I don't know what I'm doing here," announced elderly robot-maker Joe Engleberger, blithely cutting through the deliberations of the robotics panel. "I'm a serious roboticist." His remark went down like a lead balloon with his fellow panel members: artists, theorists and automaton builders. From the audience came an audible intake of breath. Later Engleberger dug himself in deeper by declaring that he has "nothing against" art; he likes creative people. That was why he had chosen to illustrate his talk with newspaper cartoons.
Since 1979, Linz, in Austria, has hosted the annual Ars Electronica festival, devoted to "art, technology and society". Every year, the world's computer art geeks gather to show off their new toys, award themselves gongs and make bitchy remarks in the bar. This is all much like any other art festival, except that Ars Electronica is one of the very few international gatherings devoted solely to technoculture, which makes it a barometer for how artists, technologists and all those in between are coping with the world at the end of the millennium.
Judging by Ars Electronica in 1996, most people aren't coping that well. Linz boiled with petulance and frustration. Everyone seems to realise that the stakes are high, and that global culture is undergoing a fundamental shift which it is the job of conferences like this one to track. But that sense of urgency seems to produce mutual suspicion and shrill sniping rather than any real attempt to understand the contemporary fusion of art and technology.
The main problem is a perennial one: artists and technologists are not really talking to each other. Opening the Ars Electronica symposium, eminent biologist and one-time Wired cover star Richard Dawkins explained his theory of memes. Next onto the stage was a minor cultural critic who called Dawkins some names and told us, unhelpfully, that attempting to analyse culture using scientific concepts was politically suspect. Not a good start: artists are prickly about being patronised by ignorant scientists, while scientists, accustomed to clearly defined problems and experimental methods, are often baffled by art. In the Ars Electronica bar, one could find artists bemoaning the festival's "over-emphasis on technology", a complaint not shared by the few delegates with technical backgrounds, who were wandering around as if they had landed on another planet and hadn't yet found anyone who would take them to their leader.
The arts-science divide is merely the most obvious fissure in technoculture; look closer and any number of gaps start to appear. Ars Electronica presents four awards in different areas of technological art. The computer music jury's short list consisted almost entirely of acolytes of electro-acoustic music, though interest in this hermetic, little-listened-to priesthood - as far as it is possible for the non-initiated to divine - lies more in the algorithms the priesthood uses to generate sounds than the sounds themselves. Meanwhile, a mile down the road from the Ars Electronica centre, a crew from Cheap, Vienna's best-known techno label, were playing to a crowd in a bar.
The electro-acoustic scene subsists almost entirely on state funding, the techno scene by distributing music through a network of shops, clubs and radio stations. The gap between establishment and underground was never better illustrated. While it is unlikely that state-funded techno music would be greeted with anything but derision, not least from techno musicians, it seems peculiar that the most influential form of computer music is entirely ignored - at least until it's time to go out dancing after the awards ceremony.
Interactive art is the area in which the gaps in technoculture play themselves out most subtly. You could say it's a classic back-end/front-end problem. The notion of technique is respectable in serious art circles. Critics admire Picasso's draughtsmanship and view his perfect art school pencil studies as evidence that the primitive drawings of his later years are more than inferior scrawlings. Unfortunately for traditionally-trained artists, the interactive equivalent of producing a life drawing is writing an elegant Java applet. It's not simply that without this technical depth a work of interactive art will be naive. Without the back-end, you can't do interactivity at all. Likewise, the "art" made by programmers, who until recently were the only people with access to the tools and the expertise to use them, has been so bad as to make computer art a byword for tackiness. Certainly, if I ever see another chrome-textured sexy robot flying down a tunnel I'm going to yak. A fusion of "art" and "science" is a prerequisite for good computer-based work.
The great divide also extends into the way the art public consume interactive art. This is in part a function of history. Interactivity has now reached the same stage that cinema had in the first decade of the 20th century. Back then, audiences were as fascinated with the technical wizardry that produced the images on the screen as they were with the pictures themselves. Each development - close-up, tracking shot, cross-cutting - was enthusiastically dissected by a public which was learning how to watch film just as the film-makers learned to make it.
At Ars Electronica I saw people feeling across surfaces looking for pressure pads, scanning ceilings for movement sensors and discussing whether the colours of the t-shirts we wore while swimming through an underwater sound installation really affected the piece's parameters, or whether it was all a plot to make money by selling t-shirts in the foyer. We were all as fascinated with the back-end as the front-end. A few years ago, large-scale inter-activity seemed like magic, and the mere fact that a work could respond to one's presence was reward enough. Now we are accustomed to such things being possible, but have yet to take them for granted. Back-end and front-end have not quite fused into a whole. "Technology" and "art" still feel like distinct aspects of the artwork; we need to teach ourselves to experience them as one.
So this year's Ars Electronica took place in a kind of dead zone, the proverbial cultural waiting room. We were waiting for someone to bang a few heads together and we were waiting for the work which bridges the gap between the two cultures. Call it the killer app. Call it the Gesamtkunstwerk. Whatever you call it, just don't call it names and go back to your corner to sulk.
Hari Kunzru is a section editor at Wired.