Thu 5.9. – Mon 9. 9. 10:00 – 21:00 Uhr
Hauptplatz

A souvenir is a mostly simple thing, with which one associates a mostly complex image or sensation of a former experience — a memory. Memories appear inside a huge snowball souvenir on Hauptplatz – just view what‘s inside, or take a headphone and listen to it, or even let it snow …

We are supposed to register, restore and recall as much as possible, in order to function appropriately in our fast world of consume. What does Souvenir remind you of? is to the offer of a gentle counter pole, the invitation of a conversation between the installation, the spectators and the surrounding space.

Thu 5.9. – Mon 9. 9. 10:00 – 21:00 Uhr
Hauptplatz

Station Rose (AT)

Station Rose, founded 25 years ago by visual artist Elisa Rose (AT) and musician/composer Gary Danner (AT) 25 years ago as Vienna’s first address of the open digital leading edge, has reached in 2013 the Digital Quarter Century mark/DQC. DQC is a current project designed to conserve cultural heritage as viewed from the perspective of artists, the pioneers of digital culture.

A Playhouse

STR has now created DQC_ShelTeR as a playable installation, an A/V sculpture, a digital archive, a playhouse for grownups, an effort to avoid losing an overview of the data. Elisa Rose & Gary Danner perform live in audiovisual sessions. DQC data are looped into new A/V material composed especially for the Festival. The world premiere of the DQC_ShelTeR performance will, in turn, be recorded.

Performances

5.9. 14:00
6.9. 16:30
7.9. 13:00
8.9. 15:00, 22:00
9.9. 22:00

Opening Hours installation

Thu 5. 9. 12:00 – 24:00
Fri 6. – Mon 9. 9. 10:00 – 21:00
Tabakfabrik

MEGA e.V. – Museum of Electronic Games & Art (DE)

Media are bearers of cultural memory. This also applies to electronic games, which have become a mainstay medium and an essential mode of cultural expression that plays a formative role in many people’s childhood memories.

MEGA’s Ludic Memento exhibition is a journey through time from the birth of electronic games to the present. It shows how important it is to conserve, restore and reconstruct gaming systems as a means of avoiding digital amnesia.

Digital Cultural Heritage

The objects on display allow for a profound substantive encounter with the history of technology and with the visual, auditory and hapitic aspects of the gaming experience. The exhibition proposes a new form of cultural transmission and, together with the Retro/per/spektiven exhibition, lodges the claim that this mission is beyond the purview of conventional institutions of commemoration and preservation.

Tabakfabrik
Thu 5. 9. 12:00 – 24:00
Fri 6. – Mon 9. 9. 10:00 – 21:00

Erika Jungreithmayr (AT), g.tec medical engineering (AT)

Does our brain react differently to celebrities’ facial features then it does to those of people we don’t recognize? Erika Jungreithmayr and g.tec medical engineering look into this. They began by photographing 50 visitors to the Ars Electronica Center and storing these portraits to a database.

Festivalgoers interested in finding out more about this can participate in the second part of the experiment: the faces will be shown to them while a brain-computer interface measures and graphically depicts their brain waves.

Ars Electronica Center, Level -3
Thu 5.9. – Mon 9.9. 10:00 – 21:00

Ars Electronica’s featured artist is HR Giger. The painter, graphic artist and designer was born in 1940 in Switzerland. He’s an art world outsider and the legendary creator of biomechanics and the Oscar-winning creature in “Alien.” This embodiment of fear and horror, the intruder from beyond in Ridley Scott’s classic sci-fi film, has been a pop culture icon since 1980 and made Giger’s inimitable style world famous.

Giger is part of the 1960s avant-garde but his roots extend back into the art history of the 19th century. He is indeed a painter, but has made the airbrush his primary tool.

Fears and Obsessions

As one of the leading innovators in the fantastic art genre, Giger’s art draws upon his childhood fears and obsessions, above all humankind’s collective fears of global atomic warfare and of being victimized by technological progress. Obsessed by the cycle of birth, eros and death, the artist merges technology, mechanics and organic creatures into frightening “bio-mechanoids” and thus visions that anticipated cyborgs.

From Necronom to Prometheus

The exhibition in Linz’s Lentos Art Museum features paintings, drawings, films and sculptures that reveal the development of Giger’s biomechanical style. Accompanied by original props, design sketches and the Alien Diaries, the exhibition traces his career from the Necronom cycle from the 1970s to Alien and all the way to Prometheus, Giger’s latest design—once again for a film by Ridley Scott.

Alien Diaries

Zu den Raritäten der Ausstellung zählen Gigers legendäre Alien-Diaries aus den Jahren 1978 und 1979. Erstmals liegen sie nun als Buch vor, das mit der Ausstellungsvernissage im LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz in den Handel kommt und auch bei einer Signierstunde mit dem Künstler erhältlich ist.

Book signing with HR Giger

Thu 5. 9. 15:00
LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz

The CyberArts – Exhibition shows the award-winning works of the Prix Ars Electronica 2013.

El Campo de Cebada

El Campo de Cebada (ES)
Golden Nica Digital Communities

Refugees United is a non-profit organization that makes a global, anonymous, user-driven search system available to families of refugees, which enables them to search for missing relatives independently of third parties.

Visualizing Palestine

Visualizing Palestine (PS)
Award of Distinction Digital Communities

Visualizing Palestine is committed to social justice and change for the better in Palestine. It focuses on the failure of the organizations involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, effective deployment of communication tools (and not relying exclusively on dry-as-dust reports, tables and graphics) and the inability of the media to deliver unbiased coverage (instead of providing one-sided reportage that concentrates on Hamas). The response that this crew’s data analysts and media designers have come up with features data put forth in an attractive, coherent way.

The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project

Koen Vanmechelen (BE)
Golden Nica Hybrid Art

The investigation of biocultural diversity and identity that Vanmechelen has been conducting since 1999 combines art, science and aesthetics. In his Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, the artist has crossed species of chickens from many different countries. The aim: breeding cosmopolitan poultry with genetic material from every one of the world’s chicken species.

Five Variations Of Phonic Circumstances And A Pause

Tania Candiani (MX)
Award of Distinction Hybrid Art

This work by Tania Candiani tunes in to the culture of hearing and audio technologies. It’s based on speaking machines and hearing systems, which she implements for poetic actions with machines, language, codification and the audio texture of narration. Each of the machines in Five Variations … addresses and expands on a particular conception associated with devices, instruments or technologies, and subjects their sounds or tonal characteristics to a variation.

Mycotecture

Phil Ross (US)
Award of Distinction Hybrid Art

Since the early 1990s, Phil Ross has been experimenting with living fungi which he introduces into a medium such as sawdust. Within a week, the mixture solidifies into a very versatile, plaster-like mass that Ross has used to construct furniture and a teahouse. The fact that it’s 100% organic and biodegradable isn’t the only reason why his invention is a terrific sustainable alternative to petroleum-based materials.

The Blind Robot

Louis-Philippe Demers (CA/SG)
Honorary Mention Hybrid Art

Louis-Philippe Demers set out to transform a robot arm from a cold precision tool into a sensitive instrument, and thereby create a new form of intimate touch by social robots. In his installation, the mechatronic arm gently feels the faces and upper bodies of installation visitors just like a blind person would do. Finally, a monitor depicts what the robot “saw” in going about this.

Pancreas

Thomas Feuerstein (AT)
Honorary Mentions Hybrid Art

Pancreas is a processual sculpture that converts books into sugar that, in turn, serves as nourishment for human brain cells. Book pages that have been shredded and soaked in water are put into a bio-fermenter serving as an artificial intestine where bacteria break down the cellulose into glucose. Once this material is filtered and cleaned, it’s fed to brain cells in a glass container. But this artificial brain is on a strict diet—its sole source of nutrition is one of the milestones of philosophy, Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit.

frequencies (a)

Nicolas Bernier (CA)
Golden Nica Digital Musics & Sound Art

frequencies (a) is a sound performance combined with light. It blends digital sounds with the crystal-clear tones of a tuning fork. By means of computer-controlled magnetic vents, Bernier imparts precise strikes to a tuning fork. This is accompanied by the pulsating of glistening lights, and the space is filled by a composition of light and sound.

Borderlands Granular

Chris Carlson (US)
Award of Distinction Digital Musics & Sound Art

Borderlands Granular is a new musical instrument that makes it possible to experiment with, touch and modify sounds by means of granular synthesis, a technique that uses stratification and/or overlapping of very brief sound fragments or “grains” to produce complex, dynamically changing timbres and tonal structures. The software supports flexible improvisation in real time and enables users—defined as organizers of sounds—to work directly with sound material even if they lack any formal musical background.

SjQ++

SjQ++ (JP)
Award of Distinction Digital Musics & Sound Art

This audiovisual tool enables multiple users to simultaneously compose music in real time. Via interaction, participants create sound data that are, in turn, visualized and depict the behavior of the respective users. The audience experiences the performance as an inseparably interwoven construction of sounds and visual elements. The sounds and images are not only perfectly synchronized; they also reciprocally influence and modify one another.

Pendulum Choir

Michel Décosterd (CH), André Décosterd (CH)
Golden Nica Interactive Art

Pendulum Choir is choral piece for nine a cappella voices and 18 hydraulic cylinders. The singers are engaged in a battle/playful encounter with gravity on tilting pedestals that, as an ensemble, form a living tonal body. This assumes various physical states that, in turn, influence its acoustic behavior—abstract, repetitive, lyrical or narrative. The forms of expression include subtle vocal polyphonies, lyrical flights of fancy, and dark, obsessive rituals.

Voices of Aliveness

Masaki Fujihata (JP)
Award of Distinction Interactive Art

Participants ride a bicycle equipped with a GPS logger and a video camera around a track prepared especially for this project—the so-called shouting circuit. While doing so, they’re requested to scream their brains out! As a collection of these loops and cries, Voices of Aliveness is a collective vocal sculpture that will be reproduced in cyberspace in the form of a ring.

Rain Room

rAndom International (GB)
Award of Distinction Interactive Art

Rain Room is a 100-m2 field of dripping water. The meticulously choreographed rainfall reacts so sensitively to installation visitors’ presence and movements that they can cross this high-precipitation zone without getting wet.

Down with Wrestlers with Systems and Mental Nonadapters!

Kawarga Dmitry & Elena (RU)
Honorary Mentions Interactive Art

Via a treadmill, installation visitors set a “social mechanism” into motion and can feel a bit like God as they go about it, since the movement of the mechanism as well as of the figures inside depend on the visitor’s own pace. The upshot is experiencing a sort of split consciousness: Does society co-opt us all, or do we create this enslavement mechanism ourselves? Reciting the Dada Manifesto into a microphone causes the installation to vibrate and several of the figures begin to tumble out of it. A monitor displays images captured by a mini video camera inside a black box in which another reality is to be found: the world of the artist.

Ishin-Den-Shin

Olivier Bau (FR), Yuri Suzuki(JP), Ivan Poupyrev (RU)
Honorary Mentions Interactive Art

In his 2012-13 series Angles, Daniel Rozin applies a new form of geometric image production. It dispenses with the usual rectangular grid and is based instead on rotation. The Angles Mirror, a triangular block of steel with rotatable pointers—doesn’t construct the image out of various levels of lightness and darkness; instead, it depicts the mirror image of the viewer taken by the camera in the form of various angles of inclination. Rather than a photorealistic picture, the Angles Mirror represents the three-dimensional movement of a figure that results from the change of distance from the reflecting sculpture.

AHORA. A song in the Hypertemporal Surface

Hernán Kerlleñevich (AR), Mene Savasta Alsina (AR)
Honorary Mentions Interactive Art

Software and installation, AHORA is a composition environment for music in space. A composed interactive song fragmented into its sound elements lies on the floor of the installation space. The sound elements make up the temporal corpus of the piece, which awaits the step of an installation visitor to make it resound. The sound elements are reordered depending on the visitor’s path, and thus the piece is rewritten depending on the particular route.

The exhibition is shown at the OK Offenes Kulturhaus im OÖ Kulturquartier during the following hours.

OK Offenes Kulturhaus im OÖ Kulturquartier
Opening Thu 5.9. 18:00
Thu 5. – Fr 6.9. 10:00 – 21:00
Sat 7.9. 10:00 – 23:00
Sun 8. – Mo 9.9. 10:00 – 21:00

Wolfgang Fadi Dorninger’s Aural Memory Machine is an six-channel sound installation. Festivalgoers and other visitors to Linz’s St. Mary’s Cathedral—with or without a musical background or technical skills—are the ones who play it. All they have to do is enter any text they want using a Midi keyboard at one of eight terminals on site. In real time, the texts launch field recordings of the acoustic surroundings, which are grouped into various thematic clusters.

Text or Sound – or Both?

Up to eight sound designers can simultaneously explore the potential of the Aural Memory Machine. They must constantly decide whether they want to produce text or code, or participate in the design of a temporary acoustic environment in the Cathedral—or both.

Nightly Concert

The culminating highlight is a nightly concert by Wolfgang Fadi Dorninger, Petra Anlanger (AT), Richard Eigner (AT), Georg Edlinger (AT), Volker Kagerer (AT) and Wolfgang Kreuzhuber (AT) and associates, in which they use the same instruments as visitors but play a predetermined repertoire: selected texts from the Ars Electronica Catalog.

Mariendom

Sa 7. 9. 12:00 – 17:00, 20:00-23:00, Live-Performance: 23:00 – 24:00
Mariendom

Ein Wiedersehen mit echten Arcade-Automaten und Klassikern aus 40 Jahren Computerspielgeschichte à la Pong ermöglichen die Ausstellungen retro/per/spektiven und Ludic Memento in der Tabakfabrik. Auf der Zeitreise von den Anfängen des elektronischen Spiels bis in die Gegenwart darf nach Herzenslust gespielt werden!

In der Game Jam in der Tabakfabrik (Achtung: Anmeldung notwendig!) schaffen Profi-EntwicklerInnen im Wettlauf gegeneinander und gegen die Zeit innerhalb von 48 Stunden spielbare Game-Prototypen;

ein ambitioniertes internationales Nachwuchsteam erarbeitet im GameLab des u19 – CREATE YOUR WORLD Zukunftsfestival der nächsten Generation ein anspruchsvolles Game.

Hiroshi Ishiguro (JP)

Seven years ago, Hiroshi Ishiguro (JP) created the remote-controlled android Geminoid HI-1 as a copy of himself. Equipped with 46 servomotors and various sensors, it’s one of the most complex robots ever built and is correspondingly difficult to transport. Accordingly, Ishiguro built a more mobile version, Geminoid HI-4. This lightweight model can converse with humans, and has 12 servomotors for facial expressions as well as eye and head movements.
Ishiguro and Geminoid HI-4 are usually not at the same place at the same time. While one of the two is out delivering a speech somewhere, the other is at work, maybe in Japan. Or vice-versa.

Fri 6.9. 10:00 – 21:00
Ars Electronica Center, RoboLab

Undergrads at Queensland University of Technology (AU), a group of youngsters associated with the u19 – CREATE YOUR WORLD Festival, and various festivalgoers are going to try out a new and different form of festival documentation. Instead of filming the goings-on at the festival as neutrally, as objectively as possible, the focus this time around is going to be on a subjective, personal festival experience. Equipped with wide-angle Action Cams, they’ll be sent out into the hustle and bustle for the length of one battery charge. What they cover and how they do it is completely up to them.

Subjective Point of View

They should go out and capture what appeals to them, which is not necessarily the stuff that producers, curators and artists consider interesting and worthy of digital immortality.
Once each swarm has scoured the festival grounds for sweet images, it’s time to buzz back to the Beehive, the Mobile Ö1 Atelier on Hauptplatz. Here, they can turn in their SD cards, upload all the data, and finally view their material on the Bienenstock Monument which consists of a 30 screens installation centerpiece surrounded by a user interface and Bienenstock user terminals. The user terminals will also be distributed throughout the festival main locations where the festival punters have the opportunity to view, edit (mash) or contribute content to the project.

ars.electronica.art/bienenstock

Mobiles Ö1-Atelier, Hauptplatz