The 2023 Ars Electronica Animation is a diverse showcase that invites spectators to discover current artistic productions in the field of digital animation. The selection has been compiled of the submissions at Prix Ars Electronica 2023, which shifted its focus this year from Computer Animation to the landscape of New Animation Art. Several exciting programs give witness to the diversity of this renewed category, not only in terms of storytelling techniques, conceptual explorations and technological innovation, but also in terms of their commitment to social change and new political imaginaries.
From the 1,120 submissions, around 30 projects were selected for Ars Electronica Animation Festival, featuring a broad spectrum of styles and techniques: AI-generated images, cinematic deepfakes, hybrids between games and animations, animated documentaries and experimental-abstract works. This diverse selection invites new ways of thinking about how we experience the digital-virtual-real world we live in.
Choose a screening program
Electronic Theatre is the annual best-of program, a compilation of five outstanding animations chosen by the Prix jury from the submitted works in the New Animation Art category. It is a diverse showcase engaging new ways of thinking about how we experience the digital-virtual-real world we live in. Combining fantasy, erotica and body horror, IT’S DANGEROUS TO GO ALONE! TAKE THIS follows an ambiguous hero undergoing numerous metamorphoses beyond conventional masculinities of game avatars. In Delivery Dancer’s Sphere, another hero, a female platform delivery driver, rushes with the speed of light through a labyrinth of endless paths, sliding into a parallel time and space. GLITCHBODIES uses video game aesthetics to introduce us to a mesmerizing group of characters with diverse bodies and minds. Lebensraum addresses contemporary problems such as overpopulation, the destruction of our living space and the steady rise in sea levels with a humorous approach. Similarly, FuneralPlay speculates on a future in which users can choose between erasing their electronic footprint after death or uploading it to virtual heaven, published on blockchain.
Featuring:
Delivery Dancer’s Sphere
Ayoung Kim (KR)
24:00 min
GOLDEN NICA – Prix Ars Electronica 2023
FuneralPlay
Ruini Shi (CN)
3:00 min
HONORARY MENTION – Prix Ars Electronica 2023
Living Space
Sven Windzus (DE)
2:00 min
HONORARY MENTION – Prix Ars Electronica 2023
GLITCHBODIES
Rebecca Merlic (HR/AT)
13:00 min
HONORARY MENTION – Prix Ars Electronica 2023
IT’S DANGEROUS TO GO ALONE! TAKE THIS
Bassam Issa (IE)
29:00 min
AWARD OF DISTINCTION – Prix Ars Electronica 2023
Data, Bodies, Space shows an intriguing mix of different animation art practices, dealing with the “glitches” of our digitality-virtuality-reality condition. The selected shorts fast-forward to a future which is fascinating and frightening at the same time. In The Needlecast Rhapsody we witness a technology that can upload humans to distant locations in the galaxy. Moirai–Thread of Life also shows a journey to different cosmic dimensions and touches on quantum physics to explain notions of fate. Posthuman Hospital and My Mind As/Is Your Memory, My Body As/Is Your Substance take one to a nightmarish posthuman dystopia, whereas Rehousing Technosphere gives a more hopeful look into a new planetary ecology in a more-than-human future in which the digital is omnipresent yet endued with haptic and sensual properties. La Limite est une façade depicts a mesmerizing journey of fluidity and metamorphosis with a poetic approach, whereas CIRCVS MAXIMVS and Interchange feature a humorous take on virtual, computer-animated worlds and their relationship with the “real” world, highlighting the entanglements of power and control.
Featuring:
The Needlecast Rhapsody
Jonathan Armour (IE)
6:00 min
Moirai – Thread of Life
Ina Conradi (US/SG) und Mark Chavez (US)
6:00 min
The Posthuman Hospital
Junha Kim (KR)
7:00 min
My Mind As/Is Your Memory, My Body As/Is Your Substance
Jieyuan Huang (CN/AT/DE)
3:00 min
Rehousing Technosphere
Wang & Söderström (SWE)
6:00 min
La Limite est une facade
Dorian Rigal Minuit (FR)
7:00 min
CIRCVS MAXIMVS
Maxime Chudeau (FR)
3:00 min
Interchange
Ryotaro Sato (JP)
8:00 min
AI & Human. Who Owns the Truth? is a unique showcase approaching topical disputes of our time, from data ownership and ethics of data harvesting, to authorship in the age of AI, love in time of crypto, deepfakes and image credibility. Using computer vision and machine learning, Soft Evidence is a series of filmic deepfakes created in classic cinema style. Decoding Bias imagines a therapy for AIs helping them to emancipate themselves from discriminatory algorithms. LoveCounter invites users to an “emotional autonomous region” where they can escape from the omnipresence of big data and manage their own digital footprints. The bizarre images from *Planets and Robots* are entirely generated by AI, yet animated by humans, showing what it amounts to when humans and AIs are equal partners in the creative process.
Featuring:
Soft Evidence
Operator (US/DE)
Decoding Bias
Theresa Reiwer (DE)
31:00 min
LoveCounter
Ruini Shi (CN)
5:00 min
Planets and Robots
Antanas Skučas (LT) & Julius Zubavičius (LT)
6:00 min
Austrian Panorama highlights recent animation works of local artists. Cave Painting, The Great Tree Piece and Not Really Now Not Anymore offer a meditative-poetic glimpse at more than human worlds, in which the organic and the digital are inseparably intertwined. Nature is neither pure, nor standing as a graspable whole in front of our gaze. It is rather fragmented and densely filled with infinitesimal details which reach beyond human perception. Animation becomes a tool for staging different perceptual calibrations, zooming between different proximities exceeding the human gaze, and redefining notions of physicality and abstraction, natural and synthetic. Internet Gaga and Shroomsday complement the selection with a humorous and ironic take on our contemporary times.
Featuring:
Cave Painting
Siegfried A. Fruhauf (AT)
Internet Gaga
Reinhold Bidner (AT)
The Great Tree Piece
Claudia Larcher (AT)
Shroomsday
Rita Weiss (AT), Alessa Wolfram (AT), Daniel Denzer (AT/DE), Marius Oelsch (AT)
Not Really Now Not Anymore
Herwig Scherabon (AT/DE)
Like every year, the work of talented filmmakers up to the age of 19 is celebrated in the category Young Animations. The program is a selection of short films created by young artists across Austria, who have submitted their projects to the Prix Ars Electronica 2023 in the u19—create your world category. It is a mix of witty, off-beat, subtle, humorous, tragic and serious animated works. Some films are individual works, others have been created collectively by pupils from different schools across the country. This program was curated by Sirikit Amann and is a collaboration between Ars Electronica and OeAD.
Featuring:
MEHR MEER
Tides of March
Neo Klinger (AT)
2:00 min
Unterwasserwelt
Sara Wanzenböck (AT)
4:00 min
PING DOWN
ORG Henriettenplatz / Media High School (AT)
2:00 min
Gemeinsam für ein sauberes Meer
Mittelschule St. Peter am Wimberg (AT)
1:00 min
Inflation
HLF Krems (AT)
4:00 min
ONLY THE STRONG SURVIVE
Torten-Desaster
HLF Krems (AT)
4:00 min
Ratchet
BG / BRG Laa an der Thaya (AT)
3:00 min
Mr & Mrs Strode
ORG Henriettenplatz / Media High School (AT)
3:00 min
Der Käfig der Probleme
ORG Austrian Panorama highlights recent animation Henriettenplatz / Media High School (AT)
6:00 min
STOP! NO WAY
HUE
Rebecca Heindl (AT), Ronja Hoffert (AT), Jasmin Korkmaz (AT), Nathalie Zalewski (AT)
3:00 min
Overflow – An animated short movie
Tobias Senger (AT), Lennard Reindl (AT)
2:00 min
Overloaded
Fabienne Andrianaivo (AT), Katharina Rohr (AT), Verena Scheiblhofer (AT)
2:00 min
MARIMBA
BG&BRG Laa/Thaya (AT)
5:00 min
SWEET DREAMS
Dance Monkey
Gymnasium Bad Leonfelden (AT) and Motomachi Highschool Hiroshima (JP)
4:00 min
Raven Love
BORG Mistelbach (AT) RG Mistelbach
4:00 min
Ein halber Cent (oder die totale Destruktion des Ungewissen) für einen Blick auf das Chaos am Silver Screen
Marco Barthofer (AT)
4:00 min
Program extensions:
The Animation Festival 2023 On Tour program could be presented either in a cinema-like setting as a one-time screening or could be activated within an exhibition context as physical, spatial and/or immersive installations. Ars Electronica does not undertake the curation for these adaptations, but could offer advice and put you in contact with the artists if you are interested.
Interactive installation
Participants are invited to use their own muscle power to control the growth of our species. The problem of overpopulation, the resulting destruction of our living space and the steady rise in sea levels, have been put into a visual context. Pressing on the pump causes heads to appear. If too many heads are pumped up, the available space expands, but the rising water level problem worsens. The work poses questions about causality and responsibility—do we keep pumping and see more and more heads pushed under the water or do we halt the process before this happens? Although we have recognized the problem of overpopulation and the resulting destruction of our environment, this realization is not usually reflected in our actions. Living Space renders this contradiction tangible.
VR interactive game
Glitchbodies is an experimental interactive VR game encompassing new forms of feminism, LGBTQ+ and Drag transformations. While playing the game, participants become part of an interactive digital space. They are invited to join a fluid journey and step into a mesmerizing loop supplying intimate, sensitive portraits of more than 47 participants with diverse and non-normative bodies, minds and thoughts.
8-channel spatial video and sound installation
8 Artificial Intelligences (AIs) take part in a group therapy session. The visitor is invited to witness their attempt to emancipate themselves from their discriminatory algorithms. The AIs intend to establish a bias-free society, in which all humans and machines function together in solidarity. However, each of the AIs have different backgrounds, and they don’t always agree. They can comprehend different moral concepts, but are often painfully thrown back to their (hu)man-made, flawed datasets. At its core, DECODING BIAS’ speculative future sheds light on prejudices that code mainstream society. As the AIs learn about Big Data, they realize that they themselves are products of legacies of exclusion.
Credits
The Prix Ars Electronica, organized by Ars Electronica Linz GmbH & Co KG, is made possible by support from the City of Linz. Special thanks for additional support go to Austrian Federal Ministry for European and International Affairs, Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research and OeAD.
The Ars Electronica ANIMATION FESTIVAL 2023 is a collaboration of Ars Electronica with the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Hagenberg Campus.
The showcase was curated by Daniela Duca De Tey (Ars Electronica) and Dr. Juergen Hagler (University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Hagenberg Campus).
The Ars Electronica ANIMATION FESTIVAL 2023 on Tour was produced in collaboration and with special thanks to the Austrian Federal Ministry for European and International Affairs.
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