Credit: ARS ELECTRONICA

Since 1979, the industrial city of Linz in Austria has been the unlikely home of Ars Electronica, a centre for the development and dissemination of digital art and media. The centre has evolved to include an annual festival, a ‘cyberarts’ competition and ‘The Futurelab’, a media lab where interdisciplinary collaborators design and engineer new installations.

To celebrate Ars Electronica's 25th anniversary, New York City's American Museum of the Moving Image is hosting Digital Avant-Garde, a series of exhibitions and screenings of projects that featured prominently in earlier competitions. Linz will have its own anniversary celebration during the first week of September.

The New York series, which runs until 18 July, includes John Gerrard's Portrait Diptych: Nadia (formerly called Networked Portrait), an interactive portrait that can be changed with the touch of a finger on a screen. The installation, shown here, consists of two liquid-crystal-display touchscreens, each presenting the computer-generated image of a particular individual.

By dragging a finger across an eye or the corner of the mouth in one of the images, the viewer can impart some emotion to the otherwise expressionless visage. When the screens are turned toward each other, the other face responds by subtly changing its own expression. The two faces then continue to respond to each other.

The portrait is seen as one of the last bastions of permanence at a time when images can be erased or modified at will. But even the portrait, it seems, can be digitized and updated continually — for example, to reflect one's mood.

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