Danube Bike Tour Day 20: Linz
Posted by Cassie, November 26th, 2009
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Linz has a large cathedral built in the Gothic style. The cathedral was similar to the cathedrals in Regensburg and Ulm, but the cathedral in Linz had beautiful, intricate stained glass windows.
We tried walking to the Franz Joseph Tower. It looked so close on the map of Linz we got from the tourist office, but we kept walking and walking and didn’t see it. Eventually, we gave up and turned around. Then, we wanted to take the train to Postlingberg, which is the steepest non-rack railway in the world. We had trouble finding where the train left from, and when we found the station, we couldn’t find where to get a ticket. You couldn’t buy a ticket on the train, and there was no ticket kiosk at the train station. We were about to head back to the tourist information center to ask where to buy a ticket when we saw a ticket kiosk at random spot on a side street not on the actual train route. Although the steepest non-rack railway sounded very impressive, it was not as exciting as it sounded. It didn’t seem all the steep to us. The view from the pilgrimage church at Postlingberg was great. However, it was snowing when we got there, so we weren’t able to see as well.
Postlingberg Pilgrimage Church
View from Postlingberg
After walking around the city in the snow, we were cold, so we went to the nice and warm Ars Electronica Center, and it was the coolest museum! It was a museum made for geeks like us. They had lots of interesting gadgets and interactive exhibits.
This was an interactive sculpture. As you walked into the sculpture, there were motion sensors, and parts of the sculpture would start moving towards you. It was really cool.
This was a screen covered with black sand that you could move around to cover parts of the screen. There were little organisms that were swimming around on the screen. If you opened up a larger area in the sand, the organisms would multiply, or if you covered the area with sand, you could kill off all the organisms.
This was an interactive exhibit where you could create a 3D drawing.
As you touch this screen, you could feel different textures on the screen, and it would make different noises as you moved your finger over different sections of the screen. There was also a little man that walked across each screen, and if you moved your finger over him, you could knock him over. Once he was done walking through the screen, the screen would change, so if you continually knocked him down, you could spend more time playing with that screen.
A Japanese artist put eyes on pieces of furniture, and they would communicate with each other through infrared and blink at random intervals.
They had a video for a Japanese art unit called Maywa Denki that made awesome robotic musical instruments.
There was an exhibition called “Morpho Tower”. There was a ferrofluid, a liquid medium that has nano-sized magnetic particles suspended in that react to a magnetic field. There was a spiral in the middle of the ferrofluid with an electromagnet, and as it spun, the particles moved along the spiral seeming to defy gravity.
There were several cool machines built by Arthur Ganson. Machine with 22 Scraps of Paper was my favorite. It was made only by moving scraps of paper, but it simulated the movement of a flight of birds beautifully.
There was a video about the Dutch artist, Theo Jansen, who creates kinetic sculptures that are powered by the wind, and he releases the “creatures” he creates onto the beach in the Netherlands.
The outside of the Ars Electronica center was lit up with a series of LED lights that would change color and create neat patterns.
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