Since 1979, the year of its first edition, Ars Electronica has gone from a niche festival to an institutionally recognised event, welcoming experts from all over the world to the Austrian city of Linz. For five consecutive days, events, exhibitions, conferences, and workshops lead visitors in and out of the festival’s headquarters, into the city’s museums, and through both institutional and informal meeting places. The whole city participates in a multitude of ways.
Each year, projects at the intersection of art, science, and technology are brought together under a unifying theme—at once a symptom of what is happening in the world and a projection of future visions. One just has to look at past editions in the catalogue available for free on the site, in the entry dedicated to the archive.
If last year’s theme of the festival was “hope”, the 2025 edition was conceived under the title PANIC Yes / no to confront the current crisis situation head-on, without compromise. It does so with determination. The red writing, evoking alarm and danger, demands a choice: yes or no. It is in the possibility of choosing that the theme takes shape. There is the possibility of overcoming the crisis, of facing panic rather than avoiding it. This is the wish expressed by Gerfried Stocker at the Prix Ars Electronica ceremony, which each year recognizes artists and collectives attentive to projects with social impact.
This year, special space was given to broken and marginalised voices, in the name of artistic freedom. “Art with the potential to change perspectives”, these were the intentions echoed by the institutional figures who opened the Prix Ars Electronica ceremony.
We move through the festival and its vast array of projects and productions. We notice how strong the need is today to map and to make visible the infrastructures and connections between technology, power and society—building the awareness necessary to act, to choose, to be free. There is also a drive to experiment with new materialities—soft and sometimes alive.
This year, more than ever, the works of students and young researchers are very interesting, both those presented in the spaces of the University of Linz, and those showcased by their respective universities in the Campus section that the festival brings together at its headquarters. Thirty-seven institutions have been selected from all over the world, young people called to investigate the role of creativity and education in a time of crisis that also means transformation, for certain aspects of possibilities still open.
“More than a showcase of student work, the Campus Exhibition is a living laboratory for artistic research, experimentation, and cultural reflection.” And again, “artists from around the world engage with a reality marked by crisis, yet not devoid of possibility. The question is no longer whether to panic, but how to respond – with curiosity, resilience, and collective imagination “.
The search for organic materials at the service of technology (such as mycelium), the exploration of micro-biotic landscapes and, again, the reconstruction of infrastructures and ecosystems that are decisive for society (organic and non-organic) are central themes. From those built by organic elements such as mushrooms, to those that link humans to AI technologies and software and that branch off between social consumption and war initiatives.
These are the main topics discussed on the stage of the Ars Electronica conferences. It is also discussed at side events such as the prestigious ISAST/ Laser talk (linked to the Leonardo platform of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – MIT), hosted and organized this year by the Interface Culture Department—founded by Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau—and moderated by Fabricio Lamoncha. Here, artists and scientists working with mycelium and other organic materials raised issues around changing research practices, protocols, and evaluation methods. These are research spaces where different disciplines meet—and sometimes clash—in the pursuit of knowledge built through relationships. Infrastructure, relationships and contamination lie at the core of many exhibitions and individual productions.
What happens when technology is no longer an isolated tool for specific tasks, but embedded in a complex web of interrelationships?
This is precisely the question that introduces the projects presented by the Department Interface Culture of the University of Linz in the section (Campus) dedicated to the previously mentioned universities. Between planning and poetry, the most urgent themes of the encounter between art and technology are addressed, from surveillance and the relationship of software with military infrastructure, to issues related to language.
Ars Electronica brings this and other realities into its network imagined as an ever-changing ecosystem. “Today, it is many things at once,” we read in this year’s statement: a platform for artists that supports, disseminates and celebrates their work. A forum for activists and initiatives that blur the boundaries between art, science, and technology and aim to improve our everyday lives. A learning space that enables students, job seekers, and everyone else to engage playfully and critically with new technologies. An artistic R&D laboratory and atelier that develops prototypes that aim to initiate social innovation. A creative partner for companies that helps them not only generate profits, but also create meaning and social benefit. All of this is driven by the question: How do we want to live in the future and how can we make this future a reality?.”
At Ars Electronica, we look for ‘solutions’ through installations and performances. Futurelab, a laboratory and permanent workshop of Ars Electronica, is dedicated to this purpose: “It builds future prototypes and works that merge Art Thinking, Art Science Research, and technology.” And if the festival inserts panic as a provocation and stimulus, the Futurelab responds by relaunching solutions, converting uncertainty into opportunities, inviting visitors to experience the future through doing. Everything presented in the spectacular 8K immersive space of Ars Electronica, along with many other productions, emerges from a long process of interdisciplinary research and exchange, where art finds its place in social impact.
And for those who, in this particular moment in history, attended the conference on the trajectories of media art to ask themselves which direction it is heading, it was a pleasant surprise to find that pioneers of media art, among the most respected worldwide, were turning the stage over to the public and their voices. Each person may find their own answer, choice, and freedom, in what art, the festival and life have been able to sow.
images: (cover 1)Jin Lee, “ Liminal Ring”, Ars Electronica 2025 (2) Marc Vilanova, “Phonos”, Ars Electronica 2025 (3) Amir Bastan, Noor Stenfert Kroese, Johannes Braumann, “MycoGravity”, 2025 (4) Takafumi Morita, Tomoka Kurosawa, Yumi Nishihara, Yasuaki Kakehi, “Entangled Liquidities”, Ars Electronica 2025.
