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WE GUIDE YOU

The WE GUIDE YOU program offers a comprehensive range of different tours that will bring the visitors of the 2017 Ars Electronica Festival closer to the different exhibitions and works. In the Expert Tours experts in various fields explain which pieces they find particularly exciting, Highlight Tours will familiarize you with the highlights of the festival and at the Community Parcours native speakers will lead people from different cultural backgrounds in their language through the festival.

The 2017 Ars Electronica Festival is a meeting place and source of inspiration for business people in Upper Austria who have already acquired expertise in digitization or are interested in new developments in this field. The staff and members of the WKOÖ–Economic Chamber of Upper Austria’s specialist group in management consulting, book keeping and IT are supporting the festival and looking forward to its dynamic atmosphere and innovative ideas that benefit the regional economy.

Registration and Prices

The festival pass and day pass include one ticket for a Highlight Tour or a WE GUIDE YOU Expert Tour (as long as places are available). Other tickets can be purchased directly on the spot. The Community Parcours are free. You can register for a tour at the WE GUIDE YOU counter in the entrance area of POSTCITY. 

Group Tours

You can custom-design a guided tour of your own. It takes 90 minutes, a tour for a group of up to 20 personas costs €140. To make a reservation, send an e-mail to tickets@aec.at.

Tours

Opening Tour

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.

POSTCITY Highlight-Tour

Join us on a tour through the POSTCITY, the main festival venue of the 2017 Ars Electronica Festival, situated amidst the main train station’s yard. Besides sightseeing, we’ll be facing some highly topical issues at the nexus of art, technology and society. These group encounters with works by some truly fascinating artists and alchemists are designed to bring forth many and varied perspectives from which to consider the 2017 Ars Electronica Festival theme: Artificial Intelligence – The Other I.

Community Parcours

With our Community Parcours we are delighted to connect the local communities with the international community of the festival. On September 9–10, the festival invites everyone to partake in free guided tours in Turkish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, Rumanian, Persian, Arabic, Italian, Austrian Sign Language and German as a foreign language.

Experts Tour: Sense of Space and Time

Students of the course of studies in Art and Multimedia at LMU Munich, will take you through their exhibition Sense of Space, Sense of Room. They present their projects, explain how they came into being and talk about the background of the works. They also answer your questions on their projects!

Experts Tour: Empowerment Informatics, University of Tsukuba

Four students of the Empowerment Informatics Program at the University of Tsukuba in Japan will introduce a series of projects that reflect the international and interdisciplinary environment in which they have been developed. Each student will present the concepts, backgrounds, and goals of their projects. A great opportunity to discuss the relations between art, technology and society from the point of view of the the three pillars of Empowerment Informatics: harmonization, supplementation and extension of human capabilities.

Experts Tour: Music Monday Tour

The Sound Art Parcour of Music Monday is an Ars Electronica tradition of long standing. The tour kicks off at Anton Bruckner Private University, the focus is on the Ars Electronica Festival’s projects that have to do with sound. The defining characteristic is that this is actually a music education program designed to mediate the general public’s encounters with musical art.

Mobility of the Future Tour powered by ÖBB

How is the topic of artificial intelligence connected with mobility of the future? And in what ways are progresses in brain computer interfaces important for the field mobility of the future? The works in this tour revolve around sustainable development and security of mobility. The tour shows highlights from the festival areas that are relevant to the topic of future mobility.

Experts Tour: Insight Inside: Live Skype to the MRI Laboratory

For her performance Whose Scalpel, Yen Tzu Chang recorded her own heart data with the help of a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner. We are going to switch to the live stream of the MRI laboratory, where the researchers will give us detailed insights into the functions of the MRI scanner, and we can immediately ask questions and scan real pieces of fruit.

Experts Tour: Botanical Intelligence

There is no artificial intelligence without natural intelligence! Are human beings the sole owners of intelligence? The Expert Tour “Botanical Intelligence” poses the exciting question: Where are the limits of our knowledge? And what has this to do with our environment and our perception? We focus on plants, the actual rulers of this world. The range of topics we touch in this guided tour ranges from biodiversity to botanical sensory life to plant sex.

Experts Tour: The Neural Aesthetic

Gene Kogan will introduce the field of machine learning and its existing and speculative implications to new media and art in general. He will discuss applications of neural networks and associated algorithms to producing images, sounds, and texts, showing examples of contemporary works using these abilities. Gene Kogan will also present two of his own works intersecting machine learning and generative art.

Experts Tour: AI Artificial Intelligence – The Other I

The media artist Refik Anadol employs machine-learning algorithms. For his immersive media installation Archive Dreaming he searched and sorted relations among 1,700,000 documents. Refik Anadol will focus his tour on AI based artworks. Join the experience to get in touch with a great artist who displays two installations at this year’s Ars Electronica Festival.

Experts Tour: Sonic Saturday Tour

Media artist and composer Se-Lien Chuang and professor Andreas Weixler, director of the Computer Music Studio (CMS), give exciting insights into the Sonic Lab & the Computer Music Studio (CMS) at Anton Bruckner Private University. After a short tour follows an introduction into the functionality of the multichannel intermedia computer music concert hall.

Experts Tour: Expanded Body

The Expanded Body Expert Tour highlights works that are dealing with the topic of transformation of the human body. We will have a closer look at art works dealing with artificial extensions, simulations and mutation processes as well as enhancements of the human body that will challenge “The Other I”.

Experts Tour: Pneuma Fountain / Kremsmünster

Chico MacMurtrie is well known for his large-size robotic sculptures. For the Landesgartenschau in Kremsmünster (Garden Show of the State of Upper Austria) Chico MacMurtrie created Pneuma Fountain, a 4-meter-tall, 16-meter-wide inflatable robotic sculpture which is placed right in the middle of the Kremsmünster Monastery’s baroque courtyard. The tour consists of a presentation from the artist himself.

CyberArts 2017 Tour

Join the tour through the Cyberarts exhibition in the OK Center for Contemporary Art that showcases works singled out for recognition by the Prix Ars Electronica. In 2017, the CyberArts Exhibition stages in the following categories: Computer Animation/Film/VFX, Hybrid Art and Digital Musics.

Experts Tour: Controlled Commodities: Ethics and Materiality

Explore the artworks and projects on show at POSTCITY that raise complex ethical issues about developments in science and technology, either in their use of materials or subject matter. Artist Anna Dumitriu will also introduce her own project Controlled Commodity which explores antibiotic resistance and CRISPR gene editing.

Kids Tour

For youngsters between the ages of 8 and 14, we offer special tours through POSTCITY, that venture far beyond the friendly confines of u19 – CREATE YOUR WORLD, the festival for the next generation.

Highlight Tour @ Ars Electronica Center

The Highlights Tour provides an overview of Ars Electronica Center’s top attractions. An expert tour guide accompanies you through all exhibition areas. In addition to the highlights of the Museum of the Future including the Deep Space 8K, you can experience our new Virtual Reality Lab at the main exhibition and new works from MIT Media Lab at the RADICAL ATOMS exhibition.

Family Tour @ Ars Electronica Center

For families who’d like an introduction to the Ars Electronica Center within the framework of a guided tour, this is just the thing. The Family Tour is a fascinating, action-packed excursion with amazing experiences in store for adults and young people alike. And there’s always a bit of time left over for a little hands-on fun with a few of the installations.

Experts Tour: Turnton Docklands @ LENTOS Kunstmuseum

The Linz artist’s collective Time’s Up, this year’s Featured Artist, transforms the spaces of the LENTOS Kunstmuseum into an interactive situation, in Turnton Docklands. We write the year 2047. The space itself becomes the exhibition, which wants to be touched, searched and worked out. Turnton Docklands offers a mixture of environmental dystrophy, corporate ideals and a scary future scenario.

Experts Tour

Every day experts offer their knowledge and insights on another aspect of the festival: These go into and beyond the theme Artificial Intelligence – The Other I and discuss current questions of art, science and society and also find unexpected paths through POSTCITY.

Star Storm – Performance by Aoife van Linden Tol

Star Storm is a spectacular, site-specific explosive performance inspired by the processes of the stars. Using research from the European Space Agency on the composition, life cycle, magnetic behavior and light production within stars, including our sun, Aoife van Linden Tol has designed a powerful and beautifully poetic experience.

WE GUIDE YOU Highlight Tour € 12 / € 8 reduced
WE GUIDE YOU Mobility of the Future Tour € 12 / € 8 reduced
WE GUIDE YOU Experts Tour € 16 / € 12 reduced
WE GUIDE YOU Kids Tour € 8 / € 5 reduced for members of the OÖ Familienbund
Community Parcours Free

The festival pass and day pass include one ticket for a tour, as long as places are available.