Ramifications of an automated society force us to rethink concepts of work, education and income. Never before has the idea of a basic income and the importance of public safety nets been discussed so intensely. In the end, the primary objective might even be the analysis of what constitutes us as human beings: What makes anyone good, worthy, morally right or wrong?

This event is realized in the framework of the European Digital Art and Science Network and co-funded by the Creative Europe program of the European Union.

Reality and Expectations

Even if artificial intelligence seems to be a long way away, many aspects of our lives are already being influenced by autonomous machines and systems. But what constitutes neural networks and machine learning processes, and at what point in its development are we right now? This panel aims to give a deeper insight at the applications of AI and at the promises, fears and potentials of these evolving technologies.

Chair: Martina Mara (AT)

The Other Intelligence

In mirroring our human strategies for learning and recognition in the designs of artificial intelligence we are forced to reflect on our own thinking processes: How is human thinking constituted? When transferring thinking and learning processes to neural networks it becomes almost impossible to trace how these machines actually function.

Chair: Martina Mara (AT)

AI Creativity

Art has been considered as a distinct human expression of creativity. This understanding is being questioned by the novelty effect of artworks created with the help of intelligent machines. Can autonomous systems understand and invoke emotions, which are an essential part of creating and perceiving artwork? How sensual is music composed by machines? How original are paintings created by neural networks, and can they provoke a contemplative experience within us? The definition of art and creativity finds itself in a state of transformation, which in turn challenges the function of the artist.

Chair: Martina Mara (AT)

Ethics, Philosophy and Spirituality

What are the sociocultural, philosophical and ethical implications of intensifying our reliance on digital technology? The contemporary discourse on and around AI developments extends well beyond the technological and economic horizon.

Chair: Jurij Krpan (SI)

Perhaps even more strongly, in its development, in the visions and intentions that human beings thereby pursue, it is a direct expression of the cultures and the times from which it emerged. How different cultures form technological developments and applications is the question at the opening symposium of the 2017 Ars Electronica Festival.

Panelists:
Maria Yablonina (RU), Mark Coeckelbergh (BE/AT), Zenbo Hidaka (JP), Shunji Yamanaka (JP)

Chair: Gerfried Stocker (AT)

The first order of business is to hack our way through the definitional jungle—after all, swarm is a term that is often interpreted very broadly and freely. But, in fact, what the Spaxels Research Initiative (SRI) is all about is coordinated, autonomous & semi-autonomous robotic vehicles. The term swarm is not explicitly derived from swarm behavior; it also encompasses formations like centrally coordinated fleets.

Heading Ars Electronica’s agenda here is illuminating the interplay of human beings (and society) with (future) mobile swarms. To accomplish this, we have constructed a series of prototypical arrays—the Spaxels, for instance—as a means of exploring the topic “Swarm and Human, Swarm and Society.”

The discussion of Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics and the attempt to expand on them suffices to deal with the individual case of how a robot must behave towards a human being. But what should be the behavior of a diverse assortment of numerous mobile robots communicating with each other in a network? Does this call for something like Swarm Laws to govern the interaction between mechanical swarm and human(ity)?

Like the Spaxels in the entertainment field, the deployment of coordinated robotic vehicles increasingly takes place in the public sphere—for instance, cars are beginning to join together to form “thinking organisms.”

But what does the encounter with swarms mean for the individual and for our society? Is there a “common framework” for swarms and their deployment in all their various manifestations that all the stakeholders can share here?

Is artificial intelligence implemented in dispersed fashion among the members of coordinated systems a solution? Or is that the problem itself?

How does humankind live in and communicate with an environment filled with vehicles that are potentially more intelligent—and certainly better networked—than we are? And what must this environment be capable of doing?

These are all huge questions, none of which can be answered at a conference. But answering questions is also not the point of a conference. Rather, at the top of our agenda is a determination of where we stand now. What are the positions of the participants in this discussion and what are their perspectives? With this as our point of departure, we will embark on a search for the common challenge that everyone in this field is, of necessity, actively facing. Accordingly, kicking off this conference will be a process of exchange in which the partners sketch their respective positions.

SO Sept. 10, 2017

This event is realized in the framework of the European Digital Art and Science Network and co-funded by the Creative Europe program of the European Union.

It became a mega-hit not only in its birthplace Japan but across the world and is loved still today by many people. PAC-MAN attracted not only the traditional game fans but also a new wave audience of young and old alike who were captivated by the game’s simple rules, profound game system, colorful and cute characters design, rhythmical BGM and unique SE and the comical intermission sequences between each level. In many ways, PAC-MAN was the first avatar to create a communication bridge between a coded, virtual world and the people. As the hype grew, approximately 400 different types of merchandise were released one after another and PAC-MAN became a social phenomenon embedded in the human psyche as a symbolic icon representing game culture and the social impact.

And now, if we regard PAC-MAN as a reflection of human social instinct and release it from the game screen into the actual world, what kind of and characteristics will it feature and what will PAC-MAN‘s new role be in the future?

Pacathon is an open innovation process that was born out of a research project: an adventure to explore what a next generation of PAC-MAN could look like. Through the collective minds of the BANDAI NAMCO group, Ars Electronica and Hakuhodo, these three collaborators have been carrying out research and workshops since May 2017 to understand the essence of future playing and to unearth the social value of PAC-MAN in order to prototype PAC-MAN’s future. This project aims to explore the potential of innovative gamification with the Ars Electronica Festival participants through Pacathon.

Credits

Text: Hideaki Ogawa (Ars Electronica Futurelab), Rena Tanaka (Hakuhodo Inc.)

PAC-MANTM&©BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment Inc.

To this end, this program establishes “Empowerment Informatics” as a new branch of informatics that supplements and extends human functions and enables technology to work in harmony with people.

Credits

Curator: Aki Yamada
http://www.emp.tsukuba.ac.jp/

Walkaholic

Minatsu Sugimoto (JP)

Walkaholic is a system that turns people into world-changing power generators. Walkaholic proposes a wearable harvesting interface, attachable at the ankle, which also stimulates walking. If everyone starts to generate energy by natural behavior such as walking it could be earth-shattering.

Escaping Chair

Minatsu Sugimoto (JP)

The Escaping Chair is a furniture shaped device that tries to escape from people nearby in order to prevent them from sitting down. Although this device is a machine with a simple function, without any will, we expect that the user will feel a semblance of will in the device through their interaction with it, and treat it as another “person”.
Takeshi Oozu, Aki Yamada, Hiroo Iwata

Life in the Space Age: Experiments of Art and Technology in Zero-G

Alberto Boem (IT)

In 2016 the Zero-G art project was launched to investigate possible creative scenarios about human life in outer space. Eight experiments that have been performed during a parabolic (zero-gravity) flight are presented. Through this project, the group aims to open space research to the society by showing its creative potential.

Artist group: Prof. Takuro Osaka (coordinator), Alberto Boem, John Brumley, Karlos Ishac, Jun Nishida, Takeshi Oozu, Rintaro Takashima, Hikaru Takatori, Tadayuki Tone

Supported by Japan Space Forum, Diamond Air Service Japan, JAXA—Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency

Echolocation Headphones

Aisen Caro Chacin (US/ES/VE)

The Echolocation Headphones are a pair of blinding goggles that emit a focused sound beam aiding spatial navigation by acoustic reflection. The directional sound coming from the headphones gives the user an audible focal point of reflection, similar to the focal point of vision.

Supported by EMP

Zero: Synopsis

We think ahead from the world of today to imagine how things could be in 30 years, so that, despite climate change, species die-offs and all the rest of it, you can still summon up the lust for life in the future. Time’s Up shows how it’s done—in full cognizance of the demonstration’s incompleteness—in a physical narrative set in real space in the lower level of Linz’s Lentos Art Museum, a walk-through account of life in 2047 in the Docklands neighborhood of a fictional coastal town called Turnton.

One: Turbulence

It’s been ages since life was boring; in fact, I can’t recall the likes of the turbulence we’re experiencing now. Crises of all kinds are rocking the mental and material foundations of existence, mainstays that most of us, and even entire societies, had secretly believed to be unsinkable. What certainly has survived intact—for the moment and the foreseeable future, apparently—is the tossed-off platitude to the tune of “unable to cope any more.” Yeah, we’re beset by a crisis all right, and not just one. There’s no need to list them all.

Values are tottering, canons collapsing; the power of doctrines and norms is on the wane. Election results in many countries yield a picture of two forces of approximately equal strength pulling in opposite directions. We live in very interesting times, stretched to breaking point. Becoming a doom-and-gloomer is the easiest thing in the world right now.

Two: Fear and Hope

On the stock exchange of future expectations the Apocalypse closes at a new record high almost every day. The fear-fueled media stoke up the climate and further satiate their breeding stock by disseminating even more dread. In this fertile soil, the fragile shoots of hopeful images of the future can flourish only with the help of tender loving care and cultivation, and can grow into irresistible dreams, visions and blueprints of a transformed, responsible, mature international society and global economy. Achieving this calls for the right dreamcatchers and tools to make the future into what it used to be not so very long ago: not a threat but a promise. And what this takes is, above all, hope. Action-inspiring hope, as Rebecca Solnit described it in Hope in the Dark: “Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.”

Three: The Futures

Painting a picture of The Future as such is an awe-inducing task. But since awe is more conducive to dumbfoundedness than to doing something, it’s considerably easier and more promising to keep several intellectual options open instead and conceive of the future in plural rather than singular terms. Thus, as futures. Futures are more tangible, more concrete, simpler to manage with respect to the concept and the design, and implementing them is a lot less arduous. After all, it makes it easier to get them off to a good start in life by making small but doable changes in one’s everyday life without having to capitulate in the face of the sheer dimensions of everything that has to be changed and necessarily conceding that one individual’s contribution ultimately doesn’t amount to a hill of beans.

Four: Futures That Can Be Experienced

Futuring is the discipline of conceiving futures and enabling them to emerge vividly before one’s inner eye. This does not necessarily demand specialist knowledge that can be acquired from textbooks; to a far greater extent, you have to be vitally interested in the world in the broadest sense. And it takes an approximate concept of that future, a concept that combines empiricism with speculation and imagination. And it begins with the simple yet momentous recognition that the future starts now. How we think and what we do today is what the future will produce. That a modicum of pathos resonates in the ever-more-frequently posed question of whether the decisions we make are good for our grandchildren does nothing to diminish its justifiability. In any case, what is absolutely undisputable is that nothing happens on its own. There’s no effect without a cause.

Five: Our Only Chance

A future world free of crises to as great an extent as possible needs a cause, many causes, changes on multiple levels, large and small. The first of these levels is the individual and, subsequently, the collective consciousness. Every thought makes a difference, at least potentially. Many small differences make a somewhat larger one. And this larger difference is what will have to be brought about if the scenarios of hope are to become reality in this world we live in.

So what futures are we implementing if we change our ways? Ideally those that have resulted from people looking back at the way things were in the 2010s and early 2020s and having concluded that “change was our only chance”—words that became Turnton Docklands’ credo.

Six: Physical Narratives

Since 2007—thus for ten years now—Time’s Up has been engaged in a special form of storytelling: designing and constructing walk-through accounts called physical narratives. These resemble film sets or scenery on the stage of a theater; the difference is that they entail neither a cast of actors nor any other personnel physically present. Instead, visitors encounter spaces designed with great attention to detail and containing traces of fictitious characters amidst an ensemble of props, objects and media—newspapers, radio or TV shows “that happen to be playing,” letters, diaries etc. Everything on hand is meant to be touched and scrutinized. Every element is a more or less important piece of a jigsaw puzzle that visitors assemble in their minds. The pieces form a picture and tell a story (though perhaps not always the one rendered by Time’s Up). In this sense, the settings for display and narrative configured by Time’s Up have additional spatial dimensions in that they are—or mentally endow—individualized spaces for play and interpretation.

Time’s Up’s first physical narrative told a crime story in film noir style. Over the years, future scenarios (in a literal sense) have become the collective’s material of choice—spaces in which a depiction of the future carefully selected from among many such futures becomes a reality that can be experienced, literally walked through. Futuristic physical narratives impart a sensory impression of which actions have to be taken now as the motive forces that ultimately effect the living conditions of a life worth living, and thus function as mental tools for change.

Seven: Looking Straight into the Eye of What’s Probable

Painting pictures of positive futures doesn’t mean donning rose-tinted spectacles or simply denying inconvenient truths. Global warming of at least two degrees and all its ecological and social consequences are happening now and you can’t just tune them out to make them go away. But this could constitute the point of departure for an intellectual exercise underpinned by plenty of facts for the development of the strategies that in 30 years humankind will have used to make the best of the situation prevailing in 2017.

In the vision of the future that Time’s Up is positing for 2047, the ecosystem has become unhinged and everyday life worldwide is plagued by the catastrophic long-term consequences of environmental pollution. Toxic waste and contaminants poison lands and waters. Entire biospheres have collapsed; huge areas of the oceans are dead zones. Due to global warming, which humankind, hampered by political considerations, only went through the motions of combating until the mid-2020s, meteorological extremes had become everyday occurrences. Droughts, flooding and sea-level rise made numerous regions and coastal areas uninhabitable.

Those are the external facts and circumstances that also characterize life in Turnton, an unspecified seaside town whose Docklands neighborhood, on the occasion of the 2017 Ars Electronica Festival, is being temporarily installed in the lower level of the LENTOS Art Museum in the form of a harbor-quarter market square, a waterfront bar, and the port authority’s offices.

Eight: Another World Was Possible

The ecological dystopia of Turnton 2047, however, is juxtaposed to a socio-economic utopia that is gradually revealed in detail to sufficiently inquisitive visitors to the Turnton Docklands. Neoliberalism is history, the growth mantra has been hushed, and unbridled free trade is a thing of the past. What has instead become reality is what, for decades, had been dismissed as politically, economically or technologically unfeasible and ridiculed as naïve.

The revolution in raw materials, energy and transportation has taken off so dynamically that there’s no stopping it anymore. Under the stewardship of the General Authority for Sustainability, the sustainable economy of 2047 serves the common good. The culture of everyday life, production and commerce are obliged to conserve nature, minimize the use of resources and uphold human rights. The mission of the Global Transparency Agency is to see to it that they stay the course, while the Center for Advanced Technologies makes the corresponding hardware and software available, as well as those that humankind can use to support the ecosystem’s gradual regeneration.

In Turnton this is being done, among others, by one of many Networked Oceanic Society Laboratories. The voracious undersea organisms bred there decimate the plastic particles polluting the seas. Algae farmer Hamish Dornbirn is looking forward to seeing the last of them; the proprietor of the Ocean Recovery Farm on the Turnton coast has pioneered the gentle clean-up of polluted beaches and bodies of water.

Nine: Migration Management 2047

Climate-driven migration has long since lost its capacity to frighten. People upping sticks and making a transcontinental or intercontinental move has become a normal social reality that is well-organized by Travel without Borders and the New Neighbor Integration Bureau. Now cultural diversity is accounted for on the asset side of the balance sheet. Among the many ways that esteem for new neighbors is manifested in Turnton is the upcoming several-day art and culture festival. Celebrating the strength of diversity is the theme of this event marking the 20th anniversary of the local New Neighbor Integration Bureau.

Round number anniversaries aren’t the only reason to throw a party. In collaboration with Travel without Borders the bureau has just received official authorization to convert empty warehouses into public housing, a decision that delights NNIB spokesman Olufemi Badour. Following the necessary renovations, these facilities will provide accommodation for a group of new arrivals who have had to be evacuated from their homeland on a group of islands in the Atlantic.

Ten: Nice Neighborhood

The chief protagonist of one of Turnton’s migratory success stories is Fenfang Lin. One day the marine biologist had had enough of lecture halls and labs, and traded in her academic career for a bar called Medusa, the hub and heart of the harbor district. Her extensive knowledge of marine flora and fauna serves her well here. In the galley of Medusa she prepares fancy snacks and creative drinks from everything that recovery farmer Dornbirn harvests in the coastal waters. Lin’s ties to him are of a commercial as well as a romantic nature. She has also become strong friends with harbor coordinator Margaret Bloomenfeld, who has made the Medusa her favorite watering hole. Other regulars are the local plant pollinator—she’s carrying on the work of her natural counterparts, who unfortunately are almost extinct—and Trashy, The Garbage Baron, who, besides operating the local Upcycling Center, is proprietor of the region’s Recycled Goods Malls, alternative shopping centers purveying an assortment of ecological, fair-trade merchandise. What do you say to that? Sold!

Turnton Docklands is made possible by the kind support of the Austrian Federal Chancellery, Linz Kultur, OÖ-Kultur, Linz AG, Valletta 2018, ecoduna, meinklangbett, Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, Ars Electronica and servus.at

Accomplices: Albert Förster, Alexander Meile, Anat Stainberg, Andrea Strasser, Andreas Kump, Andreas Mayrhofer, Angela Waidmann, Anna Mendelssohn, Antonia Kriegner, Astrid Benzer, Aurel von Arx, Barbara Hinterleitner, Bastian Dulisch, Bronwynn Mertz-Penzinger, Caroline Richards, Christian Haas, Christian Leisch, Christian Scheppe, Christian Strasser, Christian Wellmann, Christopher Hüttmansdorfer, Daniel Steiner, Die Fabrikanten, Dominika Meindl, Doris Schüchner, Elisa Unger, Elke Doppelbauer, Florian Kofler, Florian Sedmak, Freundinnen der Kunst, Gabriele Deutsch, Giles Tilling, Gitti Vasicek, Gunda Schanderer, Helga Schager, Inga Hehn, Jenny Weichert, Joschi Viteka, Jürgen Zauner, KAPU, Katja Seifert, Leo Schatzl, Leonie Reese, Luis Wohlmuter, Lutz Zeidler, Marc Schrögendorfer, Maria Fliri, Mario Habringer, Marion Huber, Markus Zett, Matt Davidson, Matthias Gschaider, Matthias Hack, Maximilian Modl, Michael Smulik, Michael Strohmann, monochrom, Nik Hummer, Nina Pieper, Paul Schaussberger, Peter Woy, Philip Huemer, Philipp Pamminger, qujochoe, radio fro, Robert Zauner, S. Javid Hakim, Sarka Zahálková, servus.at, Sigrid Cakir, Silke Grabinger, Silke Müller, Stefan Füreder, Stephan Rois, Susanne Gschwendtner, Tanja Brandmayr, Tanja Lattner, Thomas Latzel, Thomas Leitner, Thomas Maier, Tim Boykett, Tim Weckenbrock, Tina Auer, Ufuk Serbest, Ushi Reiter, Valarie Serbest, Veronika Platz, Wolfgang Gratt

Through his work Atsushi Tadokoro wants to unravel this magic by reversing the relationship between the code and the human being. It is an attempt to expose the inner surface of the concealed code in a hard shell.

Disenchantment Space transforms Deep Space 8K into a huge programmable space. Participants who enter Deep Space are transformed into objects that constitute the program. The objects will behave as program codes that generate sounds and images while interacting with each other. The image generated may not necessarily be a beautiful thing. But that is the result of behaving as code. Participants will be able to intuitively understand the inside of the code by moving around the space as part of the code.

Based on these studies, Austria’s Ministry of Commerce and Labor decides to remunerate members of the country’s workforce for their inactivity with a minimum wage. To encourage people to get started as professional idlers, robotic installations in public spaces are purveyed to the citizenry, whereby observing the changes the machinery’s form constantly undergoes is meant to facilitate the segue into a meditative state of indolence. In this relaxed frame of mind and body, it is possible to focus on oneself and open up to sweet stasis.

Credits

In collaboration with UFG
Supported by Kuka

Visuals: Christopher Noelle – TOFA
Sound: Michael Schweiger