One of the delights of the Ars Electronica Festival is attending the various forums where the winners talk about their inspirations for works past, present and future. Here, you’ll get to see what goes on during one of these forums. This year was the first to include the category of “sound art” – a category which joins up with “digital musics” – in order to encourage those that work in this area to submit works for consideration.The forum for this year’s winners was moderated by the excellent sound artist Christina Kubisch who gave a short introduction – speaking a little about the jury process – then introduced this year’s winners, Michel & André Décosterd, Ryoichi Kurokawa, and Martin Bédard, followed by a closing statement. Our first-time meeting was the day before during one of her “electrical walk” tours (of which I’ll speak more of in a later posting) in which we chatted about the influence of Alvin Lucier. It seemed like the perfect setting for me to remind her of John Cage’s 98th birthday that day as well. A longer than usual video for this website, but you’ll be able to not only hear the artists talk about influences and ways of working, but you’ll be introduced to some of their other works that have been featured in other exhibitions.