Opening hours during the festival

Thu 3.9. – Mon 7.9. 10:00 – 20:30
Tue 8.9. 10:00 – 18:00

The Ars Electronica Center’s exhibition that debuted on January 2, 2009 is focusing on fields in which the most massive and controversial innovative thrust is now in the process of emerging: the life sciences. Hand in hand with rapid-fire technological advances that are producing computers offering steadily increasing performance and higher-resolution imaging, these research disciplines also explore some compelling relationships – resulting in findings that challenge our conventional view of humanity and man’s place in the world. The Ars Electronica Center is spotlighting these “New Images of Humankind.” Simultaneously atelier and lab, the new facility attests to the affinity between art and science, and to our timeless fascination with our own kind. The commitment to creativity and productivity is stronger than ever. The core is the 1,000-m2 Main Gallery, a space in which artists and scientists, school kids and college students, parents and children can experiment, work and play. This spectacular exhibition doesn’t put the accent strictly on leading-edge technological developments; instead, it concentrates on the concrete question: What’s the impact on me and my life?

(Ars Electronica Center Exhibits: ars.electronica.art/center)

see all Events and Exhibitions in the new Ars Electronica Center

The OK Offenes Kulturhaus Oberösterreich presents a selection of the best projects in the Prix Ars Electronica’s Interactive Art and Hybrid Art category.

Opening:
September 3rd 2009, 5.00 PM

Press conference:
September 3rd 2009, 11.30 AM

Opening hours:
During the Festival Ars Electronica 10.00 AM – 10.00 PM
September 10th – October 4th, 11.00 AM – 22.00 PM

See all projects of Cyberarts 2009

Brucknerhaus

See all projects of the Human Nature Exhibition

Thu 3.9. – Tue 8.9. 2009
10:00 – 19:00
Brucknerhaus

The “History Lounge” takes you on a trip through time – not by expounding
in encyclopedic form on the history of media art, but rather by sharing with
you personal recollections and individual highlights. Experience in project
presentations and talks those protagonists who, with their passion, their
competence and their artistic talents, have been shaping the success of Ars
Electronica for over 30 years.

Project Management: Petra Fohringer, Cornelia Mayrhofer

See all projects of History Lounge

David Rokeby: Very Nervous System, 1983-94, Version 1991

Opening hours:
August 28th 2009 – January 10th 2010
daily 10.00 AM – 6.00 PM, Thu 10.00 AM – 9.00 PM

Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, Ernst-Koref-Promenade 1, 4020 Linz
www.see-this-sound.at

Promises in Sound and Vision

There are sounds and noises all over the museum, as artists today take an engagement with the sound of this world for granted. The former predominance of the visual has meanwhile been replaced by a multifaceted interplay of image and sound. See this Sound documents this development from the perspective of visual art and refers to the respective contemporary discussions and promises.

In eight sections the exhibition focuses on important milestones and historical-social points of reference, but without imposing a linear development. Starting from the filmic sound visualizations of the 1920s – so-called Eye Music – it traces the topos of traversing genre boundaries in the 1960s and questions psychedelic trance machines and multimedia sound environments about their social-political potential. The illusion of a “natural” interplay of image and sound, for instance in Hollywood movies, is countered by works that disclose the discrepancies of this purported synthesis, all the way to the loss of sound and the power of speech. In addition, there is a special focus on the local production conditions of sounds (industrial cities and industrial sounds), and on sound as a medium of institutional critique.

Collaboration with the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research has also enabled the scholarly treatment of specific media history issues presented within the framework of a web archive and in the exhibition.

Artistic and Scientific Lead: Stella Rollig and Dieter Daniels
Curator: Cosima Rainer
Assistant Curator: Manuela Ammer
Project Coordination: Veronika Floch
Scientific Collaboration LBI: Sandra Naumann

Foto: Agnes Miesenberger

We 2.9. –  Tue 8.9. 2009
6.00 – 10.00 PM

Grand Hotel Cafe zum Rothen Krebsen, Obere Donaulände 11, 4020 Linz

fabriqueee / Institut für erweiterte Kunst
http://www.roterkrebs.net/

Loudly and with high-impact visuals, the arrival of a new age is proclaimed and future worlds spoken of with a certainty as if the good old art of fortune-telling had been revived and declared to be a genuine science. Nostradamus and the whole host of sibyls seem to have risen again, just to make sure nothing is left up to free interpretation. Outfitted with diplomas, the latest technology and plenty of cash, they paint a picture of the past, present and future of mankind. Our successes, our setbacks, our bodies, our environment – all depending on the prevailing taste and the client. Fascinated and strangely fatalistic, we stand by and watch our destiny unfolding before us.

The “fabriqueee” doesn’t quite trust all this, and focuses its attention instead on a somewhat outmoded, at once ordinary and uncanny human (self)-awareness machine, in which certainty and delusion have always gone hand in hand: the mirror.

Based on this approach the group’s members develop along modular lines various individual projects – from installations to apparatus, from sculptures and objects to animation and visualizations – to finally generate in the “Grand Cafe zum Rothen Krebsen” a playful space that promises everything, except for any certainty or seemingly secure insights.

Every night during the week of the Ars Electronica Festival, “fabriqueee,” in association with the “Institut für erweiterte Kunst,” will offer visitors the opportunity to explore the world “Inside the Disco Ball.” What’s left is right, what’s up is down.

“fabriqueee” is made up of Jakob Breitwieser, Fabian Krenn, Matthias Lindner, Pamela Litzlbauer, Agnes Miesenberger, Sandra Li Lian Obwegeser and Joseph Reitsberger; students at the Art University of Linz, Department of Experimental Design.

Opening:
Thu 3. 9. 15:00

Exhibition:
Thu 3. 9. – Tue 8. 9. 10:00 – 19:00

Campus, Kunstuniversität Hauptplatz

Curated by Hiroshi Ishii (US) & Amanda Parkes (US)
A cooperation of Ars Electronica, University of Art and Industrial Design Linz and MIT Media Lab/US.

Certainly we cannot hope to solve the problems facing us without a greater understanding of the modern world, based on the integration of knowledge. Humanists must be educated with a deep appreciation of modern science. Scientists and engineers must be steeped in humanistic learning. And all learning must be linked with a broad concern for the complex effects of technology on our evolving culture.

Jerome B. Wiesner (Co-founder, MIT Media Laboratory, 1915–1994)

The 2009 Ars Electronica Campus Exhibition features current work of the faculty and students from the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge MA. From its inception almost thirty years ago, the Media Lab has taken an unorthodox research approach to envisioning the impact of emerging technologies on everyday life—technologies that promise to fundamentally transform our most basic notions of human capabilities. The lab attracts designers, computer designers, engineers, artists, and scientists, divergent in background and practice. However, unifying the people of the lab is a particular kind of passion, momentum, drive—the IMPETUS—to create and innovate for change. The depth and breadth of the Media Lab’s research areas transcend traditional technology, design or art environments and the lab can be thought of as an ongoing experiment, both physical and intellectual, in facilitating innovation, collaboration and critique. It is an environment where inspiration arises from difference and where the driving force behind creation comes from an inherently transdisciplinary approach.

The MIT Media Lab consists of 30 different research groups including the diverse disciplines of interactivity, robotics, artificial intelligence, education, nanotechnology, music, neuroengineering, material science, visualization, social networking, urban infrastructure, fabrication, and political art all intermingling in joint spaces, courses and projects. Students at the Media Lab generally arrive with a particular area of expertise, but are encouraged to explore new domains to enrich and expand their perspective on their research. In many ways, time spent at the Media Lab becomes an education on the process of innovating in itself. The goal of the lab’s work is to develop technologies that empower people of all ages, from all walks of life, in all societies, to design and invent new possibilities for themselves and their communities. Unique to the lab’s structure is our pairing with industry sponsors who support the lab’s research in a shared intellectual property model and keep the lab connected to the real world issues of the corporate community and society at large.

The idea for the Media Lab came into being in 1980 by Professor Nicholas Negroponte and former MIT President and Science Advisor to President John F. Kennedy, Jerome Wiesner. The Lab grew out of the work of MIT’s Architecture Machine Group, and remains within MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning. The Media Lab opened the doors to its I. M. Pei-designed Wiesner Building in 1985, and in its first decade was at the vanguard of the technology that enabled the “digital revolution” and enhanced human expression: innovative research ranging from cognition and learning, to electronic music, to holography. In its second decade, the Lab literally took computing out of the box, embedding the bits of the digital realm with the atoms of our physical world. This led to expanded research in wearable computing, wireless “viral” communications, machines with common sense, new forms of artistic expression and innovative approaches to how children learn.

Now, in its third decade, the Media Lab continues to check traditional disciplines at the door. This fall, we will expand into a new building, a Fumihiko Maki-designed atelier style addition to our current space, where we will continue to move forward concept driven research, inventing—and reinventing—how humans experience, and can be aided by, technology.

The Campus exhibition at Ars Electronica features a sampling of current and recent work from the lab—an intersection of cutting edge technology with an appreciation for the power of design and aesthetics to metamorphize an interactive experience, and the desire to position work within a broader social infrastructure to better understand the effects of technology, for better or worse, on the fabric of society. Three subthemes have emerged for this exhibition—community, humanity and materiality—which broadly encompass the conceptual focus of our research and present a cross over between a humanist perspective so central to our approach and the engineering and science for which MIT is so famous.

Community

The development of new media technologies has brought about a revolution in the way we communicate and share knowledge. In recent years the lab has focused on several systems that empower and democratize access to information and reformulate social infrastructure physically and virtually. Some of the systems feature novel methods of mapping information to physicality and temporality while others look at urban transportation and energy processes. Lab researchers have also developed physical and digital platforms that encourage creativity through ease of accessibility to knowledge, transforming educational methods for all ages. Through products and tools that scaffold the process of creation of technologies by amateurs, the lab has helped in fostering the DIY initiative in communities of open source and participatory design. Key to this initiative is the concept of collective intelligence, aggregating knowledge of a diverse community of experts, and allowing for the formation of virtual communities that were never before possible. IMPETUS presents projects that explore how digital technologies have changed our access to and interpretation of information, and in turn empowered the process of learning, making, doing and understanding.

Humanity

Technology has created systems for human augmentation that allow us to expand our physical and sensory capabilities and we have grown accustomed to living in an environment where our digital devices function as an extension of ourselves, both in ability and perception. The design of technological systems with artificial intelligence pushes these boundaries further, where our devices also become a reflection of ourselves—we adapt to technology and in turn create technology that adapts to us. The notion of our relationship with technology is metamorphosizing as the boundary between technology as human augmentation or outside entity shifts, blurring the line between when technological systems become part of us, and where they remain an ‘other.’ Robotic creations appeal to responses deeply rooted in our human nature, creating a dialogue to persuade, calm, assist or delight, through varying states of anthropomorphized forms and actions, while a vanguard media production questions what it means to be human in the context of an increasingly digital world. Through varying investigative methods, the featured projects seek to challenge and pursue critical inquiry into understanding our own humanity and identity in the context of technology.

Materiality

For all the new dimensions the virtual world has brought us, we still intuitively delight in the physical—the tactile, the graspable, the tangible, the material—allowing us to utilize all of our senses and our inherent bodily knowledge of the world around us. For over a decade, the Media Lab has been at the forefront of understanding and innovating on technology’s place within the built environment and the significance of physicality in our experience with digital systems. The idea of *Tangible Bits* was born at the Media Lab, seamlessly coupling the physical and digital world. In many ways, the Media Lab itself embodies the sense of the importance of physicality; it is a culture of learning by doing, a kinesthetic approach by which the physical output of endeavors can embody ideas beyond the imagination. In future visions of interactivity such as programmable matter and radical atoms, material science on the nanoscale begins to merge with concepts of interactivity, envisioning physical materials that are as malleable, programmable, and dynamic as pixels on a screen. Central to the notion of new materiality is also the innovation of fabrication processes that go along with creation, questioning how changing the process of making things also changes the things we make. For the lab’s designers, artists and scientists working on novel methods of combining computation and materiality, the challenge becomes how to expand our notion of the possibilities of the material world while creating experiences that remain familiar, comfortable and engaging.

Like everything at the MIT Media Lab, the works presented transcend any one category and show a fusion of the artists’ viewpoint, knowledge and personal motivations. Through IMPETUS, we invite you to experience and interpret the diversity and essence of our community.

See all projects of IMPETUS: Works from the MIT Media Lab

Opening:
Thu 3.9.2009 3.30 PM

Opening hours:
Thu 3.9. -Tue 8.9. 10.00 AM – 7.00 PM

DIY Style Interaction Projects by Interface Cultures Student Projects at Ars Electronica 2009
Curated by Christa Sommerer (AT) & Laurent Mignonneau (AT)

Christa Sommerer, Laurent Mignonneau, Dietmar Offenhuber, Michaela Ortner, Varvara Guljajeva

This year’s student projects from the Interface Cultures study department show a variety of interactive projects and prototypes that have been developed in the past study year. Topics circle around interactive art, audio-visual installations, wearable technology projects, gaming interfaces, information visualization and conceptual works. Weibel states in 2008: “Artists, in the age of Youtube.com, Flickr.com, MySpace.com, and Second Life, lose their monopoly on creativity. Using contemporary media everyone can be artistically creative.”¹ In our department we can observe a strong movement in the direction of do-it-yourself (=DIY) style interface projects. Artists and designers here often engage in short-time collaborations and share their code and interface designs on the Internet with a peer community. We however also observe a trend towards more traditional notions of art where the idea is to create unique pieces of interactive art that convey a strong artistic and conceptual message. It is within this dichotomy of the totally open and the rather closed system that we have to see the works presented in this year’s student exhibition.

For the format of the exhibition organization we have chosen to use the metaphor of DIY all the way. Students not only manage their own projects but also collaboratively organize the exhibition design, the curational direction, the flyers, posters and promotional materials. As an exhibition theme, the topic of “The Royal Interface Culture Masquerade Ball” was chosen by the students. From red carpets to Victorian-style frames, white ‘theatre’ masks worn around the exhibition (= the ball) by the visitors, to evening wear worn by students. This year’s theme is to juxtapose modern technology with an old-style ball set-up to create a somewhat opulent atmosphere where new and old meet. Enter into a continuous masquerade only to be trapped by your desires. The main exhibition hall affords guests a place of respite during the festival, with lush tables and chairs and performances by artists throughout the day. This year’s theme is to juxtapose modern technology with an old-style ball set-up to create a somewhat opulent atmosphere where new and old meet.

The outcome of this exhibition is a learning process in itself. It should sensitize students to how complex it is to create scenarios for the presentation of interactive projects, which challenge the audience in areas such as art, scenography and interaction design. As hosts of The 1st Inaugural Royal Interface Culture Ball we invite you to experience opulent spaces, art, performance and anonymity.

¹ Peter Weibel, YOU_niverse, exhibition catalogue, Sevilla: “Bienal de Arte Contemporaneo de Sevilla”, “Fundacionbiacs”, 2008, 16-26

See all projects of The Royal Interface Culture Masquerade Ball

Sa 5.9.
10:00 – 00:00

Hauptplatz

The Japan Media Arts Festival has been an annual event in Tokyo since 1997 and awards prizes for creative works in the fields of art, entertainment, animation and manga.

“JAPAN GAME” focuses on the entertainment aspect of Japanese media arts by showcasing selected game-related works honored by the 2009 Japan Media Arts Festival. All the games in the areas of sports, music, adventure, etc. are playable. Every evening, game tournaments will be held on a large-format screen. We hope audiences will enjoy these forms of artistic expression and, at the same time, recognize the games’ similarities to media art.

The Japan Media Arts Festival has two aims. One is to designate new cultural frameworks and values in accordance with the changes occurring nowadays that make it imperative to avoid persistently clinging to existing cultural hierarchies. Accordingly, we appreciate not only media art but also animation, manga and entertaining works such as games.

Secondly, we are helping new forms of expression and culture to take root and grown along with the progress of digital communications techniques and technology. Some observers might maintain that new culture is disconnected from traditional culture, but the Japan Media Arts Festival has tried to bridge the gap. We think that this activity helps to nurture originality in a new field of culture.

See all projects of Japan Media Art Festival

Landesgalerie Linz

www.landesgalerie.at

With the retrospective exhibition, RIGHT, TO THE CITY, the Landesgalerie Linz presents the most extensive collection of works by Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber to be shown so far in Austria. Since the late 1980s, their joint work has combined a perfectly natural approach to the widest range of media and pictorial technologies with an absolutely contemporary form of conceptual art.

Opening hours
Mon – Fri 09:00 – 18:00,
Sat 09:00 – 12:00

Landesbibliothek Linz, 4021 Linz, Schillerplatz 2

www.kunstraum.at; www.annelorenz.ch

“Deep Inside” is a 3-channel video installation with sound. It was created by the artist Anne Lorenz together with the Upper Austrian State Library for the library users and an interested public. Deep Inside allows a glimpse into the inner life of the library, showing its subliminal psychology.

“Deep Inside” is a project from the series “The Ill Rabbit// crazy about Linz,” initiated by Susanne Blaimschein and Beate Rathmayr // KunstRaum Goethestrasse xtd, realized in cooperation with Linz 09 European Capital of Culture.