FESTIVAL ARS ELECTRONICA

FESTIVAL FOR ART, TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY

A warm, late summer midday in the alfresco dining area of a bistro on Linz’s Main Square. At one table, some Japanese art students are tackling a complex issue: which exhibitions and speeches to attend over the upcoming afternoon. Nearby, 8-year-old Elena and her dad are gazing in wonder at a spectacular public-space art installation.

Since 1979, this drama is reprised annually in Linz as “Ars Electronica,” the one-of-a-kind international festival for art, technology and society, once again delivers on the promise it’s made to the thousands of devoted fans it attracts from throughout Austria and around the world. Essential to Ars Electronica’s festival agenda is establishing a presence in public spaces and reaching out to attract local audiences. The imaginativeness displayed by the festival’s venue choices is nothing less than legendary: port facilities, a mine, industrial plants, a secluded rural monastery. Each year brings unconventional locations that add a special flair to the performances and events set there and turn the city into one big festival. The goings-on in Linz exert an especially powerful attraction on international audiences from Asia, America and other parts of Europe. Symposia featuring top-name experts from around the world and artistic presentations of superb quality guarantee that the festival program lives up to visitors’ high expectations.

Through a fascinating combination of big-draw projects and events (after all, Ars Electronica had a hand in launching the Linzer Klangwolke) along with avant-garde approaches to blending art and high-tech, the festival ranges across an incredibly broad spectrum of interests and possibilities.
Establishing a new theme of particular timeliness for each year's festival is key to how Ars Electronica does justice to its claim to being a festival for art, technology and society: focusing the spotlight of attention in cyclical intervals on important artistic, scientific and sociopolitical issues and their larger contexts.
One thing’s for sure: with its leading-edge thematic orientation and diversified audiences of experts, aficionados and interested laymen, there is nothing in the world like the Ars Electronica Festival.