The Employees Committee of the voestalpine Steel Corporation commissioned the atelier-labor to come up with media art elements to be used as part of a substantive confrontation with future prospects.

Content and design work that resulted from the collaboration of the Voestalpine’s Employees Committee and the Ars Electronica Futurelab was presented at the Future Conference held on January 23, 2008 at Linz’s Design Center. A short film sketched potential workplace scenarios in the year 2032. Another feature on the conference’s agenda was the screening of a Voestalpine image video produced to launch a series entitled “modernTimes – For a World of Work that Offers a Life Worth Living.” This production had already been shown at the company’s staff party in September 2007.
Contributions posted by Voestalpine staff members over a three-month period to a theme- and location-based WikiMap provided the basis for a semantic analysis of individual and collective conceptions of the future. This semantic evaluation supported the prioritization and structuring of the main issues that were raised in the discussion and, in addition to providing a setting for a visual presentation of the contributions of participating experts, Austrian Chamber of Labor representatives and members of the Employees Committee, it also served as the overall framework for the staging of the event itself. Furthermore, the results provided input and key focal-point issues for the Future Program that the Employees Committee worked up in February 2008 as an outgrowth of the conference proceedings.