You feel like you’re being watched, don’t you? The artificial eye appears to be nothing out of the ordinary at first glance. It rests ensconced in a little black box. But upon closer inspection, you discover why you suddenly have the feeling of being under surveillance. Like a living creature with a mind of its own, Frank the Eye peers back at you—the actual observer, now also the one being observed—and follows your every move. Is this reciprocated gaze what it takes to get us to acknowledge an object as a life form? Is it even somehow human? And what actually happens with the picture files capturing visitors’ facial features that the eye’s face-tracking software uses to recognize people and stalk them?

The Japanese artist Iori Tomita creates fntastic-alien preparations out of marine animals. The muscle tissue of animals is thereby made translucent by dissolving natural proteins. The precise forms of nature are exposed by human dissection technique and then inked. The firmer and the softer tissues (cartilage) are treated differently. The process to produce a preparation lasts up to six months, depending on the size of the animal.

Manoi PF01 is a Japanese robot that combines design artistry with leading-edge technology. Several details of the construction aim to counteract the cliché of robots as mere high-tech musclemen: big eyes and a broad forehead convey openness; the expansive chest radiates self-assurance.

Progress begins when current conditions are called into question. smartflower energy technology GmbH is an Austrian company that has developed a mobile solar power plant for use by a typical household. This stylish piece of equipment in the shape of a flower with 12 solar panels collectively measuring about 18 m² as its petals can be set up and dismantled in an hour and is as user-friendly as a household appliance. This company’s motto: just plug it in and play. The smart sunflower swivels automatically to follow the sun, is self-cleaning, and folds up on its own as a safety precaution when the wind gets too gusty. After being tested as a prototype in 2011, smartflower was launched in 2013, and has been on the market throughout Europe since 2014.

Bienenstock is an ongoing artistic research experiment for collecting and contextualizing video content from people during live happenings. In the broadest sense it is a cross-media system for crowdsourced video documentation. Bienenstock is the German word for beehive, and this serves as the central metaphor: like in a society of bees, registered participants swarm out, capture footage of an event from a multitude of perspectives and return it (to the hive) to be ingested into the collective pool.

Increased platform

First developed at the Ars Electronica Festival 2013 this year the project will be taken to a new level with many more cameras and participants as well as increased platforms for mobile content delivery. The main installation and info point is located inside the Bus on Spittelwiese. Particpants can collect and drop off their camera here.

Download the app!

In addition to borrowing cameras to use during your time at the festival there is a mobile application that allows everyone to collect footage to be included in the Bienenstock. This app can be downloaded from the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store; simply search for ‘Bienenstock’.

The Pilsen 2015 Bus, a charming goodwill ambassador representing Pilsen, 2015 European Capital of Culture, has been on the road for quite a while now. This mint-green bus originally came off the Karosa assembly line, and then got a makeover by Czech artists Petr Nikl and Ondřej Smeykal. During its gig at the Ars Electronica Festival, the vehicle will be serving as infopoint for Pilsen 2015 and for the Bienenstock.

A question of trust: how far are you willing to entrust your security to a machine?
The Collider is a door that opens only to those who apparently don’t believe in its existence. Anyone who’d like to pass through it has to take a 15-meter-long approach and run full-speed-ahead right at the closed portal.

Does Trust Suffice?

At the very last moment—just when a game-over crash seems unavoidable—the door springs open … provided the runner continues at full speed all the way through the final centimeters. It calls for a lot of trust in the technology. A series of sensors is what makes it work. They measure the position and speed of the person on the runway. If the final sensor still measures no deceleration, an electromagnet is turned off, the door unlocks and the way through the portal is open.

If you happen to see a torrent of merry folks from diverse ethnic and social backgrounds dancing their way through downtown Linz while lip-syncing a blaring playback of ABBA’s hit song Take A Chance on Me, then you might think that Mardi Gras is awfully late this year or mass lunacy has broken out. But never mind, what’s underway is merely a collective emotional experiment.

Not Just One Camera, Lots of Them

The point of the Ars Electronica Festival’s experiment is a large-scale Lip-Dub, though one that intentionally deviates from the classic version featuring an uncut tracking shot. Participants in this creative exercise are called upon to film themselves with their own smartphone or an action cam they’ve brought along. This is a great opportunity to vent spontaneously, since happenings that materialize out of a clear blue sky are expressly welcome.

1 Video from 1,000 Perspectives

With the festivities still in progress, the video editing terminals in the Ars Electronica Center will already be in high gear turning countless selfies from this inner city tour into the first version of a music video shot jointly from hundreds of camera angles. Multiple subsequent versions will follow, all entertainingly illustrating how differently one and the same event can be depicted via multiple shifts of perspective.

Take part!