After a week of electronic art at ISEA and much travel, it was refreshing to hit the second stop of our three-flight journey from Helsinki back to Bergen at Oslo airport, one of the best-designed airports in which I've had the experience of connecting flights. The airport, designed by Aviaplan, of which Gudmund Stokke is the lead architect, features wide concourses with plenty of area to move around, huge airy spaces (stories high empty space between you and the ceiling), and immense windows that offer views of the runways and the surrounding countryside. The materials used, hardwoods, glass, steel, stone, and elegantly molded concrete, give the airport a sleek, Scandanavian feel. The airport is also filled with works of public art, of both the electronic and conventional variety. My favorite work(s) are the simple but colorful and immense works of textile sculpture throughout the airport. Cords of different colors stretch across hundred-meter spaces, shaping forms from empty space. There are also cleverly “literate” sculptures of bronze embedded in the floor, such as a Henrik Ibsen quote written along the line of a paper clip (one of Norway's most famous inventions). 
Works of electronic art include an LED “moving painting” of a dancing girl and several very cool audio installations in the form of “sound showers.” The interactor steps into a circle under a shower-shaped device and is treated to a cascade of sound. The three that I experienced included a tropical rainforest, a sort of new-agey whisper narrative, and the sounds of a hot springs-type bath. While the interactor stands listening to these layers of sound, the sound shower is directed only to the circle, so the other passengers in transit walk by unaware.
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