Ars Electronica Festival 2017
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Joachim Sauter on Reflections and Kinetics
To commemorate the pioneer of media art, we are showing an excerpt of the lecture he gave at the 2017 Ars Electronica Festival.
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I’m Humanity: Music for Eternity
Her idea for a way to make music live on beyond humankind’s eventual extinction and to use DNA as the medium to transport this information for eternity garnered Japanese musician Etsuko Yakushimaru the 2017 STARTS Prize. In this interview, she explains her concept of “post-humanity music” and gives her take on mutations that randomly occur…
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Who or what is on the line? Find out via “Hello Machine”!
The “Hello Machine” is an installation connecting the Ars Electronica Festival Linz, Science Gallery Dublin and Volkswagen Berlins Drive Exhibition, has been developed with the assistance of the Ars Electronica FutureLab, by way of vintage or obsolete pay phones from Hanlon’s collection. The Hello Machine’s ‘Hello Machine – Hello Human’ feature touches on the playful…
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Day 5: ‘Til We Meet Again at the Ars Electronica Festival!
Sad but true—the fifth and final day of the 2017 Ars Electronica Festival has come to a close. Amazing how time flies when you’re having fun at so many absorbing events! We sincerely hope you checked off everything on your to-do list. Here’s a brief retrospective look at Day 5.
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Day 4: Jam-Packed with Highlights
The 2017 Ars Electronica Festival is already four days old. And Sunday as well lived up to high expectations with a great lineup of conferences, workshops, media art, performances and much more. The most noteworthy event was undoubtedly Markus Poschner’s premiere as chief conductor of Linz’s Bruckner Orchester. But let’s take this one step at…
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This was the Ars Electronica Festival 2017
“Artificial Intelligence – the Other I”, or the connection between AI and humans was the main topic at the 2017 Ars Electronica Festival, which turned POSTCTITY Linz into a hotspot of media arts for the third time in a row this year. There were over 100.000 visits to over 600 different events, conferences and lectures,…
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Day 3: Starting the weekend with Media Art
Our festival Saturday made an exciting start into the weekend: With the Helper’s Conference, the final hours of the Hackathon, an organic farmer’s market, the Expanded Animations Symposium, the Prix and STARTS Forums, and of course countless exhibitions full of state-of-the-art media art, the festival was once again filled to the brim with wonderful events.…
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Day 2: Impressions without an End
Thinking together, celebrating together. From conferences to ceremonies, from exhibitions to workshops, from VR glasses to brain-computer interfaces. Another inspiring impressions from the 2nd festival day.
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Day 1: Welcome to the 2017 Ars Electronica Festival
The big day has finally arrived—this year’s Ars Electronica Festival is underway! The preparations had been going full speed ahead for months now to once again make this huge celebration of media art something absolutely extraordinary. And that’s exactly what has come to pass! Here, for your viewing pleasure, are a few impressions of the…
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From Atoms to Entire Galaxies: “Everything”
This year’s Golden Nica in the Computer Animation/Film/VFX category goes to David OReilly for “Everything,” his game that literally lets you play with everything—from the tiniest atom to the biggest galaxy. In this interview, the artist and game developer tells more about his work.
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Ars Electronica Festival 2017: The Technology behind the Scenes!
The Ars Electronica Festival annually transforms the mini-metropolis Linz into the global hotspot of media art that attracts tens of thousands of visitors. Karl Schmidinger, technical director of the Ars Electronica Festival, tells us in this interview how he and his crew make it possible for this big show to go on!
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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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Feminism and Climate Change: UCLA at the 2017 Ars Electronica Festival
The Campus exhibition that Linz Art University has hosted during the Ars Electronica Festival since 2002 extends an invitation to an art college from a foreign country to come to Linz and showcase the work being done there. This year’s guest is the University of California at Los Angeles. In this interview, Professor Victoria Vesna…
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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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Markus Poschner’s 1st Big Concert Night Is Entitled “Departure”
The Bruckner Orchester’s new chief conductor, Markus Poschner, is not only making some significant changes at Linz’s Brucknerhaus concert venue; he’s also giving a creative makeover to the Big Concert Night at the Ars Electronica Festival. The first such event on which he’s made his mark is set for Sunday evening, September 10, 2017. He…
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Dynamic Technology at the Festival: How Brain Power Can Drive an Earthmover
Visitors of this year’s Ars Electronica Festival will be able to actually take command of an earthmover with their eye movements and mental powers. Read what it takes to participate and how this mind-melting experiment came into existence.
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“Corpus Nil”: A Performance by Man and Artificial Intelligence
Man meets artificial intelligence in a performance entitled “Corpus Nil.” Depending on the tension and posture of artist Marco Donnarumma’s body, an artificially intelligent algorithm modifies the light and sound on stage. Festivalgoers will be able to experience this spectacle live at the Big Concert Night on Sunday, September 10, 2017. In this interview, Marco…
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Artificial Intelligence and Spirituality: Zenbo Hidaka
A monk who’s also an expert in artificial intelligence is one of the speakers at the 2017 Ars Electronica Festival’s Opening Symposium as well as the artificial intelligence Theme Conference. Zenbo Hidaka will discuss the latest technologies, artificially intelligent machines, and spirituality on September 7th and 8th. Here, he provides some initial insights into his…
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As if in a Trance: Maki Namekawa and “20 Etudes for 20 Etudes”
An Austrian premiere concludes the Festival on Monday, September 11, 2017. Maki Namekawa will perform all 20 of Philip Glass’ piano etudes accompanied by artist Cori Olan’s real-time visualizations. The duo will also present a daily demonstration of their virtuosity in Deep Space 8K. Maki Namekawa tells us more in this interview.
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ZusammenKommenLab: Innovative Integration Projects and More
Networking, meeting new people and exchanging ideas with experts—that’s what’s up at ZusammenKommenLab [ComingTogetherLab] at Ars Electronica 2017. On all five days of the festival, ZusammenHelfen in Oberösterreich [HelpingTogether in Upper Austria], your go-to source for ways to help refugees, will be showcasing projects by, with and for immigrants and refugees.
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“Technology is human”: How Culture Shapes Technology
Mark Coeckelbergh, a philosopher of technology, will deliver a speech on intelligent machines and art on Friday, September 8, 2017 at the symposium limning the Ars Electronica Festival theme, “Artificial Intelligence – The Other I.” In this interview, he goes into how culture shapes technology and what characterizes our dealings with artificial intelligence today.
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WE GUIDE YOU through the 2017 Festival
There’s a lot happening at the 2017 Ars Electronica Festival! But with so many exhibitions, concerts, performances, events, workshops, film screenings and awards ceremonies, it’s easy to get lost. That’s why we developed WE GUIDE YOU, a comprehensive lineup of guided tours that make things clear—especially for festivalgoers who speak neither German nor English.
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Festival Tours: Thanks to WKOÖ UBIT
The WKOÖ [Economic Chamber of the State of Upper Austria] represents the interests of the regional business community. The UBIT, its group for business consultants, accountants and IT specialists, is sponsoring the guided tours at this year’s festival. We talked to Chairman Markus Roth to learn more.
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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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Theater & Digital Media: One Topic, Two Perspectives
Theater & Digital Media is debuting as a focal-point topic at Ars Electronica this year. September 7-11, 2017, this conclave is hosting encounters of, among others, traditional institutions such as Linz’s Landestheater and performative experiments like “Breaking the Wall” by Chris and Didi Bruckmayr. In this interview, we found out how digital media are changing…
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Comically Inefficient: Joseph Herscher’s Machines
New York artist Joseph Herscher uses everyday objects to build Rube Goldberg machines that are as inefficient as can be. At the 2017 Ars Electronica Festival, he’ll be involved in three projects that illustrate his playful approach to creativity. In this interview, we found out what exactly awaits us.
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How much globalization can humankind stand?
This is the second year that the Ars Electronica Festival is hosting a “Perspectives on Political Education” symposium. This series of events under the aegis of Pädagogische Hochschule OÖ [state teachers college] is set for September 7-8, 2017. This year’s theme: “The world is my world. How much globalization can humankind stand?” Stefan Giegler told…
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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.