future – Radical Atoms

u19 CREATE YOUR WORLD Exhibition

Vanessa Graf — Wed, 03 Aug 2016 11:31:02 +0000

“CREATE YOUR WORLD” is the motto of what has become an Ars Electronica mainstay: the Future Festival of the Next Generation. Once again this year, this festival-within-a-festival is a playground for exciting, unusual, funny and just plain young ideas, solutions to problems, concepts and experiments for shaping the future. All those who come up with them have one thing in common: they’re under 19 years of age.

In downtown POSTCITY, young artists, programmers and tinkerers form all over Austria will populate a village of their own—one that’s full of ideas and creativity, one that shows how they see the world of tomorrow. Here, young people aren’t just audience members; they’re co-producers too.

The centerpiece is, once again, an exhibition of works submitted for prize consideration to the Prix Ars Electronica’s category for young people that annually honors creativity and pioneering spirit expressed in the form of media art. The projects are as diverse as the participants themselves. A computer game entitled “The Decision” by Jonas Bodingbauer from Leonding entails one player—unbeknownst to him/her—making a life-or-death decision about the other player. A LEGO stop-motion film by Tyrol’s Dimitri Teufl is the account of families that had to flee from their homeland. “Blackout,” an experimental film by Jasmin Selen Heinz, Tanja Josic and Emily Poulter from Vienna, is a work of social criticism that examines the meaning of life. A colorful assortment of projects makes up the rest of the lineup, all efforts by youngsters to create their world.

For more information about the u19 – CREATE YOUR WORLD Future Festival of the Next Generation please visit ars.electronica.art/u19/en/festival

Solo Date

Vanessa Graf — Wed, 03 Aug 2016 09:02:02 +0000

At the earliest stage of its creation, Solo Date asks: how do you live without someone you love? This solo performance is set in the near future and explores the interaction between human beings and artificial intelligence. Unlike most cross-sector collaboration, where technology is merely applied for aesthetic purposes, Solo Date makes technology an active character and an integral component of this work.

Throughout history, people have turned to science when religion fails to offer answers, and vice-versa. Solo Date raises philosophical questions about human emotion, existence and solitude. As we move towards the era of AI, Solo Date raises important issues that redefine the relationship between human and machine. Like a guinea pig under observation, the performer is enclosed in a modern, transparent, LED-lit cube centered on a proscenium stage, which is enveloped in black scrims. The audience will be taken on a journey in search of a past romance through ancient eastern ritual and artificial intelligence.

Credits

Director / text / performer: Pao-Chang Tsai; Music/sound director: Blaire Ko; Visual designer: Ethan Wang; Set designer: Yu-Han Huang; Light designer: Li-Ting Wei; Master electrician: Yi-Chin Chang; Costume designer: Yi-Zong Zhang; Stage manager: Chia-Nung Li; Producer: Po-Shen Lu; Production manager: Shu-Wen Yang; Executive producer: Chia-Chien Lin; Crew: Chih-I Chang, Tsung-Chi Chiang, Tzu-Hsien Wu

Solo Date is supported by Ministry of Culture Taiwan, Quanta Arts Foundation and QA Ring.

People Thinking Lab

katjani — Mon, 01 Aug 2016 07:35:35 +0000

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. At this year’s Ars Electronica Festival, which explores a new frontier created by “fusion” between the physical existence of the human world and physically-detached digital data, Future Catalysts (Hakuhodo and Ars Electronica) will set up the People Thinking Lab (a pop-up lab) to transform the festival site into a real-time experimental space, together with Hakuhodo Institute of Life and Living (HILL), an unprecedentedly unique institute that specializes in people analysis. The concept of the lab is People as Radical Atoms.

Program 1: People Thinking—Method-Sharing

The advance of technology is transforming people into a form that can keep changing radically. When we look at people as radical atoms, we can sense the initiation of new emotions and perspectives. People’s emotions may seem impromptu at times, but by finding the desire that lies deep down in the emotion we can get one step closer to the core of the desired technology and design.

For example, we have been accumulating People’s Long Data for more than 20 years, which is a pile of data that shows the changes in people’s emotions and sense of value. We deciphered the change in people’s emotion by analyzing such dynamic data, which allowed us to observe the change in people’s sense of value. In contrast, with the expansion of networks by the use of SNS, we were able to find that “people are minimizing relationships with others in their conscience and awakening love of oneself more than that for others.”

We also have a method called Unasked Questions, which we use to sense hidden emotions by analyzing people’s reaction when uncommon questions, whether verbal or nonverbal, are thrown at them. For example, in the research to find when people give up on a “frame of mind”, such as believing that Santa Claus is going to give them a present, wanting to ride a roller coaster, being excited about a new product, etc., we were able to visualize the change in motivation and conscience by their age.

We also utilize this emotion-sensing to predict our future lives. In this program we will present HILL’s unique method that analyzed the emotions of People as Radical Atoms for over 35 years.

Program 2: Tomorrow’s View—Open Research Lab

Introduced by HILL this year, 100 Views of Your City is a bundle of future scenarios about the future city, which was predicted by analyzing the change in people’s sense of value. Even if the same technology is used as a function, a city might show a different view depending on the directions of people’s emotions when they are considered as Radical Atoms. For example, there are various possibilities for the future location of a grave, such as a real space in the local community, a virtual space, or not even a space but maybe embedded in the body of the bereaved, and all of these ideas are pictured in our subconscious. Based on 100 Views of Your City and using Shadowgram, developed by Ars Electronica, we will set up an Open Research Lab to write a new future scenario with the visitors to the festival.

Text: Takamasa Sakai (Hakuhodo Institute of Life and Living), Kazuhiko Washio (Future Catalysts—Hakuhodo×Ars Electronica)