we started day 02 of the ars electronica festival in linz at the postcity[01-55]. first thing we did was to pay a visit to the "pie deck", an exhibition curated by the university of applied sciences in hagenberg, coordinated by our friend jake. at the playful interactive environment deck the movements of the participants are tracked via laser tracking devices and rendered in the virtual space. there they can interact with other participants - both real and virtual - in various new game concepts. also external sources like text or chat messages can be included in some games - very enjoyable and interesting. after admiring some professional drone steering at the "aec drone lab"[01], we started our round tour through the huge building with its many hallways, halls, small rooms, staircases, and many more locked doors. we were pretty fascinated by all the exhibits that dealt with fashion, like shoes from the "artist lab iris van herpen"[03-04]; or the "environment dress"[08-11], which was actually an awesome and amazing alien costume to me, that reacted to all kinds of input like brightness, noise, atmospheric pressure, etc, then calculated the hostility or friendliness of its environment, and raised or lowered the shields accordingly; or the "kinematics dress"[12], a dress that was entirely made in a 3d printer as a single folded piece. all of them pretty cool. but also entire small houses can be 3d printed with concrete, as shown by the "artist lab marjan colletti"[05-07] - it takes a while, but the printing process does not need any human interaction, besides the refilling from time to time. art with plants is shown in the "photosynthegraph"[14] installation, where a film is put on a plant's leave, so the dark areas lack chloroplasts, whereas the transparent areas leave the natural amount of chloroplasts. with chemical treatment, this effect gets visible, and thus enables the artist to "print" onto the leaves. easy concept, but looks great. very, very cute were the "phytowalkers"[15], walking plant pots - great fun to watch, i would have wanted one of them for my home. the thing in common for the origami like art from "ori*lab"[13] and the "single-stroke structures"[16] are repetitive patterns, which i found very pleasing and soothing. same applies to the lain pieces of hardware[17-19], from keyboards to mobile phones and other electronic gadgets, although i did not find any information on what installation or by whom this was. we also came by the "ready to crawl"[20] creatures again. still cute and nice to watch.a whole room was dedicated to the "artist lab yoichi ochiai"[23], but no artist was around, and we just could not make out what all the installations were about, or how to interact with them. so we left, and entered a bigger room, housing the "implant"[24] installation, a huge tube with shiny reflecting things inside, that become alive when you rotate the tube and shine inside with two big flashlights. it should represent an enormously enlarged virtual nanobot tube that should fix corrupted dna strings. we just arrived in time for a live performance of "roboaction(s) a1 k1"[25-30], where the artist is strapped to an industrial roboter. the roboter then determines the patterns to be drawn by the artist. nice idea, and interesting to watch. noise generated by a vortex in a glass container, made audible through spiral pipes of the "chozumaki"[31-32]. amazing fog landscapes are generated by "brume"[33-34], which uses ultrasonic transducers to produce very thick fog clouds that emerge through a membrane of a black cube. lovely little fragile looking jellyfish are the artist for the "aurelia 1 + Hz"[35] installation, where the creator tries to communicate with the jellyfish via sound. quite sadistic is the concept of "miserable machines: soot-o-mat"[38-39]. a mussel is attached to conductive wires and an indicator that scratches the surface of a cylinder. when an electrical current is applied to the mussel it contracts, resulting in a graph on the cylinder. a new stimulus is given every 20 minutes. after a certain amount of cycles, the mussel finally dies. poor mussels, who actually should represent human beings in the capitalism machine. an installation without any biological elements is "f₂( )"[40], an audio-reactive installation that reacts to its environment, changing sound and light accordingly. three black horns producing sound and soap bubbles are the main elements of "black hole horizon"[43-47]. each horn has a different pitch and also produces different sizes of the bubbles. the bubbles then float through the huge room, to finally burst once they touch the floor or wall. "rotating lights"[48], is, as the name implies, an installation with five rotating systems, each equipped with neon lamps. they start rotating, slowly at first, then getting faster, and finally the power is turned off, so the rotation and light is gone. when we walked into the really huge gleishalle - the hall where train wagons were un/loaded when this place was still in operation - a concert was held, namely the "gleishalle, a concert cycle"[50]. minimalistic soundscapes of recorded noises were interwoven to create really amazing songs. we sat down to enjoy the whole concert by the duo "tamtam", and it was worth it. "sonic wilderness"[52-55] was another interactive installation that presented a new way of tracking precisely where the head of each participant (or to be more precise the ears) were, in what direction they were looking, and thus, how near or far they were from a source of sound. those sound sources where scattered all over the room, and i had to admit, it really was very precise and realistic. then we had to head over to the aec, as jake had asked me to take pictures of a "pie" presentation by him later this evening. but before that we had a quick look at all the new exhibits, like the "active wood products"[57], that bends wood into predefined shapes, or the "infinite cube"[58], that shows seamless movements of reflective spheres. as a preparatory work for tonight's "klangwolke" we attended a show in the "deep space"[56,59-67] about the spaxels[56], the flying drones, that will be flying over the danube tonight. there we got insight on how the drones get coordinated and programmed, what to take care of with such a high amount of drones and what further steps are necessary to get such a show going. very, very interesting. a little later it was time for jake's performance. he presented the prototype of "cargo"[59-67], a vr game in which the main participants control a spaceship with vr headsets, while other spectators can join the team and act as collecting drones to bring resources to the spaceship it can then use to defend itself. a simple concept, yet it is a lot of fun to collect all the stuff as you can run around in the physical space that doubles as the virtual space around the spaceship. after the "cargo" amusement, it was time for the spaxels, a combination of the words "space" and "pixels" in the "drone 100 - spaxels over linz"[68-72] show. as usual, at the klangwolke, the entire area around the main stage is massively crowded, so we could not get to the best spot for viewing. also it would have been way too late by now to get a good spot. so we gathered outside of the ars electronica center and watched from there. it was a very impressive and special performance. the show with the 100 drones was shown only once before in sydney. once the crowd dissolved we ambled along the danube[73-75] to let the day unwind. ars 16 was really a positive surprise to me, as it was quite astonishing, and more interesting that it was back in 2013. but maybe it also helped that this year we had more time to explore, and did not have to rush. or maybe it was the new location; postcity really is an interesting place with a lot of possibilities for such a big event. anyhow, it was great.