Selected
Stories

The entanglement of Ars Electronica Futurelab with the entire range of what may be considered “Virtual Worlds” – from Virtual Reality (VR) to Augmented Reality (AR) onwards to Mixed Reality (MR) – goes right back to the early days of the Futurelab in 1996, making it one of the key areas of the Futurelab's work along this entire quarter of a century.

Poetic Systems are about art transforming different kinds of knowledge, cognition and perception into poetic levels of meaning, in this process striving to make the invisible visible, the intangible tangible, to encode and decode meanings or — in other words — to allow treasures, which are hidden inside the many systems humankind creates, to emerge.

The story of the Ars Electronica Futurelab inventing the „Spaxels“ – a swarm of illuminated drones – is the story of a paradigm shift that was quite typical for the specific way of thinking at the Futurelab.

Drawing from the extensive experiences of years with robotic projects, a concept emerged that had the ability to integrate and shape the approach of the Ars Electronica Futurelab towards robotics research. For this new concept, Hideaki Ogawa coined the term “Robotinity”—as a mirror term for “humanity”—and described it as a journey to understand what a robot actually is. “Robotinity,” however, is to transcend issues of human-robot interaction by inserting the wider horizon of looking into future ways of arriving at a “harmonious coexistence of humans and robots.”

In the overall ecosystem of Ars Electronica, questions related to biotechnology had been prevalent for several years. The ways in which the Ars Electronica Futurelab adopted this new area of biotechnology was characterized by two strategies, which were basically part of the DNA of the Futurelab. With the creation of the Bio Lab and the Fab Lab, the Ars Electronica Futurelab played a key role in the process of introducing the new format of “lab” infrastructures to Ars Electronica. Their enabling potential represented a further step in the Ars Electronica Futurelab’s efforts to make new technologies tangible and to provide the basis for an informed discussion of the implications of those technologies to the public.

AI-based technologies are already massively shaping our world, and the speed of their development creates an urgency to understand them. The Ars Electronica Futurelab approaches these technologies by developing installations with the aim of making the complex topics of machine learning and neural networks understandable. At the same time, it creates art projects that might raise unexpected questions and cast a critical eye on the uses of AI in our societies. An artistic view on issues regarding the use of AI of course also includes looking into the implications of AI systems for concepts of creativity and for the specific works of artists. Therefore, the Ars Electronica Futurelab is asking within this key research topic the question: “Can machines create?”

There is a golden thread running through the feedback from many clients of the Ars Electronica Futurelab, an emphasis on the special quality of the open-minded dialogue with the Futurelab and the inspiring and innovative effects of its approach, which is experienced as unconventional and highly creative. These aspects already indicate why Art Thinking is not a method in the strict sense, but rather a mindset, from which the perceived qualities of the Ars Electronica Futurelab result.