	European Soundscape
	Europe is Real
	Europe: A Landscape of Ideas
	Leading Opinions

	Threshold to the Kingdom
	27. Januar 1945
	This is your Victory
	Faces of Europe
	Strength and Opportunities
	Europe all Weather
	Ars Electronica Futurelab

Soundtrack of the Conference

Visions for Art, Technology and Society

The Ars Electronica Futurelab is continually redefining mankind's interrelationship with computers. The Linz facility's productive activities are centered on media art, but the incredible diversity of its successful projects are powerful testimony to the Futurelab's creative competence contributed to joint ventures with partners in the private sector, collaborative R&D undertakings and cooperative associations with academic institutions.

The world of the Ars Electronica Futurelab is interactive, multimedial and characterized by completely new approaches to conceptualization and design. Horst Hörtner, head of the facility's staff, describes its special orientation in these terms: "Our focus is on expanding the realm of interaction among human beings and computers. Our particular research interests as well as artistic approaches flow into the solutions we come up with."His overall assessment: "Today, the various different communications technologies are already merging together. In our work, it's not the medium but the process of mediation that has highest priority."Hardware and software that can be used in an easy, intuitive way, superb design and the consummate harmony of interaction and content are at the very top of the Ars Electronica Futurelab's R&D agenda.

In concrete terms, the Ars Electronica Futurelab carries out projects across the entire new media spectrum commissionedby corporate clients and in collaboration with R&D associates and cultural institutions:

Installations that take a playful approach to facilitating the public's encounter with exhibitioncontent
Multimedia projects for the interactive presentationof content live at trade shows and at websites online
Media for architecture:multimedia installations featuring large-format projections and interactive elements that are permanently integrated into a building's structure and thus engender a new type of "edifice art"
Large-format projections and installations in conjunction with art projects
Research projectsin cooperation with partners in the private sector and academia; area of particular expertise: enhanced/upgraded hardware and software to implement Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality

Originality and imagination lead to spectacular results and to growing acceptance. Voestalpine, SAP, Siemens, Mobilkom Austria, the University of Linz, MIT Media Lab and the Brucknerhaus Linz are just a few of the many organizations involved in manufacturing, art and R&D who have come to appreciate the Futurelab's unique approach to doing a job. Its artistic orientation endows concepts with precisely those qualities that have made Ars Electronica such a tremendous success for over 25 years: maintaining an impartial, independent, open point of view, which makesfor the vision to see beyond the confines of individual disciplines and purviews, and thus the capacity to come up with totally new approaches to solving problems.

Global Activities - internationale Vernetzung

The Futurelab has collaborated with associates in Austria, Europe, Latin America, Asia and the USA. The permanent headquarters of these global activities is a 750 m2 production facility located in the Urfahr section of Linz, Austria and featuring computer infrastructure, studios, offices and workshops in which up to 40 staffers carry out their project-related work. Through its ties to the Ars Electronica Festival, the world's largest and most important festival for art, technology and society, the Futurelab maintains close contacts with leading members of the international media elite.