The theme of today at ars electronica was Going to the Country. So we went to the country, at the St. Florian Monastery of the Canons Regular of St. Augustine (!)

Quite nice if you like heavy architecture, queueing for ages to get some food and being pressed like a sardine in a room to hear the talks. The sound installations were great though. I particularly enjoyed the talks of the Pixelspaces panel (some of them at least).

At the end of the panel Maren Richter showed us a nice video from 2001.

Directed by Matt McCormick, The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal (video) documents the seemingly mundane job of graffiti removal. The movie humourously compares city workers’ job to pain over existing graffiti to the works of abstract masters such as Mark Rothko, Kazimir Malevich and Robert Rauschenberg, dividing removal works into subcategories such as ghosting, symmetrical, and radical.

UPDATE: Reevo informs us that There’s a great Secret Art Of Graffiti Removal group on flickr if you want to see more of this kind of thing.

Images stolen at Ward-o-matic.