MON September 8 2014, 5 PM
Ars Electronica Center, Deep Space

So-called serious games and other game-based solutions to problems have achieved notable successes in recent years when called upon to tackle a wide variety of problems—for instance, analyzing huge data sets or motivating XXL couch potatoes to get more exercise. Nevertheless, there’s hardly been any improvement in the framework conditions for the interaction of a lot of players in one and the same real space—it’s still gaming’s terra incognita.

Game Changer, a digital game suite assembled especially for Deep Space, boldly goes forth into this unexplored domain. It consists of several multiplayer game prototypes that function only by means of players’ physical presence and movements, and makes possible multifarious varieties of collaborative gaming.

Team
Jeremiah Diephuis (US), Andreas Friedl (AT), Wolfgang Hochleitner (AT), Georgi Kostov (BG), Michael Lankes (AT), Poorya Piroozan (IR), Christoph Schaufler (AT), Daniel Wilfinger (AT)

As different as the Ars Electronica Center and Linz’s St. Mary’s Cathedral may be in every imaginable respect, they’ll have something in common during Ars Electronica 2014: festivalgoers will be able to employ the façades of both buildings as projection surfaces.

Living Architecture

Archifon III, an audiovisual and architectural installation by Tomáš Dvořák and Dan Gregor, turns Mariendom’s windows and walls into a virtual musical instrument. It can be played with laser pointers, which activate acoustic and optical elements mounted at various stops on the façade. Suddenly, the church’s stone walls seem to come alive, to react like a resonating body.

Read more about this on our Ars Electronica Blog!

As the festival moves into the heart of the city, the media façade of Ars Electronica Center extrudes itself to a number of pixels distributed across the festival sites, entangled with their counterparts on the iconic building. They are controlled via the “LinzerSchnitte”, an open-source radio-based physical computing technology developed at the Ars Electronica Futurelab.

Godparenthood for a pixel-pair

During the festival, workshops in the program of the Future Innovators Summit enable visitors to participate by assuming “godparenthood” for a pixel-pair and choosing the patterns it will show. Ars Electronica Futurelab also offers a behind-the-scenes look at the technology itself and advice for anyone interested in using it for their own project.

You can get an impression of the feelings and attitudes of people in Linz towards the environment, mobility, security, the housing situation and the public sphere from the Smart Citizen Sentiment Dashboard (SCSD) on the Ars Electronica Center. Like an ongoing opinion poll, the SCSD features a simple interface that gives people the opportunity to personally rate the quality of life in this city.

Database of Feelings

The information thus gathered goes into a database of feelings that’s translated into a visual vocabulary and depicted on the Ars Electronica Center’s media façade. In this way, the SCSD makes a splendid, high-profile statement that’s designed to foster an ongoing dialog about life in Linz.

Read more about this on our Ars Electronica Blog!

Anyone who’s ever felt the desire to adopt a pixel can now make their dream come true thanks to Entangled Sparks. Foster parents assume authority over one of the points of light on the Ars Electronica Center’s façade. Meanwhile, the façade’s pixels are being distributed about town in the form of Linzer Schnitt pastries with a tiny radio receiver hidden inside. So, instead of wolfing it down and being done with it, you’ll just have to come up with some creative way to put it to use.

Playing with Light

For instance, via remote control from the privacy of your own home, you could toggle your adopted pixel on and off, or make it shine steadily, blink, or slowly segue from bright to dark. You could even join forces with other pixel-adopters and design a pattern for the AEC’s façade. Accompanying workshops https://ars.electronica.art/Link-zu-den-entangled-sparks-Workshops provide an opportunity to get acquainted with the innards of the Linzer Schnitten and to give some thought to how you could put this technology developed at the Ars Electronica Futurelab to use in your own project.

Connecting Cities is a worldwide expanding network aiming to build up a connected infrastructure of media facades, urban screens and other digital projection sites to circulate artistic and socially relevant content. In opposition to the commercial use of these urban media, we use them as platforms on which citizens can exchange information and artworks – within the city as much as between cities.

This year’s theme is Participatory City, the aim of which is to get city dwellers integrated into the various projects. During the Ars Electronica Festival 2014, Linz serves as one of the Participatory City venues and shows two outstanding interactive façade projects: Entangled Sparks and Smart Citizen Sentiment Dashboard

Connecting Cities Network initiated by Public Art Lab Berlin in co-organization with Ars Electronica Linz, Media Architecture Institute Vienna, FACT Liverpool, BIS Istanbul, Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, m-cult Helsinki, Medialab-Prado Madrid, iMAL Brussels, Foundation Riga 2014 and Videospread Marseille, in association with Mutek Montreal, Marseille-Provence 2013, Aarhus University, Quartier des spectacles Montreal, Foundation Bauhaus Dessau, Verve Cultural Sao Paulo, ikono Berlin, Federation Square Melbourne; funded by the European Commission – Programme Culture..

To illustrate the evolution of computer games Teh House of Pong compares iconic games from the past with recent games. The direct comparison of old and recent games shows both breaks and continuities in the technology, the game design and the visual style.

Tracing the basic genres

Vom Klassiker Pong ausgehend, widmet sich die Präsentation den Entwicklungen der grundlegenden Spielgenres: Shooters/Shmups, Action Games, Adventures, Jump & Run Games, und Racing Games.

Neue Konsolen

Starting from the original Pong game, the presentation traces some of the basic genres: Shooters/Shmups, Action Games, Adventures, Jump & Run Games, and Racing games. In the early days of computer games consumer expectations exceeded the technology. Graphical fidelity was one of the main selling points of any new system.

Constant change

Today there is a new console generation on the market; handhelds, tablets and mobile devices are everywhere. The market is constantly changing, just like the business and distribution models. Looking back at the past may just help shed light on the future.

PLEN is an open source printable bipedal walking humanoid robot. Since all its constituent control circuits, software and mechanical designs are universally accessible, technicians and artists can use PLEN as a platform for their own diversifying development processes.
Visitors can attend workshops in which they develop their own vision of an evolvable robot and then, in various forms, bring these creative visions to life.

Iris is a pair of hands that communicates with participants by hand gestures solely. Through interacting with Iris, audience will then discover and create the language to “talk” with her, which leads to the investigation of human’s behavioural codes by manifesting hand gestures in a mischievous manner.

Learning hands

Iris is responsive to the audience’s hand gestures when they put theirs inside a designated device. Their hands are then detected and analysed. The gestures are scrutinised and responded by an array of rules that audience may explore through communication. Since the installation keeps learning different combinations of hand gestures by recording to a database on the Internet, it will keep expanding persistently.

Film is the theme of the 2014 u19 – CREATE YOUR WORLD Future Festival of the Next Generation. And that’s a happy happenstance, since this year’s Golden Nica winner in the Prix Ars Electronica’s u19 – CREATE YOUR WORLD category, Sarah Oos, is being honored for “Femme Chanel – Emma Fenchel”, a film montage that makes use of found footage.

15 Great Works

You can take in a screening of Sarah Oos’ outstanding film and check out 14 other works by some very talented young people in this year’s u19 – CREATE YOUR WORLD Exhibit, a showcase of fascinating, surprising, offbeat and witty submissions to the Prix Ars Electronica’s u19 category.

Melodious Mirror

(e)motion-mirror by Richard Sadek features an unforeseen mirror that translates facial expressions into sounds. Jonas Bodingbauer’s Smart Clock doubles as a clock and appointment calendar. Plus, there are funny animated films with surprising endings, exciting adventure games, practical robots that can plan interior layouts, and lots more.

Up, up and away!

The youngest prizewinner takes visitors on a trip in her Balloon Hotel. Another project deals with how to make life easier for asylum seekers in Austria. And one project was actually implemented in conjunction with a development aid project in Africa.