This year's Ars Electronica in Linz was titled "A New Cultural Economy". But the most interesting statement on this topic could be found outside of the festival at a local flee market.

- Being kind is important. (The opposite is also true.)
- It is essential to create a working environment with a happy, warm and inspiring atmosphere.
- You can be successful and upright at the same time.
- The money you don't spend on useless things is the money that prevents you from doing useless work. (I actually knew that before but it was helpful to have it confirmed.)

(This picture of my brother's bunny has nothing to do with the text above.)

And if you leave the town you suddenly find yourself in the most beautiful landscape which is hard to describe and impossible to capture in 400x300 pixels.

This morning Rupert and I have been discussing in his backyard what we saw yesterday at the Royal College of Art Summer Show. It is quite large with additional exhibition space in a tent in Hyde park next to the RCA and definitely worth a visit.

This topic is a getting a bit boring but since I moved to Munich I don't grow tired of chatting about the differences between those two cities. And people are always ready to jump into this conversation.

I just spent the weekend in Berlin and I found out that what I love most about cities like Berlin is that unexpected things can happen anytime and adventures are possible everywhere. For instance within those two days I saw a car going up in flames on my way home from a party, I witnessed a bar getting cleared by an armed police force, a woman (who turned out to be an actress) talked to me and the conversation was filmed with a hidden camera and another beautiful well-dressed young woman sitting next to me in the train suddenly totally freaked out, screaming at people and slamming her fist against the window pane.

And the nice thing about Munich is: These things don't happen there.

The atmosphere on stage was also carefully designed. The lighting changed over time in a very subtle and supporting way. There was at times a projection in the back with variations of live camera footage of the musicans' hands. And even though the visuals were stylish, unobtrusive and beautiful I... hated them. I still try to figure out why. At first I thought that these images deliver me some kind of interpretation which sort of blocks my own. But then the lights and the smoke (oh yeah!) also interpreted the music and that did not bother me at all. So I came to a different conclusion: Pictures have a tendency to point to "somewhere else". The german word for TV is "Fernsehen" (= "far-seeing") which is a nice expression for what virtual worlds in pictures do. They transport you somewhere else. And this is what I hate about TV screens in bars, VJ visuals in clubs and TV in general: They distract you from what is here and now. They point to a canned world behind a window pane. And as live jazz is so much better than recorded jazz BECAUSE you can feel the "here and now" I found those VJ visuals particularily disturbing.

People keep asking me what project I liked most in Linz. I guess it was the flowerbed at the Hauptplatz in the shape of a 3D map of Passau, the town I grew up (and down) in.

This year's Ars Electronica in Linz was titled "Simplicity - the art of complexity" inspired by John Maeda's discourse about simplicity. When John introduced his "laws" of simplicity in a concentrated and diverting talk I was happy to hear him point out that he actually wants to have his statements understood as questions, as fruitful starting points to think about digital media making room also for a discussion of complexity.

John had pointed out – among many other interesting ideas – the potential strategy of embodiment to make things simpler which intuitively might resonate with many of us. I don't want to have the invisible "clapper" to toggle the lights in my room, I want this physical button on the wall next to the door.

And here comes my big "BUT" (no pun intended).

BUT, embodiement is currently very often mistaken as the best and only way to make live easier. Maybe we are still shocked by the rapid advent of this gigantic flood of abstractions that we have experienced during the past decades caused by the introduction of computers in our everyday lives. We are now facing a trend of artists and designers spitting out countless ideas for new physical objects.

They come up with ideas like throwing LEDs at cars and busses. And I feel empathy for the youthful excitement to waste, destroy and ignore. What worries me is the broad acceptance and promotion of this concept at media festivals like Ars Electronica without even questioning or at least commenting on them. Of course we can throw those toxic batteries into our streets, waste LEDs and demonstrate our attitude towards resources and our immediate environment ("impress your friends and city officials" ). At best this might be seen as a blunt mirroring of one of our major problems: the necessity to produce, consume and dump resources in order to keep our economy going... and stay entertained. At worst this might be seen as just another way to gain instant attention with cheap tricks as we also know them from advertising campaigns.

Giving our problems and questions a physical representation does not necessarily solve them. And if we do not want to mistake simplicity for banality we might want to give things a closer look instead of appreciating them simply because of their physical presence in the form of basic electronics.