The 2015 Ars Electronica Festival is set for September 3-7. This year’s theme is POST CITY – Habitats for the 21st Century. Hundreds of artists and scientists from around the world will join festivalgoers in an inquiry into how fit for the future our cities are. The focus will be on four aspects of urban life: Future Mobility – the city as transportation hub; Future Work – the city as workplace and marketplace; Future Citizens – the city as community; and Future Resilience – the city as bastion. This year’s primary venue is the mothballed Postal Service logistics center on the grounds of Linz’s main train station.
These huge premises will host the sprawling POST CITY exhibition, the featured attraction of which will be the Mercedes-Benz F 015 Luxury in Motion, a self-driving car making its European debut. This exhibition will also be the centerpiece of a whole series of discursive formats dealing with the festival theme. Other venues in downtown Linz are devoted almost exclusively to the Prix Ars Electronica: The CyberArts exhibition showcasing the year’s most outstanding works of media art will take place, as always, in the OK Center for Contemporary Art, and the Animation Festival is right next door in CENTRAL.
At the locations arrayed along the Danube, the watchwords are Art & Science: works by students at Université Paris 8 will be shown on the campus of Linz Art University, the Mobile Ö1 Atelier will be ensconced on Hauptplatz, and the new Elements of Art and Science exhibition opens at the Ars Electronica Center, which is also the site of «Spaceship Earth» featuring amazing satellite images provided by the European Space Agency. And a trip to the Ars Electronica Center wouldn’t be complete without ultra-high-resolution viewing in the new state-of-the-art Deep Space 8K! (from the press release)
images (cover) Supreme Believers / Universal Everything (UK) (1) Sujet Ars Electronica Festival 2015 – credit: Pablo Scapinachis Armstrong / Stefan Eibelwimmer (2) Mercedes-Benz F015 CREDITS Mercedes-Benz (3) VIUNAP / Nick Ervinck (BE) credit: Peter Verplancke (4) Second Body / Anarchy Dance Theatre X Ultra Combos (TW) – credit: Ching-Ju Cheng.