This year’s Ars Electronica Festival 2022 is dedicated to the theme “Welcome to Planet B – A different life is possible! But How?” to “Planet B” as a cipher for the indispensable, new and in many ways completely different life and action on this only planet that exists for us. The festival theme emerged as a reaction to the current issues in society, which increasingly revolve around the consequences of climate change and the many unknowns of a necessary change. As early as 12 years ago, Ars Electronica took the crises of ecology, economy and politics as an occasion to embark on a search for ways out under the motto “REPAIR – can we still be saved? From September 2-11, 2010, the Ars Electronica Festival brought together visionaries from the worlds of art, science and business to work on alternative scenarios for the future. Visionaries from the worlds of art, science and business who have begun to make their own contribution to repairing the situation, showing us that knowledge, technology and tools for doing so are all available. With more than 300 individual events, the edition was the most extensive in the festival’s history up to that point, and with an eventual attendance of 90,227, the festival even surpassed the mark of the 30th anniversary edition in the Capital of Culture year of 2009. Highlights included Honda’s ASIMO, which made its appearance as a star guest in the Ars Electronica Center’s Deep Space, blood and tears by Richard Kriesche (AT), the 2010 Featured Artist, the traditional CyberArts show, the Expanded Interface by Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences and the Crawford School of Art and Design from the Cork Institute of Technology, respectively.
More pictures of over 40 years of Ars Electronica can be found in our archive.
In our Throwback series, we take a look back at past events, exhibitions, installations and other exciting happenings from the Ars Electronica universe since 1979.