So, there are many interesting ways to reconnoiter what’s happening at Ars Electronica’s venues. Round about Festival-City, lots of stuff has been subtly inserted into the cityscape, features designed not to stick out but rather to be discovered only at second glance, sort of like irritants that make their presence and significance felt only upon closer inspection(s). Art projects will pop up here and there—in display cases of Arkade shops, lobbies, pubs, courtyards, classrooms, a gymnasium, wood & metal shops, an underground garage, and on the streets and squares of Linz.
Carrying on in the spirit of pleasant surprise is the Change Gallery, exhibitions shrewdly, artfully arranged in the display windows of a few Arkade shops. Video monitors—some temporarily diverted from their regular retailing duties—are screening films about projects that are based on innovative ideas, have a technological or social background, and aim to improve people’s living situations in some laudable way.
In the middle of the FestivalCity, more specifically in the shops and display windows of the Arkade and the surrounding stores, art and video works invite you to think about the theme of this year’s festival.
The featured artists at the 2014 Ars Electronica Festival are a duo from the Republic of Korea. Since 2012, computer specialist Shin Seung Back and artist Kim Yong Hun have been working together under the dual portmanteau Shinseungback Kimyonghun. 10 works representative of their oeuvre are on display at Ars Electronica.
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.
A piece of no-man’s-land in Japan that belonged to France until 2009 when it reverted to Japan, which will possess it until 2059 when it re-reverts to France—this geo-political oddity reminded Aki Inomata of the behavior of hermit crabs and inspired him to create this work. After all, hermit crabs cast off their shell when they outgrow them.
Radio Österreich 1’s Mobile Ö1 Atelier has been a Festival fixture on Linz’s Main Square for several years now, an art space and discussion lounge prominently situated right in the center of the cityscape. Ö1 has configured this year’s on-site studio Umbrella Radio in accordance with the 2014 Festival theme.
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.
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.
The Japan Media Arts Festival honors outstanding works from a wide range of media, from animation and comics to media art and games. There are four categories of awards: Art, Entertainment, Animation and Manga.
Hand-crafted technological artifacts focus on social interaction and the engagement of the public with DIY (Do It Yourself) and DIT (Do It Together) practices, and learning by doing techniques.
The tamable looper is one of a group of works in which inorganic material is set in motion and thereby evokes the distinctive behavior of certain living creatures.
Yasuaki Kakehi and several colleagues have been working for a considerable time now on the development of haptic interfaces and technology to thereby add a third medium - in addition to audio and video - to the creative repertoire available to digital art and design.
unsettled succinctly describes the mood prevailing in Japan in the wake of the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear catastrophe.
onNote is a novel musical performance system that directly utilizes printed music scores as a musical instrument. This system can make users believe that sound is indeed embedded in the music notes in the scores.
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.
Sensarium Dome is an intelligent recliner that can interact with its user via various sensors, and adapt its fulldome program to his/her behavior and biofeedback.
Audiovisual Environment inspired by the myth of Orpheus, his descent into the underworld and the attempted rescue of his wife Eurydice.