Artistic exploration at the Ars Electronica Futurelab refers to creative and experimental strategies that enable a wide audience to grasp complex issues, future ideas, social discourse, and technologies – intellectually, emotionally, and aesthetically.
Exploration Approaches:
Developed by the Futurelab, this creative method helps shape tangible prototypes to foster future dialogue with society.
Our yearly canvas for artistic exploration and futures dialog with the public during the Ars Electronica Festival.
Collaborating with artists and researchers from all over the world provide food for thought and new opportunities.
Artistic exploration serves as a platform for reframing questions, breaking away from conventional paradigms towards innovative problem-solving approaches, and opening new avenues for collective action. By integrating artistic strategies into our work, we foster a dynamic environment where diverse voices can contribute to shaping the future landscape of technology and society – building on artists’ innate curiosity and ethical commitment.
Key Strategies
Our artistic exploration is driven by three key strategies: fundamental, applied, and social deployment. In fundamental exploration, Futurelab has unique domains in Art Science Research as well as Key Research themes that drive it, with artists and researchers of diverse expertise exploring the latest artistic media. In addition, the Futurelab’s internal grant program, Futurelab Ideas Expedition, provides financial and opportunity support for original explorations within the lab and serves as a booster for research culture. We also offer residency programs where artists from around the world who resonate with these areas of exploration stay at the Futurelab and create with its members.
In applied exploration, the cutting-edge technology and expertise of outside research institutions, corporations, and government research organizations creatively collide with our own fundamental explorations to co-create the futures. With these collaborations, we conceive and prototype future systems with Art Thinking at their core. Depending on the program, the Ars Electronica community is also involved in the creation of future scenes.
In addition, social exploration focuses on how to integrate the futures we can touch into a real-life context. We do not just treat the magical moments of artistic exploration as transient – by carefully designing the context and framework, we transform it into a force for change in the future.
We are lead by questions such as: How can we humanize technology? How can we create harmony within the cycles of planet Earth, not just human-centered values? What is humanity and what is society?
With unique demonstrations, workshops, exhibitions, new formats that transcend existing boundaries, and new education programs, our artistic explorations do not unfold in a vacuum but appear in society as prototypes of future systems, encouraging open discussion in society.
Through all this, we provide opportunities for people to increase their futures fluency and competence, creating active public engagement with the futures.
Highlights
Consulting program to incorporate the method of Art Thinking into the management and R&D of companies, research institutions, and government organizations in Japan.
Capturing brainwaves and body signals in real-time to create a new form of ink, called Life Ink, expressing our creative moments in a completely new form.
Interactive decision-making game for Deep Space 8K where groups of visitors try to reduce CO₂ emissions through dilemma decisions to achieve climate goals.
Virtual reality application bringing Max Reinhardt’s 1930s production of “Faust” back to life by recreating the stage design of the original production – the Fauststadt.
AI, robotics, programming, and more: This mobile learning platform for primary schools in rural areas offers children a hands-on learning experience.
Interactive application for Deep Space 8K to experiment with psychological and physiological processes by exploring visitors’ heartbeats.
