As the first festival of its kind, Ars Electronica has attracted a great deal of attention from the very beginning. This enthusiastic reception can be attributed to the festival’s pioneering role, one it still plays today, as well as to its reputation and function as a trading place for information, an exchange hub for ideas and projects whose impact extends beyond the scope of the festival itself.

Ars Electronica has always made an effort to offer younger festivals, initiatives and media art laboratories diverse platforms on which to present their work to a wider audience. This has given rise in recent years to an important endeavor – diverting the spotlight focused on the Ars Electronica project onto related enterprises and their concerns.

In its 30^th year, Ars Electronica is exerting an even stronger pull thanks to its anniversary’s coincidence with Linz’s year as European Capital of Culture, and through the opening of the new Ars Electronica Center. This constellation provides an opportunity to give what has up to now been somewhat of an informal presentation its own festival format for the first time, thus lending it a higher profile. Not as a program with a defined thematic structure, but rather as an open stage – as *Scenes and Structures*. This will cast a more focused light on what has already been a tradition for several years.

Within the scope of this format, for example, Andreas Broeckmann, artistic director of the ISEA 2010, will present the direction this symposium will take for the Ruhr Valley’s year as European Capital of Culture (D); the artistic and technical ensemble of the Dutch media center V2_ will present their relaunch and new concept; and the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology, *Leonardo*, will introduce its recently developed education forum. The Spanish VIDA competition, whose twelfth edition will again focus on artificial-life technologies and the associated disciplines such as robotics and artificial intelligence, is just as much a part of *Scenes and Structures* as the performance of computer animations from Mexico and from the SIGGRAPH milieu, or the presentation of the latest publications by Linz artist Christa Sommerer.

FutureEverything will present The FutureEverything Award and the relaunch of Futuresonic as FutureEverything.

See all projects of Scenes & Structures