Technology
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VR Themed Weekend: Virtual Worlds – New Realities
Digital environments occupy the focal point at the Ars Electronica Center April 6-8, 2018. The “Virtual Worlds – New Realities” themed weekend features talks and workshops about virtual & augmented reality. And, of course, there’ll be lots of installations that let visitors experience this amazing technology right up close, hands on. To find out more,…
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The Always Astonishing World of Deep Space 8K
From music videos to dance performances and even interactive installations —there’s always something interesting going on at Deep Space 8K in the Ars Electronica Center. Let’s take a look at how creatively and diversely artists use this extraordinary space.
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Deep Space LIVE: The Last Supper
The Deep Space LIVE event on the Thursday before Easter, March 29, 2018, is dedicated to one of the world’s most recognizable paintings—The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci. Art historian Lothar Schultes and theologian Michael Zugmann will elaborate on the background of this masterpiece. We just got a sneak preview.
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Deep Space LIVE: Egon Schiele’s “Portrait of Trude Engel”
100 years ago, artist Egon Schiele died in Vienna. He left behind a remarkable oeuvre of expressionist works, one of them a portrait of a young woman named Trude Engel. Who was she? And why was the image stabbed with a knife? At the next Deep Space LIVE, “Egon Schiele – A Closer Look at…
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A Tinkerer, Two Designers and hundreds of Drones: How Swarm3D Came To Be
“And then, fortunately, the birds didn’t fall out of the sky,” said Michael Treml in a terse summary of the outcome of work over many months by an Ars Electronica Futurelab team at Rock in Rio 2017, the first public SPAXELS® drone show using Swarm3D software developed in-house in Linz. We were interested in finding…
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Humanising Autonomy: A Language for Self-Driving Cars
How do we as pedestrians want to communicate with the autonomous autos that will soon be driving around our cities? Now is the best time to give some thought to this question, according to the staff of Humanising Autonomy, a project that was honored with a 2017 STARTS Prize and is now collaborating with, among…
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Cultural Heritage in 3D
2018 is European Year of Cultural Heritage, and the Ars Electronica Center is taking part by hosting several events devoted to our cultural heritage throughout the year. Kicking things off will be a themed weekend on January 27-28, 2018 in Deep Space, where one of the featured speakers will be Stefan Traxler, archeologist at Upper…
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Cultural Heritage: The Past Has a Bright Future
2018 is European Year of Cultural Heritage. To mark the occasion, the Ars Electronica Center is making cultural heritage a highlight of this year’s program of events. But you might ask why the Museum of the Future of all places is focusing on the artistic and cultural treasures of past epochs? Indeed, because the research…
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Swarm Compass: A Sea Change in Visualizing Events by Swarm Intelligence
What are the possibilities of swarm intelligence? How can drones be used to make transportation and communications easier? The Ars Electronica Futurelab is working together with Japanese telecommunications company NTT to find answers. In this interview, Hideaki Ogawa of Ars Electronica Futurelab and Shingo Kinshita of NTT tell us about their efforts.
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VR and Theater: The Cyberräuber at the 2017 Long Night of the Stages
The next Long Night of the Stages is set for November 11, 2017 when, in addition to theaters and other stage-based performance venues, the Ars Electronica Center will host a diverse lineup of productions. The dramatis personae include Björn Lengers and Marcel Karnapke, who’ll be contributing two projects at the interface of performance and virtual…
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Rock Print: Building with Cable and Pebbles
The idea seems so simple—Rock Print, a STARTS Prize honoree, demonstrates how to build a large structure out of only gravel and wire. But behind the seeming simplicity is the difficulty of implementing the concept in real life. In this interview, Matthias Kohler and Fabio Gramazio of ETH–Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich tell…
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RADICAL ATOMS: Rethinking Materials
A fresh update from the Tangible Media Group, an interdisciplinary research facility at MIT Media Lab in Cambridge MA, USA, is the latest attraction of the RADICAL ATOMS exhibition in the Ars Electronica Center. These three programmable materials are presented in this interview with Prof. Hiroshi Ishii, the director and founder of the lab.
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Spaxels Research Initiative – Swarms of the Future
How to deal with networks of intelligent, autonomous robots raises many questions that the Spaxels Research Initiative aims to formulate and pose.
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Beyond Humans: Artificial Intelligence, Yawning Wide
Artificial intelligence is the theme of this year’s Ars Electronica. The 2017 media art festival’s encapsulating motif is provided by the “Beyond Humans” research project. The respective roles played by the android and the chimp depicted in this image were elaborated on by the project’s scholarly director, Ramiro Joly-Mascheroni.
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2017 STARTS Prize: Innovative Projects That Cross the Boundaries of Disciplines
Dealing with complex issues calls for marshalling insights and skills from numerous fields, cultures and perspectives. Excellence in accomplishing this is precisely what the European Commission aims to honor with the STARTS Prize. Here, we present 2017’s best projects and what the jury’s statement has to say about them. Many will be featured in a…
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The Wandering Artist Project
For her proposal to send a robot with artistic skills into outer space, robotics engineer Sarah Petkus was the recipient of an Honorary Mention from the 2016 art&science@ESA. In this interview, she talks about her plans for her upcoming residency at the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Ars Electronica Futurelab, about humane robots, and…
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Bernad Batinic: “We’re opening up a completely new chapter!”
The Institute for Pedagogy and Psychology at Johannes Kepler University of Linz has just received funding for a research project on wearables. We talked to Prof. Bernad Batinic, director of JKU’s Department of Psychology of Work, Organizations and the Media, about wearable technology, the many ways it can be deployed, and the dream of big…
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Artificial Intelligence – The Other I
September 7-11, 2017, POSTCITY Linz will be the setting of a stimulating, comprehensive confrontation with the reality and the vision of artificial intelligence. We talked to Ars Electronica Artistic Director Gerfried Stocker about this year’s festival theme.
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SPAXELS rock in Rio – A test run near Linz
This years edition of the mega rock festival ROCK IN RIO will be the first to wow its audience with an illuminated swarm of drones. But before the Ars Electronica Spaxels® can enchant a one-million-plus of people between September 15th and 24th, a three-day marathon rehearsal was staged in Upper Austria over the last Week…
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Martina Mara: “More Women in Robotics!”
Even in the 21st century, robotics R&D is still a male domain. On the occasion of International Women’s Day, we discussed this issue with Martina Mara of the Ars Electronica Futurelab. She’s a media psychologist and director of robo-psychology.
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Industrial Robots in the Service of Art
Part 2 of the “Creative Robotics” exhibition series premiered in February. This time, the focus is on robots that have normally been deployed in conjunction with industrial assembly processes but are now increasingly being used as catalysts for innovation in such fields as the graphic arts, design and architecture.
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Industrial Robots Move beyond Their Natural Habitat
Robots are increasingly making their presence felt in everyday life. They vacuum our floors and mow our lawns. And hasn’t humankind long dreamed of mechanical helpers that could act autonomously, understand our needs, and perform arduous tasks we gladly dispense with?
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Flow: A Sea of Real-time Data
The water comes in; the water goes out. Since time immemorial, human beings have been fascinated by the sea. Artist Mathieu Le Sourd alias maotik has captured its motions and translated them into a walk-through interactive visualization in Deep Space.
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The Linz Synagogue in 3-D
The Linz Synagogue that was destroyed in 1938 has been reconstructed—at least, virtually—and it’s now possible to tour it in Deep Space 8K at the Ars Electronica Center. In this interview, Danielle Spera, director of the Jewish Museum of Vienna, talked to us about the general significance of a synagogue as well as her personal…
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Social Communication Technologies towards 2020
For the Japanese enterprise NTT (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone) all signs are pointing towards 2020. The giant in telecommunication and Ars Electronica Futurelab as a forray collaboratively developed two pilot projects which were up to guide the visitors of the Ars Electronica Festival 2016 in a stunning fashion.
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The Virtual Reconstruction of the Linz Synagogue
On Kristallnacht in November 1938, a mob acting on orders of the Nazi regime broke into the Linz Synagogue—like so many other Jewish houses of worship that night—ransacked it and set it ablaze. All that remained of the synagogue was a burnt-out ruin.
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DRONE 100 – Spaxels Over Linz: Test Flight in the Mühlviertel
“DRONE 100 –Spaxels over Linz” is the title of a spectacular quadcopter swarm performance that Ars Electronica and Intel are staging on September 10th, 2016. Before the 100 drones make their European public debut above the Danube they’ll be subjected to a rigorous physical exam. The first two test flights already took place this week—the…
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Around the World via Quadcopter
A spectacular Spaxels show will be the lead-in to the 2016 Klangwolke, Linz’s annual outdoor extravaganza. The DRONE 100 crew has already made a name for itself worldwide; now, the record-setting quadcopter formation of the Ars Electronica Futurelab and Intel™ Corporation is making its European debut. Here, Chris Bruckmayr and Andreas Jalsovec talk about some…