You’ve never been to the Ars Electronica Festival before, want to take another look at the POSTCITY, or you’ heard that there are wondrous things to see? Maybe you’ve been here before, but couldn’t decide and didn’t feel like you had a good overview? Don’t worry, we have a number of tips and programs for newcomers to help you get to know the Chamber of Wonders of Ars Electronica.
To begin with, we would like to point out a new concept: With the Ars Electronica Art Thinking School, we are presenting a new festival program that conveys a creative attitude and the questioning of the world. The Art Thinking Tours serve as an entry point to experience the festival with an Art Thinking attitude. They have been carefully curated and designed to facilitate navigation through the multitude of exhibitions and events. The Art Thinking Tours focus on five different core themes of Ars Electronica, from Art x Industry to Art x Education, and aim to empower visitors to create their own compass to explore the festival on their own. The tour brochures are available for free at the Art Thinking School .
The best part of the program to begin with the Ars Electronica Festival is – appropriately – the opening. Under the title „Unboxing the Festival“ , numerous performances and concerts will be on the program, with three stages in the POSTCITY: the Basement Stage, the Courtyard and the Train Hall. The musical and performative presentations, which will take place free of charge on this evening, provide a good first insight into the essence of Ars Electronica and will certainly inspire you to spend the next few days immersed in the program.
Another suggestion you can’t repeat often enough – especially for beginners – is our WE GUIDE YOU offer. The WE GUIDE YOU program is a comprehensive selection of tours that will bring visitors closer to the various exhibitions and works at the Ars Electronica Festival 2019. In addition to numerous expert tours for special interest groups or community tours in various foreign languages, the Spotlight Tours are the first choice for anyone who wants to get an overview. All of the POSTCITY’s exhibitions are exemplarily visited as part of the daily guided tours in German and English; visitors receive suggestions and can then explore one or the other exhibition on their own.
Watching artificial intelligence “think”, training self-driving cars, programming robots, 3D printing, processing one’s own DNA with gene scissors – the completely redesigned Ars Electronica Center is clearly a hotspot of this year’s festival. “Compass – Navigating the Future” is the guiding principle, claim and invitation of the Center, which takes a close look at current developments in the fields of artificial intelligence, neuroscience, neuro-bionics, robotics, prosthetics, autonomous mobility as well as genetic engineering and biotechnology. The main focus of attention, however, is on a technology and its effects on our lives: Artificial intelligence.
All exhibitions are designed in such a way that they can be experienced by everyone, regardless of their level of knowledge. In addition, our ” infotrainers” provide advice and assistance and there is a wide range of guided tours purely relating to the Center.
The initiative S+T+ARTS = STARTS is a programme of the European Commission to promote synergies between art and technology to support innovation in industry and society. STARTS promotes the involvement of artists in research and innovation activities in Europe and the collaboration of engineers, scientists and artists. As one of these projects, Ars Electronica, in collaboration with BOZAR and Waag, has created a prize to select the most outstanding collaborations and results in the field of creativity and innovation at the interface of science and technology with art. As part of the Ars Electronica Festival, the STARTS Initiative and a selection of the award-winning and nominated works of the STARTS Prize 2019 will be presented. The show is a good introduction to the topics of art and technology, the projects are easily accessible and comprehensible, and admission is free.
If you are a little more courageous, you can also take a look at the STARTS Day program: In the STARTS talks, the winners of the STARTS Prize 2019 talk about their award-winning projects, and in the panel “Humanizing AI” experts ask about the influence and responsibility of developers when it comes to making future AI systems humane and fair.
Another festival tip – and no, it’s not just for children and teenagers – is the CREATE YOUR WORLD Festival. CREATE YOUR WORLD is Ars Electronicas future festival of the next generation and this time it is about the question, who determines how our future will look like? CREATE YOUR WORLD is a centre for creative projects, a playground for quirky ideas, a laboratory for exciting experiments and a forum for constructive protest. As a kind of festival within the festival, it offers free space for artists, inventors, unconventional thinkers, those thirsting for knowledge, future enthusiasts and activists who want to exchange ideas with others and like-minded people, try out new technologies and forge joint plans. The motto: Come, get inspired, join in! The mission: Get involved and help shape the future – no matter how old you are!
If the above tips are not enough for you, you can go a little deeper into the Ars Electronica Festival, into the POSTCITY bunker and thus into the heart of the theme exhibition “Human Limitations – Limited Humanity” and the Gallery Spaces, the presentation space for international media art galleries. The exhibitions focus on our current relationship with our environment and pose the question of what social-ethical obligations arise from it. Two objects to carefully approach this theme are the Institute for Inconspicuous Languages: Reading Lips by Špela Petrič and Aurelia 1 + Hz/proto viva sonification / aurelia by Robertina Šebjanič and Slavko Glamočanin.
The work of Špela Petrič deals with the research of communication between plants and humans. At the Institute for Inconspicuous Languages we can look into the psyche of the plant with the help of natural and artificial intelligence by carefully reading its lips – the thousands of microscopically small “mouths” (stomatas) distributed on each leaf with which the plant breathes.
The project Aurelia 1+Hz / proto viva generator deals with possibilities of coexistence of animals and machines. In contrast to robots driven by digital artificial intelligence, the project uses a living organism to illustrate the “liveliness” of a simple machine. The project is also a good introduction to one of the central questions of the Gallery Spaces: What are the demands of media art, of Bioart on the art market? For hanging a picture on the wall is far simpler than keeping these “pets”, the jellyfish in Robertina’s Šebjaničs work, as part of a collection.
This wasn’t enough and you are looking for more events and exhibitions? You can find the whole program on our website.
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