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 exhibitions at POSTCITY bring 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.
The art projects assembled in the spacious confines of the venue’s lower levels are dedicated to the question of essences—of being human, of the machine, and what it means to be born out of code. Set in a spectacular bomb shelter and spaces housing this building’s mechanical infrastructure, this exhibition takes full advantage of the unique atmosphere of a former postal service logistics facility.
This exhibition offers a comprehensive look at current forms of artistic work with machine learning and AI. It is supplemented by a tutorial program by and for artists to impart what you have to know to get started using machine learning in artistic projects.
The rapprochement, as it were, of art and science, the artistic exploration of new applications, is a key factor in the increasingly social dimension of new technologies in order to comprehend how reciprocal human-machine relationships, interactions among individuals and globally networked systems can not only be better understood but, above all, better designed. International crews of artists and scientists have taken up this task, and now present their works in this exhibition space.
Just in time for the festival, Deep Space 8K—the ultimate attraction at the Ars Electronica Center—is premiering a series of new and fascinating visualizations. Thanks to 16×9-meter projection surfaces on the space’s front wall and floor, 8K resolution and sophisticated technical features like laser tracking, festivalgoers are in for breathtaking worlds of imagery and mind-blowing experiences over the five-day festival run.
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 2017 presents a selection of the prizewinning and nominated works of STARTS Prize 2017.
Experience digital arts! CyberArts presents the most outstanding entries from the Prix Ars Electronica, the international competition of computer art, this year for the 20th time at the OK Center of Contemporary Art. This year’s exhibition shows award-winners and distinguished works from the categories Computer Animation/Film/VFX, Hybrid Art and Digital Musics & Sound Art. The intelligent and entertaining presentation impressively depicts the developments in digital art, the current discourse, and the associated issues.
Can a human love a robot? Can a robot love a human? When it comes to the question of how deep the emotional bonds between human beings and machines can get, then it pays to take a peek at a very special branch purveying futuristic technical visions: smart sex toys, tele-dildonics and sex robots. “Artificial Intimacy” permits you to enter this erogenous zone.
The Ars Electronica Gallery Spaces were coined in response to growing mutual interest on the part of media artists, collectors and galleries as a setting for protagonists to compare experiences and to discuss, among other topics, such core issues as the long-term maintenance and conservation of media-art projects and the many new formats and business models manifesting themselves on the growing online art market.
Every year since 2002, Ars Electronica and the University of Art and Design Linz has hosted an exhibition by artists associated with an international higher-education institution whose curriculum takes an innovative approach to teaching media art and media culture.
The arc/sec Lab for Digital Spatial Operations is led by Assoc. Prof. Uwe Rieger at School of Architecture and Planning at the University of Auckland. The lab explores digital matter as a new form of construction material.
With the selected works, we aim to converge the issues in feminism with environmentalism. By framing the exhibition in this way, it is our hope to reinvigorate the eco-feminism that emerged in the 70s and was ignored for much too long. In this particular context, at the Ars Electronica festival in Linz, we address the local and transnational issues of feminism in media arts and the global issue of climate change.
The Internet of Enlightened Things is a collection of projects that explore the implications and opportunities of sharing our lives—willingly or not—with ever more “intelligent” objects and systems.
The exhibition “Roads Less Travelled by . . .” features student projects from the Art and Technology course and the Erasmus Joint Master in Media Arts Cultures at Aalborg University. All student projects are the results of critical academic inquiries into art, technology and culture involving problem-based research and learning processes.
“Whose scalpel” is a sound performance combined with a visual and 3D-printed installation, realized with an application framework for medical-image processing. Mixing several methods from art and science, it is an imagination of the future and presents the issues in the relationship between human and machine in heart surgery.
Virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality, total immersion in virtual worlds and superimposing data onto our reality—for several years now, everybody has been talking up these concepts and ideas once again. The VRLab in the Ars Electronica Center’s Main Gallery showcases the latest VR, AR and MR technologies.
The Wandering Artist is a meditation that took place at the European Space Agency on the role that creativity and human expression play in the context of space exploration.
Pacathon is an open innovation lab for discussing future play and future society through prototypes exploring new utilizations of PAC-MAN for people. PAC-MAN is a video game algorithm that was released by BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment Inc. (formerly NAMCO) in 1980.
The BR41N.IO Hackathon brings together engineers, programmers, physicians, designers, artists and fashionistas to collaborate intensively as an interdisciplinary team. They plan and produce their own fully functional EEG-based brain-computer interface headpiece to control a drone, a Sphero or e-puck robot or an orthosis with motor imagery.
A3 K3 is a unique interactive experience. Artworks are created by machine technology and audience participation. Dragan Ilić uses an elaborate brain-computer interface (BCI) system where he controls a hi-tech robot with his brain via state-of-the-art technology.
The exhibition “Sense of Space and Time” contains fourteen projects ranging between design, art and technology. The projects were created by bachelor’s students from the Institute of Art Education, School of Arts, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and by master’s students from the LMU Department of Informatics.
A person’s outer appearance, which can be deliberately modified, is juxtaposed to their fragile, immutable inner beauty. A human being’s exterior is characterized by age, cultural influences, social background, facial expressions and many other factors, and people can change how they “beautify” themselves, to a certain extent.
Since 2012 the Ars Electronica Futurelab Academy has been supporting students and educators from international partner universities to engage in transdisciplinary practice. Collaborations with renowned universities in China, Japan and Australia have resulted in a range of exhibits and performances being presented at the Ars Electronica Festival.
How do we get the digital (back) into the physical world? An answer to this question could be so-called radical atoms. In a sort of digital core meltdown, they bond information and material—the information liberated from the constraints of the pixel realm, the atoms wrenched out of their static state and set in motion. The results are smart materials that can be computer-modeled and remodeled into ever-new forms.
The Digital Mirror allows you to see yourself the way everybody else sees you, but how you never see yourself.
The seventeen programs on the lineup of this year’s Ars Electronica Animation Festival – screened at Moviemento Movie 1 – are once again an international showcase of excellence in current digital filmmaking.
In Closed Loop two artificial intelligence models converse with each other—one with words the other with images—in a never-ending feedback loop.
Future societies are expected to demand engineering systems capable of improving the quality of life in terms of safety, convenience, a sense of fulfillment, and so on.
Driver is an mechanism consisting of a system of two sound circuits and auxiliary mechanical and electronic elements. The first sound circuit is a speaker emitting sound with a square wave shape. Copper balls are dispensed and fall on the membrane of this speaker one at a time or several at a time.
In the Pogrom Night in November 1938, a mob acting on orders of the Nazi regime broke into the Linz Synagogue—like so many other Jewish houses of worship that night—ransacked it and set it ablaze. All that remained of the synagogue was a burnt-out ruin. In conjunction with the work on his master’s thesis at the Technical University of Vienna, René Mathe created a virtual reconstruction of the Linz Synagogue.
Lohner Carlson have been pursuing the notion of the Active Image since the late 1980s when their initial collaboration with John Cage inspired them to expand the found object and the notion of silence into the medium of film. As a result, Active Images investigate the nature of photography and the moving image.
A new generation of artists emerged in Linz in the 1990s, where, as you might expect in a town of heavy industry, they began concentrating on the technological changes happening in our habitat. Particularly noteworthy is the Time’s Up collective headquartered in the “idyllic” setting of Linz Harbor. The group, which has gone on to make a name for itself worldwide, is this year’s Featured Artist. The Lentos Art Museum will showcase its work.
The Memories of Borderline is a unique merger of theater and virtual reality. Schauspiel Dortmund and CyberRäuber have cooperated to create a new virtual, immersive and interactive space based on the stage and performance of the acclaimed play Die Borderline Prozession.
The central work in the Natural History of the Enigma series is a “plantimal”, a new life form that Eduardo Kac has created and which he calls “Edunia,” a genetically engineered flower that is a hybrid of the artist and a petunia.
[{Ghost}] is an artificial neural network, an artificial intelligence that inhabits two different art institutions. It will be shaped by online text information derived from both the Kunsthaus Graz and Ars Electronica Center but mainly through the participation of their human audience.
Paint and animate live: Tagtool transforms your tablet into a live instrument for spontaneous visual expression. Paint with light, create animated graffiti or tell improvised stories. Tagtool can be used for jams and performances.
This series of scientific experiments conducted by Dr. Manuela Macedonia and her staff at Johannes Kepler University Linz in cooperation with the Ars Electronica Center and the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milan, investigates learning a language in a virtual setting.
Driving a six-ton earthmover using only the power of your mind or your eyes? Outfitted with cutting-edge BCI and eye-tracking technology, visitors of all ages can maneuver an ET 65 track-driven earthmover and operate its 7-meter-long excavator arm.
Almost traditionally Ars Electronica Festival and cooperation partner Ö1 stage the Mobile Ö1 Atelier. The living cooperation with Austria’s cultural public-radio broadcasting station is once again located at the entrance to the festival’s main quarter, POSTCITY.
How can we redefine our human presence? The Digital Nature Group has focused on researching the relationship between waves, material and intelligence by computational environments towards building feedback loops between human intelligence and machine intelligence.
This program impressively demonstrates new and innovative approaches in current digital filmmaking at the interface of art and science—e.g. nature and bio-tech studies, morphogenesis, experiments with architecture, and perception.
Help us clean up Deep Space! Having fun with space junk? Eurogym Space Debris, a game developed by high school students at Europagymnasium Baumgartenberg, makes collecting cosmic garbage a competitive challenge.
In an artificial-intelligence society, a code is hidden from people. Even without understanding the meaning of the code we perceive it as a form of magic, which produces new results by using enormous quantities of data and broad parameters.
Bi.xels is an affordable and accessible toolkit to allow everyone to design, create and monitor their own DNA programed display.
The exhibition “Sense of Space and Time” contains fourteen projects ranging between design, art and technology. The projects were created by bachelor’s students from the Institute of Art Education, School of Arts, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and by master’s students from the LMU Department of Informatics.
Students in the Interface Cultures master’s program experiment with the development of interactive prototypes, musical interfaces, conceptual installations and interaction critiques and also broaden their view by encountering and collaborating with other international fellows who are investigating these topics from a different cultural context. All the artworks, prototypes and various interfaces in this year’s exhibition have been made in Linz.
The three installations presented at the POSTCITY, laying out sonic spaces rather than musical sequences, reflect not only this fundamentally open approach to the question of what musical art is or could be these days, but also the media composition course’s deep integration into the university’s other fields of study.
Semiotics of the Laboratory aims to question the symbolic and semantic properties of laboratory practices when they are interpreted at face value—that is, merely through their visual observation, without the narrative that tries to explain their scientific meaning. It is a laboratory observing the interpretation of the laboratory practice itself.
The Deep Space 8K program of PAC-MAN comes from the team thinking about new experiences and new language.
The “Interactive Diorama—Rembrandt, 1632, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp” is a virtual-reality simulation of the original artwork by Rembrandt realized by professor Lily Díaz-Kommonen with the Department of Media Systems of Representation research group at Aalto University.
Linz’s Johannes Kepler University’s faculty includes outstanding research scientists whose work is quoted in some of the most highly respected scientific journals worldwide. So who are these brilliant young Upper Austrian scientists and what exactly are they doing research on?
The Summer Sessions pop-up exhibition shows a selection of outcomes realized through the international exchange of emerging talents within the Summer Sessions network. Summer Sessions are short-term residencies for young and emerging artists, organized by an international network of cultural organizations.
When technologies reach obsolescence our relationship with them changes, but what never changes is our need to reach out to others, connect and share. But what if no one is on the other end of the line? Who is there to hear us?
Natural Intelligence—NI is a selection of artworks from the research group GIIP and its partners. The assistive interfaces pursue the development of devices to enable people with physical and mental disabilities and/or immobility to talk, produce and teach arts—including three-dimensional scenery and sound.
Fibres, tissue, bodies de/materialize between real and virtual space. New surfaces and materialities evolve from bioplastics or desert plants; are welded, etched or boiled.
Abstract-animation artist Max Hattler presents a cross-section of his work in special versions created for Deep Space 8K at the Ars Electronica Center.
ARTUR: Autonomous Robot Playspace is an interactive environment featuring a full-scale, three-dimensional virtual robot. Developed specifically for Deep Space 8K in the Ars Electronica Center
The netidee Open Source Community Camp is a two-day workshop that offers producers of open-source projects the opportunity to consolidate their efforts, to design them with sustainability in mind, and to obtain valuable input from mentors, experts and colleagues.
SOFEA’s Top Swing Golf Robot 3.0 is an electronically controlled swing robot made in Germany. Beginners, advanced players and professional golfers can work on their own individual swing.
At Infabity, the innovative 3D vision lab, special 3D printing and scanning technologies are used to produce unique and individual pieces of art. Infabity stands for the infinite possibilities of digital fabrication with a focus on design aspects.
This presentation invites the audience to experience the archaeological site Hisn al-Bab. It is little known but nevertheless played a significant role in Egyptian history, both with respect to its geography and its chronology. In historical terms, it was active at the very end of Roman rule and the Early Medieval Period, long after the pharaohs.
The very best of the regular Deep Space 8K program at the Ars Electronica Center in German and English language.
Capillaries Capillaries is an audiovisual composition based on a non-hierarchical and bi-directional relationship between sound and image in real-time. The piece does not represent a visualization of music or sonification of an image but rather a tangle of audiovisual interactions.
Bird Song Diamond is a site- and habitat-specific interactive installation based on long-term research (2011-present), involving multifaceted, interdisciplinary perspectives—uniquely connecting the nodes of evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence and life, spatial sound, mathematics and mechatronics.
Washed up on our coasts in obvious and clearly visible form, the plastic pollution spectacle blatantly emerging on our beaches is only the prelude to the greater story that has unfolded further away in the world’s oceans, yet mostly originating from where we stand: the land. For more than fifty years, the global production and consumption of plastics has continued to rise.
The VH Award’s purpose is to discover promising but relatively unknown Korean artists creating media art. It seeks to support the art-making process of these young, talented media artists but to also help them gain international recognition.
Austrian astronaut Franz Viehböck’s lift-off to the MIR space station on October 1st, 1991, was accompanied by a euphoric celebration of this country’s giant leap into the cosmos. 25 years later, Florian Voggeneder boldly goes on a photographic mission to document the implications of this miniature Space Age.
Perception is the procedure of acquiring, interpreting, selecting and organizing sensory information. Perception presumes sensing. In people, perception is aided by sensory organs. In the area of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.), the perception mechanism puts the data acquired by sensors together in a meaningful manner.
Sanbaso is an 8K documentary featuring a novel performing art by renowned Japanese artists. The stage is based on an ancient divine dance, the Sanbaso, praying to nature.
Four artists, three countries, two art fields, one topic. Reality vs. fantasy—these opposites have always been dividing people. But does one’s personal reality correspond to the mass understanding of it? What in fact influences the individual or mass definition of reality and imagination?
Pitoti Prometheus is a first in VR: ancient rock art that literally comes alive at 360 degrees. It is the film with the longest production time in history.
Yoichiro Kawaguchi proposes high-quality computer graphics with approximately 8K resolution as an artistic expressionistic method and media for presenting artworks.
NOIZE Etudes is a live multimedia performance focusing on micro-sounds caused by binary operations in multiple layers of music coding.
Can machines totally replace humans, or is there a need for just the right combination of human and artificial intelligence—hybrid intelligence? We will turn our real-time onstage performance into a human vs. machine battle.
Led by the LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial from Spain, the European Network for Contemporary Audiovisual Creation (ENCAC) is co-funded by the European Union’s Creative Europe program. ENCAC aims to facilitate, promote, inspire, support and create new opportunities and challenges in the audiovisual arts as well as to foster innovative and sustainable solutions for the creative community, a wide range of audiences and the audiovisual field.
Will we all, at some point, have virtual friends, enjoy sex with robots more than making love to a real person, and hack our own body? Homo Digitalis is a Web series about the ultimate future question: What is the digital revolution doing with us human beings?
Waag Society—institute for art, science and technology—is a pioneer in the field of digital media. Over the past 22 years, the foundation has developed into an institution of international stature, a platform for artistic research and experimentation, and has become both a catalyst for events and a breeding ground for cultural and social innovation.
Die Ausstellung „GEHEIMNIS – Ein gesellschaftliches Phänomen“ schafft einen interaktiven Raum für die selbstreflexive Auseinandersetzung mit den zentralen Gegenwartsfragen um persönliche Freiheit und gesellschaftlicher Verantwortung.
How empathetic can a construct of zeros and ones be? A technological miracle or just complex statistics? What makes a person a human being, and a machine a machine? Is it possible for machines to transcend their physical and mental limits just like some people do in extreme situations?
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