I.

The first festival of art, technology and society in 1979 initiated the inquiry into the cultural correspondences of technological change, an undertaking dedicated to analyzing the process by which new technologies become a culture (and, indeed, a cult as well), and to finding possibilities of designing and managing this process.

During the ensuing 20 years, the Ars Electronica project-itself committed to continual evolution-has expanded and diffused into a broad spectrum of social domains and thereby attained the status of a model for coming to terms with art in a way that is appropriate to these times-art that represents the effort to traverse boundaries by artists taking digital technologies as their implement, their medium, as well as their subject. Moreover, this art addresses the new ordering of our society. Conceiving itself as a direct consequence of society, it intervenes in these transformational processes, participates in them, and advances them as an essential element of social innovation.

In 1987, the festival added the Prix Ars Electronica as a forum for artistic achievement and innovation, and as a barometer indicating trends in an expanding and increasingly diversified world of media art. The Ars Electronica Center was opened in 1996 in response to growing public interest and as a prototype of a new artistic venue-as a strategy to develop adequate forms in which to produce, disseminate, and encounter art. Aside from the Museum of the Future as the chief attraction for the general public, it has been the Ars Electronica Futurelab in particular that has assumed an essential role here in providing the infrastructure necessary to bring together leading scientists and artists in the Ars Electronica Research and Residency Program, and constituting a successful experiment for interdisciplinary collaboration implemented in actual practice.

These 20 years, however, have also been marked by the emergence of a global Information Society as the determinative circumstance of our civilization. The processes of cultural assimilation of and adaptation to this new reality remain a continual challenge; the formulation of the multifarious problems posed by this economic, social, and political reordering is not even close to completion. Nevertheless, the vectors of this development have been set, and thus 20 years of Ars Electronica naturally offers an occasion to undertake an archeological dig through the strata of artistic and technological evolution. But, above all, this is an occasion to concentrate on the prospects-based on the prior achievements of digital information technology-that are in store.

In the wake of these technical innovations, biology has catapulted itself onto the leading edge of key technologies for the coming decades. Molecular biologists and genetic engineers, equipped with the tools of information technology provided by the Computer Age, have thrown open portals whose thresholds, in many instances, mark our culture's boundaries and taboos, the breaching of which, though, is increasingly the focal point of expectations and hopes for the continued prosperity of our civilization.

Without a doubt, there are serious potential dangers, particularly since it is to be expected that, beyond scientific undertakings, all economic and industrial efforts as well-and, indeed, to the same extent to which we have, up to now, gone about the business of mastering, reworking, and economically exploiting our physical environment-will now concentrate on life, on the science of life.

The fact that the foundations of life thereby assume a position at the centerpoint of attention, however, can also engender a new mode of dealing with life. The very conception of being capable of forming life (human life as well) beyond the morphological level of the body, and of being able to construct its predispositions and talents, compels us to take up new perspectives in regarding ultimate aspects of this life-its social and metaphysical constitution. A challenge for art as well.

Ars Electronica 99 will face these new challenges with the theme Life Science, a confrontation which-in the tradition of Ars Electronica-will take place, above all, in the interplay of the divergent concepts of artists and scientists.

II.

LifeScience

Ideologie und Wissenschaft

You don't need to consult a trend researcher to find out which issue is currently dominating the public discussion of progress and the future. Following the Industrial and Digital Revolutions-from the steam engine to the atom bomb to the Internet-the Biological Revolution is now being proclaimed. Spurred on by the success stories of information and computer technologies and the fabulous stock market profits reaped by their promoters, reports from fields of science, research and technology have achieved headline status as dispatches from the "world of wonders" and attained a sensational impact equaling those of natural catastrophes and major sports events-tantalizing prospects that correspond so very closely to our high-performance society's dreams of a life that is healthy, beautiful and long. The internationally prognosticated developments make the option of doing without these achievements seem a hardly realistic one, and-in light of hunger and disease-many observers go as far as calling it a moral imperative to deploy every technological means possible to alleviate these problems.

And thus it is not without justification that life science-the term which subsumes modern genetic and biological technologies-has emerged as leading contender to become the key technology of the coming decades. Molecular biologists and genetic engineers equipped with the tools of information technology made available by the Computer Age have opened up doors whose thresholds have, in many instances, marked the limits and taboos of our culture, though it is the traversal of precisely these boundaries upon which our civilization has increasingly pinned its expectations and hopes for continued prosperity.

Beyond any doubt is the social-political and cultural potential of these developments. What can well be foreseen are the efforts going beyond those of scientists and scholars-economic and industrial enterprises on a scale on which we have heretofore gone about the task of mastering, harnessing and exploiting our physical environment that will now be concentrated upon life itself and its constituent elements. The very idea of having the capability of forming life (including human life) beyond the morphological level of the body and designing its predispositions and talents makes it incumbent upon us to assume new perspectives on the limits of this life and its social and metaphysical constitution.

To an extent unmatched by other sciences, genetics and biology have also been used as tools of ideology and instruments enhancing claims to political power, and they bear the historical burdens of the interpretations of their findings and results.

Moreover, in the case of biological and genetic technologies, we find ourselves confronted by a lofty domain in which authoritative experts are few and far between-a fact which, in light of the lasting consequences of the social and political decisions looming on the horizon, will also become a touchstone of the democratic political process. Between the arrogance of businessmen and the ignorance of politicians, the human being remains alone to face this dilemma-enticed by the hopes of healing all illnesses and deeply troubled by the fears of a biological Armageddon (legitimate fears in the wake of Bhopal, Chernobyl, BSE ...).

This is a situation in which we require a Wissenschaftskultur (the way science is done and promulgated) and a critique of science that dispense with the myth of neutral facts and findings.

The experiences and methods of media art can help us go about this. What we need are interdisciplinary collaboration in a modern, pluralistic society, and artistic intervention that gets beyond moralizing political correctness to actively engage in the social discourse concerning progress and innovation.

With this year's Festival, Ars Electronica begins to focus on issues in the field of modern biotechnology. This constitutes a reorientation, as well as the continuation of a practice with a long history of success: namely, turning attention to those areas where conflicts develop in the sphere of tension and interplay at the nexus of technology and society, and bringing art into play as an interface and catalyst for the interaction involving science and the general public.