A pendulum swings through a space. Although freely swaying through space it collides with objects; invisible, but audible.
Events, Concerts, Performances
Music and visualizations are mainstays of the Festival program. An opening extravaganza on Thursday kicks off the five-day media art festival. Linz’s spacious riverside Donaupark will once again be serving as an open-air stage—on Saturday, centerpiece of the Visualized Klangwolke (Cloud of Sound); on Sunday, the site of the Big Concert Night when orchestral music and digital sounds intermingle with live electronics and visualizations. Sonic Saturday and Music Monday are great opportunities for aficionados of digital music and sound art to enjoy up-close-and-personal encounters with the festival’s lineup of artists and musicians.
A series of openings will highlight Day 1 of the Ars Electronica Festival. Whoever wants to benefit from expert commentary along the way through the POSTCITY should definitely join the Opening Tour led by Ars Electronica Artistic Director Gerfried Stocker.
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!
The Artificial Skins and Bones Group
The Artificial Skins and Bones Group is an interdisciplinary group of young designers from Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin. Their expertise ranges from textile, surface and product design to fashion and visual communications.
Linz offers lots of possibilities to explore the city by night on foot, to which Ars Electronica adds an additional attraction throughout the Festival run: Nightlines.
Dragan Ilić
In his project, Dragan Ilić executes a ten-minute performance/gestural action with an advanced robot, Kuka K210+DI, which allows his body to rotate at a speed of up to two to three meters per second.
Among cultures throughout history, the representations of Hell, demons, and punishments are vast. In Inferno, the anxiety of the Singularity translates Hell and infinite punishment into a pseudo-model of infinite automation (rituals) and subordination to the machine.
For the meanwhile legendary OK Night during Ars Electronica, this year the OK Deck will be transformed into a “modular club”.
Anouk Wipprecht
Agent Unicorn is an accessory that logs the wearer’s observations through EEG that can help with understanding ADHS.
A series of concerts of varying duration and staged at different times during the festival’s run engenders on site a tonal space that plays with visitors’ perception of space and time, and the emotional perceptibility of the space.
Interactive, innovative and highly technically sophisticated–on September 8th, 2016, 5 PM, the OK in the Upper Austrian Cultural Quarter opens the CyberArts 2016 exhibition.
The Ars Electronica Opening is full of performances and concerts – the opening event to the Ars Electronica Festival 2016.
Linz’s Johannes Kepler University, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, provides the theme for the 2016 Linzer Klangwolke at the Donaupark.
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.
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.
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.
China’s history is awesome, full of tales and traditions passed down from time immemorial. How do students at Tsinghua University deal with this monumental cultural heritage when they approach it in terms of media art? Join the opening of the Campus Exhibition: Animate Worlds at the Linz Art University and watch a flight performance/intervention!
Numbered, weighed and found wanting. Blinded by his unbounded power, Babylonian King Belshazzar hosted a great feast. At the height of the gala celebration, he commanded that the gold and silver vessels stolen from the Jewish Temple be brought forth so the revelers could drink from them in honor of Baal, the god of Babylon.
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.
A culinary concert orchestrated around a chef, an enchanted kitchenette and sonified ingredients. As the chef prepares a meal, sections emerge from culinary tasks to form multisensory tableaus.
POSTCITY will be welcoming farmers on Saturday. These men and women will be bringing along regional, organic products that festivalgoers can taste and purchase.
This solo performance is set in the near future and explores the interaction between human beings and artificial intelligence.
Artist Aoife Van Linden Tol invites the residents of Linz to submit material for the second incarnation of her project Second Story, where she creates explosions in books and on paper that have emotional value. The performance can then be seen at the Ars Electronica Festival 2016.
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.
An evening with the crème de la crème of the digital arts – a highlight of the 2016 Ars Electronica Gala will be the ceremony at which the Golden Nica statuettes are bestowed upon the Prix Ars Electronica prizewinners.
A multi-talented artist Ukawa Naohiro founded the live streaming channel DOMMUNE on March 1, 2010. “Commune and the next step” is the motto. With The Final Media DOMMUNE he has created something like a commune in the digital age. As a mixture of live talk show and club night, DOMMUNE has been broadcast via livestream from a little studio in Shibuya, Tokyo on weeknights from 19:00 to 24:00 since March 2010.
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.
Following STWST48 in 2015, Stadtwerkstatt, the nerve center of Linz’s free/open culture, hosts STWST48x2, 48 hours of non-stop happenings along the Danube.
PIEdeck is an experimental interactive installation created for playful activities with multiple participants.
In recent years modular synthesizer systems have not only been undergoing a revival, but the development of this form of sound generation is also being newly impelled and ranges from classical sound modules all the way to experimental approaches.
Book Presentation: New Tendencies – Art at the Threshold of the Information Revolution (1961 – 1978)
Armin Medosch will present his new book on the international art movement and network New Tendencies, who were important precursors of new media art and digital art.
Naotaka Fujii + GRINDER-MAN + evala
How do we build a social relationship with others? How will technology interfere with the building process? The immersive art performance Neighbor visualizes the subjective process and will predict the future pattern of social bonding.
Bright lights and blazing flames—Don Ritter works with sound & video projections screened right on the exterior wall of the old post office at Linz’s main train station right across from the entrance to POSTCITY.
Lightstorm—two meters high, three meters in diameter, and spinning at 35 kph—is an oversized, rotating tube with LED strips embedded all around the outside.
he performance piece MYGRATION—beget involves a corporeal dispute on the topic of migration and identity.
Knight Light is ZoopTEK’s vision for the next generation of e-sports, as an immersive live gaming event.
Among music-loving night owls, Nightline is an annual highlight of the Ars Electronica Festival program.
Radwende is a petition tool for improving the cycling infrastructure. It works simply by cyclists tracking their routes. These routes then are consolidated in a map that is used by city planners.
A pendulum swings through a space. Although freely swaying through space it collides with objects; invisible, but audible.
touch the sound 2.0 / sound-sculpting makes a concerted effort to focus auditory attention on the importance of the interface that is the human body and to explore the reality-constructions of two dissimilar, sensory forms of interaction.
This unique collaboration between Hakan Lidbo (SE), Tracy Redhead (AU/AT), Synthestruct (US), Trevor Brown (AU) and Jonathan Rutherford (AU) working at Ars Electronica Futurelab takes audience interaction to the next level. During this live improvised performance the audience will decide the composition of the music.
The highlight of the final day of the festival features encounters of both a sensory as well as intellectual nature with electronic and experimental music. Accompanied by musician/musicologist Werner Jauk (AT), festivalgoers will enjoy close-up contacts with creative artists as well as first-hand insights into the music and tonal worlds conjured up at the festival.
Together with Joan Bairam you will get to know and discuss projects at POSTCITY that were realized by refugees or deal with the internationally relevant topic of escape, prosecution and displacement. Especially the social dimensions of forming communities, mixing cultures, looking for and finding an identity will be focused in this tour. These concerns can be found in many artistic and documentary projects throughout the festival.
Scientists of the Tangible Media Group of MIT Medialab will have a look around POSTCITY and introduce to you – additionally to the symposia about the topic of RADICAL ATOMS – projects and artistic ideas that already incorporate the theory of RADICAL ATOMS.
Take a walk with media artist Manuela Naveau through the POSTCITY and explore current developments and ongoing research of fashion and technology.
Familiarize yourself with Werner Jauk on the way through the POST City, where you can experience through auditory installations that music is not just sound – but interpreted above all a perception and thought process that formalizes into sound.
Explore how we will be able to alter and extend our bodies and those of other life forms – get an insight and learn how to use open source technologies in this field – learn from Paula Pin, member of Pechblenda, transhackfeminist Hardware Lab.
Explore the vegetation on the roof of the POST CITY by biologist Friedrich Schwarz and learn from him about the rich ecosystem of the city.You will be amazed!
The Computer Music Studio (CMS) at the new Anton Bruckner University, a word-class location for the research, performance, teaching and reflexion in the field of computer music, media composition & music technology.
Travel through the POSTCITY with video game expert and collector Andranik Ghalustians (GameStage@u19). Through space and time you will get to know the history of video games and finally reach the workd today and try VR glasses to learn more about Virtual Reality Technologies.
An experimental guided tour for non-humans and artificial intelligences. The tour will be held in spoken syntax of the programming language c#, Java and in English.
Salon Franziska is a versatile plattform, which tries to connect people within spaces and to make them visible. Salon Franziska is an interdisciplinary group of people which deals with sustainability and the temporary utilization of space.
Aurelia 1 + Hz / Proto viva Sonification is an interactive performance that explores the phenomena of interspecies communication, sonification of the environment, and underwater acoustic/bioacoustics, using jellyfish. Jellyfish are one of the rare organisms that seem perfectly suited for the Anthropocene era. The current 6th Mass Extinction may not apply to them, in fact, their numbers are growing. It is not established (yet) how they communicate. Do they feel vibration? Aurelia aurita’s gravity receptors (calcium crystals) are the same as in the human inner ear.
