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.

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’.

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.

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!