For about two decades, printers have offered computer users a convenient way to print texts and photos. But for a while now, special devices allow to make three-dimensional objects made of plastic, metal, gypsum and even concrete with a printer. First, you use special 3D software to design a digital object on the computer. Then all you have to do is print it!

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.

Learn to be a Machine | DistantObject #1 is an abstract system of obedience and manipulation. The video installation features a representation of the artist himself, who has provided a means for the audience to interact with the system. By scrolling a trackball, the audience can manipulate the direction of the artist’s eyes. Blinking and facial expressions are generated randomly.The work explores the power relation between humans and machines.

People transfer systems from the physical to virtual space. But what happens if this process is reversed? Aerosol is an experiment, which investigates exactly this by using a particle simulation. The fascinating thing about such a particle system is the emergent, unpredictable phenomena. A taut fabric surface is formed into a continually changing landscape by using a grid of 16 servomotors that is attached to the fabric. Due to gravitation, small metal balls placed on top of the fabric are set in motion.

Groups and loners

If you watch the balls for a while, you will notice how the balls display a variety of behavior patterns. There are loners that constantly race over the fabric, never coming to rest, and groups of balls that move more slowly and only separate when the fabric landscape suddenly creates a hill.

How can humankind arrive at an eminently livable future? Which pioneers are already blazing trails in that direction and can make it accessible to all? These questions are being posed by the 2014 Ars Electronica Festival, and there’ll be no shortage of potential answers to them either!

Delivering Energy

Thus, the C in the festival theme also stands for catalysts, the agents necessary to provide energy and trigger a reaction that gets change underway—not only in chemistry experiments; in processes of social renewal too. Since time immemorial, art has been a superb catalyst. It can impart energy to an idea without exhausting itself.

Making the World a Better Place

Artists as catalysts of change: the 2014 Ars Electronica Festival will address this fascinating concept as well. How art can be applied will be showcased in the Change Gallery arrayed in and around the Arkade shopping center. These best-practice examples of how technical and social innovations can make life better have been designed to impart the courage to get started with some much-needed change. The mix also includes an interesting assortment of media art from around the world.

The wall installation In Search of Lost Time consists of 42 flip-flap displays arranged in a square grid. Instead of alphanumeric text, the modules are reduced to colour and movement. By detecting activity in the room, the units randomly start to move until they reach a synchronized rhythm. When the visitor leaves the room, the motors decelerate and return to their initial position, except one additional module which keeps a revised position thereby creating a dynamic autopoietic image.

In “tour en l’air,” Berlin-based artist Ursula Neugebauer evokes an unforgettable childhood experience: the thrill she felt when she got her first long skirt and the wonderful new feeling of twirling while wearing it. This was her introduction to a new form of stability amidst rotation.

Dancing Clothes

“tour en l’air” is an impressive installation at the nexus of fashion, art and architecture. Each of several deco busts slips into a floor-length red taffeta dress and is then brought to life by a computer-controlled electric motor. Although the individual elements are merely machines and pieces of fabric, the overall composition seems to amount to a poetic expression of something quintessentially human: an enchanting dance.

Dance with the air: atOms and MoLECULE are two—actually invisible—kinetic installations. The fact that they actually consist of unstable, moving layers of air is made apparent by the small white balls kept hovering in midair by several fans.

For atOms , Ryo Kishi set up a group of eight air jets controlled by servomotors. They produce a meshwork of eight individually adjustable air currents.

Fascinating Interplay

MoLECULE is constructed according to a similar principle. With 25 independently operating air vents keeping the balls aloft, Kishi’s second installation is even more complex, engendering a fascinating spectacle of equilibrium, motion and ceaseless change.