translates wasn’t good at all!)

There was time when Internet electoral campaigns could were restricted to simple homepages with candidate’s proposals. With their eyes open to the potential of the Net, not to mention cutting down costs, many politicians decided to focus their investments in new tools to get more votes in the upcoming election. Online guerrilla marketing includes uploading videos to YouTube, adding voters and friends to Orkut communities, using IMs among other props.