Highlights

These events should not be missed during your visit of the Ars Electronica Festival, September 8 to 12, 2016!
A preview of each day of the media art festival from Thursday to Monday can be found here.

DRONE 100 – Spaxels over Linz

Ars Electronica and Intel present… On Saturday, September 10, 2016, 7:45 PM, immediately prior to the Klangwolke, these 100 unmanned aerial vehicles will ascend into the night sky above Linz and form spectacular illuminated figures. You’re cordially invited to Donaupark to experience this huge drone swarm’s European premiere!

Ars Electronica Opening

The Ars Electronica Opening is full of performances and concerts – the opening event to the Ars Electronica Festival 2016.

Big Concert Night

The musical highlight of every Ars Electronica Festival is the Big Concert Night. It is an encounter of classical music, electronic sound artistry and computer-generated visualizations. The impressive venue of this year’s extraordinary concert is POSTCITY’s huge Train Hall.

Drone Races / Performances

The XBlade Allstarts get Radical is one of the world’s fastest drone racing teams. During the festival, they’ll transform the Train Hall of the POSTCITY into an aerial racing arena. This futuristic spatial spectacle featuring flying objects traveling at up to 140 km/h blows away the boundary between speed sport and artistic performance.

Radical Atoms Symposia

The 2016 Ars Electronica Festival theme symposia are scrutinizing the alchemists of our time. Who are these people conjuring up our near-term future?

Inferno Cyber Arts 2016

CyberArts 2016

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.

Tangible Media Group MIT Radical Atoms Exhibition

Radical Atoms Exhibition

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.

Alchemists of our Time Exhibition

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

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.

u19 Create Your World Festival

u19 CREATE YOUR WORLD Exhibition

“CREATE YOUR WORLD” is the motto of the Future Festival of the Next Generation. This festival-within-a-festival is a playground for exciting, unusual, funny and just plain young ideas. All those who come up with them have one thing in common: they’re under 19 years of age.

Ars Electronica DroneLab

From our home base, DroneLab in POSTCITY, we’ll embark on a fact-finding tour featuring projects, demos, races and airborne artistry, and providing insightful looks into the fascinating world of unmanned aerial vehicles.

Bio Austria Organic Market

Farmers’ Market

POSTCITY will be welcoming farmers on Saturday. These men and women will be bringing along regional, organic products that festivalgoers can taste and purchase.

Campus Exhibition: Animate Worlds

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.

Boris Labbé Rhizome Animation Festival Prix Ars Electronica

Ars Electronica Animation Festival

The Ars Electronica Animation Festival shows diversity with respect to both content and style. It delivers impressive testimony to how quickly (computer) animation is growing and how strongly it influences our everyday life.

Future Innovators Summit

Collaborative brainstorming and the creative development of questions having to do with humankind’s future, education and the digital commons—that’s the mission of the Future Innovators Summit.

STARTS Prize 2016

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.

STARTS Forum

Attention isn’t focused only on the prizewinning projects of STARTS–Prize 2016; Ars Electronica’s spotlight also shines on the people who produced them. At the STARTS–Forum 2016 they will have an opportunity to elaborate on their approach and point of view, their methodology and the results they’ve achieved with it.

Mini Maker Faire Linz

Makers who love experimentation present their do-it-yourself projects on Sunday. Above all, this is about dialog: people can exchange their knowledge and experiences in speeches and workshops.

SYMPOSIUM I.II.: RADICAL ATOMS – IMPACT AND EXPECTATIONS

Taking work done by MIT’s Tangible Media Group and the Ars Electronica Futurelab as the point of departure, this part of the symposium will deal with how the evolution of Radical Atoms will be felt in various occupations, economic sectors and, by no means least of all, our everyday life.

Underworld in the POSTCITY

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.

Focus Digital Music and Soundart: Sonic Saturday

The Sonic Saturday schedule includes a diversified lineup of offerings—symposia, panel discussions, a guided tour, Listening Room and Medium Sonorum—dedicated to listening experiences in general and modern multi-channel compositions and computer music in particular.