OnTransform Performance @ Futurelab Night; photo: Bettina Gangl

Futurelab Night 2024

Playful interactive research projects, immersive artistic works, and moving large-scale representations of memories almost lost – saved with the help of technology, artistic thinking, and social interventions: Futurelab Night 2024 was once again the performative peak of the lab’s activities at the Ars Electronica Festival. 

To be able to accommodate a larger audience than in previous years, visitors were invited to experience the Futurelab’s work in Deep Space 8K at the Ars Electronica Center in two time slots. Each session kicked off with insights into the Data Art & Science Project. This year, the interdisciplinary research group focused on Shiga Prefecture in Japan – an area affected by problems like depopulation, an aging society, and flood risks. At Futurelab Night, plans for a DAS Center to revitalize the region were introduced, and the Futurelab work Memories for Futures left a lasting impression: Here, residents of Shiga talk about their favorite places, almost forgotten customs and dying villages. Supported by the lab team combining new technology with artistic methods, touching audiovisual memories were created. 

Another research project with a different focus was presented next: The EU project SHARESPACE investigates how people will be able to interact socially in the near future with the help of digital avatars. This vision was creatively realized by the Futurelab team and a young artist collective from Berlin and London. The two Futurelab outcomes, Converge and *falcon heavy, invited the Futurelab Night visitors to engage. In Converge, they had to collaborate with each other and an avatar controlled by a lab member remotely to solve different scenarios with AI characters. *falcon heavy also tracked the movements of participants, adding hand gestures to the mix. In a ritualistic virtual arena, being in sync with audio-visual cues and each other proved to be key to progress. 

Afterwards the whole audience was invited to be part of POP Post Origami Punk, an exploration of the latest addition to the Futurelab’s Oribotic Instruments. With an outlook at the Gigantic Oribotic Spiral presented at the Open Futurelab 2024, the audience shared their voices to become part of the artwork themselves. 

It was then time to present the outcomes of this year’s Futurelab Ideas Expedition where lab members can develop their ideas freely. First up, the thought-provoking hyperbolic campaign Schmilz, schmilz, Baby advocated an attitude of radical acceptance towards our self-induced fate of glacier retreat. The activist group from within the lab showcased the many outcomes and winner of their open call to the public to create ideas for the post-glacial future with the help of AI. The second winning project of the Ideas Expedition 2024 is Persistent Time Sink Resonance, an artistic exploration of reality volumes utilizing the novel rasterization technique 3D Gaussian Splatting. With it, representation tends to get fuzzy like memories, and digital reality bursts apart – and so machinic expressiveness is revealed in spatial aesthetics. 

The Futurelab’s dedication and years of experience in digital heritage were once again demonstrated with Notre-Dame Immersive. Based on detailed point cloud data from before the devastating fire in 2019 and incorporating historical information, visitors can explore a huge model of the building in stereoscopic 3D in Deep Space 8K. Architectural and artistic features from completely new perspectives await, and points of interest tell stories of over 200 years of construction of the cathedral until 1345 and present special objects like a vast rose window with intricate glasswork. 

Both Futurelab Night sessions culminated in stunning audiovisual performances. In the first slot, Melanie Daveid and Arno Deutschbauer invited the audience to a metamorphic experience with OnTransform. The second slot, and with it the Futurelab Night 2024, was concluded with the traditional noise performance 11°22’4″142°35’5″ by Stefan Mittlböck-Jungwirth-Fohringer, Johannes Pöll, and Arno Deutschbauer – audiovisually exploring the depths of the Mariana Trench in Deep Space 8K. 

Schedule Slot 1 | 18:30 – 20:00 | ARS ELECTRONICA CENTER | Deep Space 8K
Data Art & Science – Ars Electronica Futurelab (AT), Toyota Coniq Alpha (JP)

Data Art & Science: Memories for Futures – Ars Electronica Futurelab (AT), Arno Deutschbauer (AT), Azusa Kawachi workshop participants (JP) 

SHARESPACE: Converge – Patrick Berger (AT), Daniel Rammer (AT), Raphael Schaumburg-Lippe (AT), Arno Deutschbauer (AT), Cyntha Wieringa (NL), SHARESPACE Consortium (EU) 
 
POP Post Origami Punk – Alexandre Bizri (FR), Matthew Gardiner (AU), Anna Weiss (AT) 
 
Schmilz, schmilz, Baby: Award Ceremony – Futurelab Ideas Expedition  
Alexandre Bizri (FR), Denise Hirtenfelder (AT), Nicolas Naveau (AT/FR), Maria Pfeifer (AT) 
 
Persistent Time Sink Resonance – Futurelab Ideas Expedition
Johannes Pöll (AT), Raphael Schaumburg-Lippe (AT), Arno Deutschbauer (AT)
 
Notre-Dame Immersive – Ars Electronica (AT), Iconem (FR), Histovery (FR) 
 
OnTransform – Melanie Daveid (AT), Arno Deutschbauer (AT)
Schedule Slot 2 | 20:45 – 22:15 | ARS ELECTRONICA CENTER | Deep Space 8K
Data Art & Science – Ars Electronica Futurelab (AT), Toyota Coniq Alpha (JP) 
 
Data Art & Science: Memories for Futures – Ars Electronica Futurelab (AT), Arno Deutschbauer (AT), Azusa Kawachi workshop participants (JP)

SHARESPACE: *falcon heavy –  Johannes Pöll (AT), Daniel Rammer (AT), Raphael Schaumburg-Lippe (AT), Arno Deutschbauer (AT), Cyntha Wieringa (NL), SHARESPACE Consortium (EU) 
 
POP Post Origami Punk – Alexandre Bizri (FR), Matthew Gardiner (AU), Anna Weiss (AT) 
 
Schmilz, schmilz, Baby: Recap –  Futurelab Ideas Expedition  
Alexandre Bizri (FR), Denise Hirtenfelder (AT), Nicolas Naveau (AT/FR), Maria Pfeifer (AT) 
 
Persistent Time Sink Resonance – Futurelab Ideas Expedition  
Johannes Pöll (AT), Raphael Schaumburg-Lippe (AT) 

Notre-Dame Immersive – Ars Electronica (AT), Iconem (FR), Histovery (FR) 

11°22’4″142°35’5″ – Stefan Mittlböck-Jungwirth-Fohringer (AT), Johannes Pöll (AT) feat Arno Deutschbauer (AT)