This year the Ars Electronica festival glimpsed the future through the past.
Michelle Kasprzak reports 

The second Pandaemonium Festival didn't lie beneath a lucky star this year. As so often in the art world, it's much easier to find money to build a venue than to secure and maintain the programme budget. But none of this seems to have diminished the LEA staff's enthusiasm for working on their festival.

Get lucid in Hull

A two-day open festival mapping media arts in London.

DMZ is a firewall-free mapping of media arts in London, a two-day open festival celebrating the diversity of screen based and network based local cultural practice with an exhibition, screenings, talks, installations, wireless networks, net art, live performances, workshops, stalls and a tea lounge as chill out zone.

 During the DEAF evening programme curated and hosted by Sadie Plant, artist Brian Duffy showed us the secret, electronically musical, lives of toys he’d purchased for a pound or less at car boot sales and flea markets in and around Birmingham.

With a ludic theme and international roster, Berlin’s Transmediale festival played a global game. As visitor to and participant in the event, artist Bea Gibson found her close-up view of the proceedings left her more enervated than enthused

>> Transmediale Lounge

For the past 13 years, the Italian seaport of Bari has been the venue for Time Zones, a festival of music and performance. Arsalan Mohammad watched Krautrock veterans Popul Vuh try their hands at a little mass hallucination.

A video installation showing 10 year-old gamers babbling about Super Mario. A live radio-play on surveillance. A found footage web piece about a fictitious character. These are all pieces you could see at Intermedium2, a festival dealing with ‘identities in the 21st century.’ According to ZKM’s Peter Weibel, Intermedium is the first media art festival which gets wide coverage in the media too.