The CyberArts exhibition at the OK Center for Contemporary Art features the best works singled out for recognition by the 2016 Prix Ars Electronica, a prize honoring creativity and pioneering spirit in media art.
Exhibitions, Projects
The finest in media art. The most important exhibition at every festival is the CyberArts show at the OK Center for Contemporary Art featuring works submitted from all over the world for Prix Ars Electronica prize consideration and singled out for recognition by this year’s juries. This is a comprehensive showcase of excellence and leading indicator of what’s happening in digital art. The theme exhibition at POSTCITY brings together a wide array of artistic approaches designed to open up diverse perspectives from which to consider this year’s festival theme. The Ars Electronica Center (with extended opening hours throughout the Festival) hosts multiple exhibitions. Linz Art University’s annual Campus show spotlighting outstanding work being done at a selected guest university rounds out the lineup of exhibitions running during the Festival.
Beginning September 8, 2016, the Ars Electronica Center will showcase the “Radical Atoms” exhibition, which centers around the digital world’s merger with the physical one. It is a reference to the visions and prototypes that have emerged from the MIT Media Lab’s Tangible Media Group.
The “Alchemists of Our Time” exhibition at this year’s Ars Electronica Festival spotlights a new generation of artists and researchers. This show will be running in the spacious halls of POSTCITY on the grounds of Linz’s main train station.
Deep Space 8K is premiering a series of new and fascinating visualizations. Festivalgoers are in for breathtaking worlds of imagery and mind-blowing experiences over the five-day festival run.
The international Association for Robots in Architecture is originally a spin off association of Vienna University of Technology. Its goal is to make industrial robots accessible for the creative industry, artists, designers and architects, by sharing ideas, research results and technological developments.
The group exhibition Media Spaces contains media projects that research innovative conceptual solutions within the realm where real and virtual spaces come together. They include artworks created with a focus on spatial aspects of media installations, including their dimension and perception, to show art works by nine young individuals who came to Berlin a year ago to study, work, and last but not least to live in the city of Berlin.
Summer Sessions are short-term residencies for young and emerging artists, organized by an international network of cultural organizations. The Summer Sessions pop-up exhibition at the Festival Ars Electronica shows a selection of outcomes realized through this international exchange of emerging talents.
Linz Art University’s Interface Cultures program annually invites an international partner university to present work being done there. This year’s guest is Tsinghua University. The Campus Exhibition will showcase outstanding works of media art by Tsinghua students.
University of Art and Design Linz / Interface Cultures (AT) This year the Interface Culture department intends to celebrate the emergence of new sensibilities in respect to speculative investigations of new materialities
Appointed by the European Commission, Ars Electronica has launched a prize to select the most pioneering collaborations and results in the field of creativity and innovation at the nexus of science and technology with the arts. Ars Electronica 2016 presents a selection of the prizewinning and nominated works of STARTS Prize 2016.
Do you need a friend to chat with? Do you want to know more about an artwork? Is intelligence human? Kydo may provide an answer.
A young blonde said to me, “Welcome.” Last September, transiting to the airport, at Vienna’s Westbahnhof rail terminus I was suddenly caught up in the crowd transiting to Europe from the east. Side by side, we are waiting for the next train.
From door to door, from room to room:In the former offices of the postal and parcel distribution center you will encounter different projects by international artists.
Upper Austrian photographers Werner Dedl and Volker Weihbold did a lot of traveling while the flow of refugees was at its peak—to train stations, temporary quarters and meet&greet events, and to Jordan near the epicenter of the crisis. They photographed people who had just made it through the perilous ordeal of fleeing to Europe.
Deep in catacombs of POSTCITY, there’s a labyrinth of passageways, The Maze, a fallout shelter with room for 3,000 people, and a former storeroom for undeliverable parcels. These spaces—their extrovertedness, their aesthetics—evoke animated scenes in computer games. Now, the 2016 Ars Electronica Festival is using them as a setting for an intriguingly composed show of audiovisual works in which space is an essential magnitude.
The huge current interest in forms of interdisciplinary collaboration shines what or many people is a long-overdue spotlight on the multifarious possibilities that can emerge from exchange and cooperation among, on one hand, art and creativity, and, on the other hand, science and technology.
Ars Electronica and Intel present: “One rarely experiences moments in which it becomes crystal clear how important and rewarding it can be to defy all the naysayers, to steadfastly pursue a vision and to work unwaveringly for years to bring it to fruition.” That’s how Horst Hörtner, director of the Ars Electronica Futurelab, summarized what was going through his head when 100 drones took off in pursuit of a world record in November 2015. In Deep Space 8K he personally presents the DRONE 100 project.
Alchemical authors have compared the “prima materia” to everything. To male and female, to the hermaphroditic monster, to heaven and earth, to body and spirit, chaos, microcosm, and the confused mass
NHK, Japan’s public broadcasting company, will show the highlights of NHK 8K programs and share some of the things they experienced and learned as they went through the production process.
Alchemists deal with matter and meta-physics; they integrate human understanding of the world, visions, ideas, and their desire to reach ultimate enlightenment in their search for knowledge and creation.
Rhizome is an experimental animated short film that has its foundation in the homonymous philosophical concept coined and developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Gattari, involving research that is close to Steve Reich’s serial music, Escher’s mathematical art work, Bruegel and Bosch’s paintings and various scientific theories about the development of life, genetics, the infinitely small and the infinitely large.
The VH AWARD’s purpose is to uncover promising but relatively unknown Korean artists creating media art. It seeks to support these young, talented media artists’ art-making process, but to also help them gain international recognition.
RadianceScape is a data-visualizing audiovisual piece. It based on the live radiation data from the Safecast.org, a global sensor network for collecting and sharing radiation measurements, to generate a cityscape
FLOW is an immersive interactive installation specially designed for the deep-space media display. Inspired by the natural phenomenon of the tides, the multimedia environment offers a sensory experience, poetic, playful and aesthetic principles of the rise and fall of sea levels.
Cooperative Aesthetics is an exhibition by Gerhard Funk (AT) of a collection of programs designed to enable audiences to enjoy collective audiovisual experiences. The intention is to transform Deep Space into a setting in which visitors can move about freely and thereby influence the visual output of the wall and floor projections and the sounds audible in the space
See what you made me do is a generative performance for two characters, playing and interacting according to roles and rules of power present in social intercourse. According to archetypes of behavior, our attitudes and actions are determined within a dramaturgical thread and intertwined with an immersive visual and sonic interpretation.
During the last three decades we have witnessed the growing complexity of technology and a flood that is filling our hospitals today—functional imaging, full gene sequencing, automated laboratory medicine and much more. But the role and responsibility sharing in healthcare, clearly structured into specific disciplines, has remained almost unchanged despite almost complete digitization.
The starting point of AROTIN & SERGHEI’s art Installation WHITE POINT for the Deep Space 8K is the smallest possible visible image: a single shining white light pixel of the matrix of 66 million of the 16 m x 18 m projection space is shown pulsing in the rhythm of a heartbeat.
RoBoHoN not only has the basic functions of a mobile phone but is also equipped with a camera, projector and robotics functions, including the voice communication system. These are all embedded in a compact humanoid robot body.
Virtual reality applications tend to focus on the experience of an individual, creating an immersive experience that practically separates the user from the real world. VR Playspace strives to achieve a collaborative hybrid VR experience by integrating multiple VR players and live spectators into a cooperative game
Paguro Idea initiated its first project in Nepal to support the reconstruction of villages, starting with Raghuchour in the Kavre Palanchowk district. Engineers without Borders supports the project in creating a concept to construct earthquake-resistant buildings with local materials and local resources as well as improving the water supply to secure a third crop.
The LabOratorium exhibition being staged during the festival scrutinizes the alchemists of our time and the forces that impel them to do what they do. One spontaneously associates the word alchemy with the—eternally frustrating—handiwork of transforming base metal into gold, the endless search for the Philosopher’s Stone, or even with the likes of Paulo Coelho—quirky geniuses in antique laboratories full of odd apparatuses and bubbling flasks full of spooky substances.
Media Wall Nexus is community forming public art project of Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Art & Heritage Museum, Singapore. It explores new terrains to enhance digital interactive media and fine-art expressions
The installation is the representation of an artificial vocal apparatus which creates an abstract artificial language, tracing the physiological function of a natural voice.
The aesthetics of man-made objects in space, their appearance and especially their orbits are transformed into a minimal audiovisual performance, showing the poetic dance satellites and their trash perform while revolving around us. Seemingly chaotic paths mutate to amazing patterns of an almost organic nature—all of it due to pure physical necessity.
Considering how computer tomography (CT) makes it possible to look inside the human body without resorting to a scalpel is actually quite fascinating in its own right, but the app Cinematic Rendering at the Deep Space 8K takes the teaching of the anatomy of the human body to the next Level.
This video draws attention to forced migration and the refugee crisis and also depicts the tides between death and life as a boundless crisis instead of a regional one.
This work visualizes the pressure field around the soles of shoes. By using the fluid simulation software developed by the artist, the propagation of pressure in air is visualized in 8K video, with a marvelous sound experience.
Take an audiovisual tour of the cosmos together with students from Soundfactory EXTD (staged jointly by Linz Music School and the Ars Electronica Center) and the piano and flute class taught by Marco Palewicz and Petra Wurz
Ars Wild Card is a smartphone app developed by Ars Electronica Futurelab which enables visitors to enjoy exhibitions in public spaces. Visitors can use it to get information about works in the exhibition, as well as photographing the works, even including themselves, and creating their original postcards.
Linz Art University’s new Fashion & Technology program invites festival-goers to take a virtual journey that opens up unexpected dimensions of the anatomy of clothing. Cinematic rendering, a new form of computer tomography, reveals garments’ interior structures that are invisible to the naked eye.
“Empowerment Informatics” is a new branch of informatics that supplements and extends human functions and enables technology to work in harmony with people.
The Ars Electronica Futurelab Academy comprises a range of activities that share the goal of knowledge transfer and exchange with educational institutions and organizations acting at the nexus of art, design and technology.
The Conduit is part performance, part interactive installation that investigates social engagement and the consequences of speculative technological and political frameworks. Participants will negotiate an eight-bit simulation of the future and its effects on our everyday social interactions.
Through the intense cooperation with Ars Electronica The Mobile Ö1 Atelier staged by Austria’s cultural public radio station has been a festival fixture for many years now.
Deformation Lamp is a new light-projection technique developed in 2015, and a magical lighting system that can bring completely novel visual experiences, making physically static objects appear to move, deform or flutter.
SEEC Photography is a science-art project that investigates how light moves across objects. This happens at the speed of light and within a few nanoseconds.
Woman in Media Arts is a comprehensive database dedicated exclusively to women working in these genres. It includes all women who have made a mark on the 36-year history of Ars Electronica, and is designed to serve as an active research platform for artists, curators, scholars, scientists and anyone else interested in finding out more about female practitioners in these fields.
Beehive art&science is an ongoing artistic research experiment and a documentation tool for the European Digital Art and Science Network to collect and contextualize video contents from artists, visitors and partners. In the broadest sense it is a cross-media system for crowdsourced video documentation.
The work was produced at Fondazione Mondo Digitale’s Innovation Gym. Lino Strangis for six months at Phyrtual Innovation Gym along with seven young people selected by a call.
The very best of the regular Deep Space 8K program at the Ars Electronica Center in German and English language.
Ars Electronica shows two projects by audiovisual artists, that were developed during an ENCAC-production residency.
Both systems are based on Brain-Computer Interfaces that measure brainwaves in real-time and process immediately to have real-time feedback. Learn more about recoveriX and mindBEAGLE and communicate only by your thoughts!
Shadowgram is a combination of aesthetic entertainment – creating a physical object, a sticker cut out in the shape of your shadow – and participating in social brainstorming.
A true revolution of technology is taking place in the stream of people’s everyday lives. The accumulation of new interactions between people and technology is creating a culture and shaping a new society. And that is how cultural and social innovations are initiated.
The title FAUX TERRAIN subsumes various interrelated but nevertheless discrete artistic works by Claudia Larcher. Through the use of abstraction, exaggeration and decontextualization, she presents habitats, architectural landscapes and natural formations as utopian expanses and dystopian scenarios
Current exhibitions at the LENTOS Kunstmuseum: Ingeborg Strobl, Béatrice Dreux, Julia Tazreiter.
A play on artworks, works in process and working things out by doing – together. Through negotiation, juxtaposition, and re-contextualization, various works and non-works will be woven into an interface for the audience, built through interactive, textual and performative processes.
Welcome to the POSTCITY! At the entrance of the former postal and parcel distribution center you can not only purchase your ticket for the 2016 Ars Electronica Festival – this is also the starting point for our WE GUIDE YOU tours and the central meeting point in the POSTCITY.
