In the first week of September, the Ars Electronica Festival returned to bring life to Linz, a small town near Vienna. Every year, artists, scientists, researchers, entrepreneurs and activists gather here and, through their work, offer a glimpse into future directions shaped by the intersection of art technology, science and society.
From a meeting point for a group of specialised enthusiasts, as it was back in 1979, to the global attraction with full institutional recognition today, the Ars Electronica Festival continues to serve as a moment of encounter and discovery. Creativity is embraced across a wide range of fields, from art and research on new technologies and materials to environmental policies.
In 2024, Linz hosted 1,260 artists, developers and activists from 67 countries. The numbers, released at the end of the Festival, hint at the size of the event and the inevitable personal experience of those who attend over the course of a few days.
This edition was titled HOPE. Artistic director Gerfried Stocker immediately clarified that hope is not a resigned statement. Instead, hope is found in the number of projects, both large and small, that have been concretely launched with a future perspective in mind. And it is exactly in the lack of perspective, rather than the overt crisis of imagination, that Stocker identifies the central junction of the crisis.
HOPE is also understood as a co-creation process, challenging ourselves and others. This is how Anna Weiss, a young researcher who is part of the interdisciplinary team of the Future Lab, defines it. Future Lab is a key component of the Ars Electronica framework, an active laboratory for the creation and preservation of all interactive works in the permanent exhibition of the Ars Electronica museum, as well as a catalyst for external energies that constantly engage with the team.
They are the ones behind the scenes of Deep Space 8k, a digital space with a resolution of 33 million pixels and a high-performance laser tracking system. Among the Festival shows, this space hosted a session dedicated to Cultural Heritage for the first time this year.
Works, lectures, workshops, and research in progress, together with the themes guiding the Festival and the ever-expanding network that connects Ars Electronica with organisations and institutions worldwide, including universities, offer an overview of the current directions of creativity and its potential impact on society. Of course, the institutional recognition of the Festival must be considered and all that this entails regarding the selection policies for the works. It should be noted, however, that this is a natural growth process. It is hoped that an organisation like Ars Electronica, which has grown over time with the ability to absorb and metabolise change, while also identifying key turning points, will achieve this. This event, supported over time by the museum system and other related organisations that have emerged around the Festival, has accompanied chapters of the story of the intertwining of technology with society and creativity – a narrative which at times has been overlooked by institutions but that, as a matter of fact, has shaped our present. One only needs to browse the themes and catalogues of past editions (all available online) to appreciate the incredible relevance and correspondence between the themes and the present historical moment.
The central exhibition at the festival, but for these last three years, is historically housed in POSTCITY, Linz’s former mail distribution centre just a stone’s throw from the train station. In this beautiful space of industrial archaeology, every space is studded with works, events and projects, all the way down to the basement, in the spacious bunker spaces. Main themes alongside technology are empathy, ecology, the link between artificial intelligence and creativity.
Calculating Empire by Kate Crawford (AU) and Vladan Joler (RS) opened the main exhibition and received the Grand Prize for Artistic Exploration. It is a manifesto that, through the combination of science, art and design, reconstruct the steps of progress from printing to artificial intelligence, placing them within the power system that have linked society and technology from the 1500s to the present day, from the managing of data stored in the cloud, to the politics of extraction for the materials needed for the development of new technologies.
As we proceed through the exhibition, we frequently encounter research on materials and the materialisation of the invisible, from organic to synthetic, potentially eco-friendly materials. Processes are often examined in their analogue dimension, as seen in the ongoing research from Singapore’s materials laboratory, also found at the entrance to the exhibition.
The overall perspective is inspiring given the variety of approaches that seem to offer a way out from the isolation that has enveloped the world, not only with the loss of contact not only between people but also with the world itself, connected solely by equally sticky information channels.
We continue outside the central exhibition at POSTCITY with the Prix Ars Electronica, one of the media art competitions established in 1987. For this edition, the selected works in various categories, including New Animation Art and Interactive Art +, as well as the Awards for Distinction and Honorary Mentions, recognised the political commitment to building the future. For the first time, the exhibition was hosted in the beautiful spaces of the Lentos Kunstmuseum, on the banks of the river Danube.
The Medicine campus of Joan Kepler University, a scientific university that has been an active partner of the Festival for several years, opened its doors to Ars Electronica for the first time, hosting not only an exhibition but also a collaboration between art and science – a fertile exchange of proactive ideas. The location of this campus of Joan Kepler University is also ideal, as it is centrally situated, close to the Design Museum where the Prix Ars Electronica award ceremony took place.
The Campus medSPACE was also the venue for the animation part of the Festival, showcasing twelve screening programmes, including highlights from the Prix Ars Electronica in the category New Animation Art and *AI in Art* , and a selection from SIGGRAPH, ISEA and the Runway AI Film Festival. The Expanded Animation conference organised by FH Upper Austria, Campus Hagenberg in collaboration with Ars Electronica, was also held here.
In this context, students also played an important part with the exhibition Expanded Play, 13, a collaboration with the Department of Digital Media at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria and the Department of Visual Computing at Masaryk University (Brno).
Compared to previous years, the space dedicated to universities has clearly expanded. There were many works by young students that showed commitment and inspiration. The Campus exhibition, dedicated to universities, accompanied the main exhibition in the POSTCITY building. Another dedicated venue was the University of Linz, bringing us closer to the Ars Electronica Museum on the banks of the Danube.
This year, a prize of EUR 2,000 was introduced for the Campus exhibition, in collaboration with an international jury that took part in the selection of works from the 42 entries, each participating university contributing one to represent its institution. “If students invest their entire summer holidays to exhibit with us, then it is up to us to offer them as much visibility, attention and appreciation as possible,” emphasises Veronika Liebl. ACV (Algorithmic Cultural Vandalism) by Pietro Lugaro (IT) and Alessandro Mac-Nelly (DE) was the winning work.
This provides an overview, a few traces left along the way, but also room for individual works, projects and exhibitions to be explored in more detail – and for readers to get an overall idea by ‘browsing’ through the pages of the website.
As the festival bids farewell to the public, preparations are already underway for the next edition, scheduled as always for the first week of September. Gerfried Stocker has announced some of the upcoming programmes, such as the presentation of the high-resolution scan of St Mary Cathedral for Deep Space 8K, which will be presented at the end of September as part of the European Conference of Cathedral Builders’, the opening of the new Deep Space in Hangzhou on 1 October, 2024, and exhibition by the Ars Electronica museum with the Climate and Energy Fund opening in mid-November. Once again, the aim in 2025 will be to place creative media education at the forefront, with projects carried out by Austrian schools. This year, more than ever, young people have shown tremendous will to overcome the crisis and project themselves into the future. The institution has demonstrated that it understands the importance of their presence by providing them with a space to make their voices, the voices of the future, heard. This requires a lot of work, collaboration and an all-round open-mind, which the Festival, the museum, the facilities and the accompanying network help us to bring into focus.
Ars Electronica 2024
images: Ars Electronica 2024 (2) Adelin Schweitzer (FR), «#ALPHALOOP », Ars Electronica 2024 (3) Where Dogs Run (RU/SL): Natalia Grekhova, Olga Inozemtseva, Alexey Korzukhin, «Kerosene Chronicles. Fungus», Ars Electronica 2024 (4) Stefan Mittlböck-Jungwirth-Fohringer (AT), Johannes Pöll (AT) Arno Deutschbauer (AT), «11°22’4″142°35’5″», Ars Electronica 2024 (5) Shapes of Emergence: Baudouin Saintyves (FR/US), Severine Atis (FR), Otto Briner (US/FR), Ben Kinsinger (US), Roiel Benitez (PY/FR), « Water Organoids», Ars Electronica 2024 (6) bit.studio (TH), «FLOCK OF», Ars Electronica 2024 (7-8) Clemens Wenger (AT), Enar de Dios Rodríguez (ES), Martin Ringbauer (AT), Johannes Kofler (AT), Richard Küng (AT), Alexander Ploier (AT), Benjamin Orthner (AT/GH), Philipp Haslinger (AT), « BruQner—The Sound of Entanglement», Ars Electronica 2024 (9) Marc Vilanova (ES), « Cascade», Ars Electronica 2024 (10) Marko Vivoda, Saša Spačal, Luka Murovec, Nina Mršnik, Andrej Koruza, Gaja Meznaric Osole, Danica Sretenovic, « Spaceship from hope», Ars Electronica 2024 (11) Impression create your world @ POSTCITY, Ars Electronica 2024
