The fifth episode of the Ars Electronica Futurelab’s 25th Anniversary Series, addresses a far-reaching and essential social question. Difficult or elusive content often requires a change of perspective in order to affect.
A wide variety of the lab’s ideas and concepts have been finding their way directly into the hearts and minds of stunning audiences, for 25 years now: art, creativity, random chance and even failures have been responsible for the most amazing results.
Matthew Gardiner and Marianne Eisl, both Artists and Key Researchers in the Lab, present their approach to the issue using key exhibits from the Lab’s past: a gesture-controlled spherical labyrinth, a mirror that can transform gestures in space into an interactive experience, kinetic sculptures somewhere between robotics and origami, or shadow silhouettes of digitally captured bodies.
Using their innovative concepts at the boundary between art, technology and society, the two show that it takes more than a machine can calculate to develop vivid experiences: It’s about reducing complexity to manageable portions of information in order to translate important information into tangible formats.
Six more episodes from the series, which were and will be broadcast on the occasion of the lab’s 25th anniversary, provide a new perspective on the history of the future: Virtual Worlds, Creative (Artificial) Intelligence, Humanity & Robotinity, Computation & Beyond, the Art of Swarms, and Art Thinking. Learn more about the meaning of Tangible Links and Origami Robotics and the powerful Art Thinking method of the Ars Electronica Futurelab.