Ali Nikrang

  • Open Futurelab 2020

    Open Futurelab 2020

    The Open Futurelab already planned for 2020 was redesigned into a major experiment due to the Covid pandemic – intended to create a hybrid interaction space that confronted the difficulties of social distance as well as the opportunities presented by telepresence. For not only the lab itself, but the entire festival was challenged by the…

  • Ricercar

    Ricercar

    An AI-based Musical Companion

    Ricercar is an interactive AI-based music composition system. The word Ricercar refers to a musical form of the Baroque and Renaissance and means “to search out” in its Italian origin. Composers used this term for pieces in which they experimented with a theme or musical idea and discovered its qualities such as permutation and variation possibilities…

  • The Translucent St. Stephen’s Cathedral

    The Translucent St. Stephen’s Cathedral

    As part of the European R&D project Immersify, the data from spatial measurement of St. Stephen in Vienna with more than 21 billion laser points was converted into a translucent representation of the cathedral. The result is an innovative interactive and immersive journey through the building in stereoscopic 8K, an experience in the Ars Electronica…

  • AI x Music

    AI x Music

    Exhibition at the Ars Electronica Center

    The potential of artificial intelligence in musical applications has been demonstrated by various projects in recent years. Modern AI can certainly be seen as another step towards expanding musical possibilities through the use of technology.

  • Open Futurelab 2019

    Open Futurelab 2019

    The festival site at POSTCITY in Linz was used as a stage for Open Futurelab until 2019. Created with the Japanese public broadcasting company NHK, Media Platz was a prototype of an open media plaza consisting of cardboard and high-resolution screens, which was used as a forum for public debate. Various panel discussions took place…

  • Mahler-Unfinished

    Mahler-Unfinished

    Music made by man and machine: For the Big Concert Night at the 2019 Ars Electronica Festival, Ali Nikrang, Key Researcher at the Ars Electronica Futurelab, added to Gustav Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony – together with an artificially intelligent algorithm.

  • Understanding AI

    Understanding AI

    What can we understand by the term Artificial Intelligence and what do we want to understand by it? What do we actually understand about human intelligence and what does it have to do with attempts at modelling it?

  • Augmented Humanity @SAP Pavilion

    Augmented Humanity @SAP Pavilion

    In 2012, Europe’s largest software manufacturer SAP commissioned the Ars Electronica Futurelab with a representative work on the 40th anniversary of the former start-up. The exhibition format “40 – years of Future” was specially developed for the planned company museum in order to communicate the company’s history and key inventions to the general public.

  • Open Futurelab 2018

    Open Futurelab 2018

    Following an extended period of integrating contributions from the Ars Electronica Futurelab at various festival settings, the 2018 Open Futurelab initiative in the POSTCITY was intended to create a key interface for the lab’s creative international network.

  • Immersify

    Immersify

    They almost make us forget the world around us: Virtual Reality (VR) applications let us dive deep into images and videos, promising interactive experiences. To lead immersive media from a niche phenomenon to a more widespread practice in the consumer market, the three-year EU-funded project Immersify took to the task of research and development with…

  • Pixelspaces

    Pixelspaces

    Pixelspaces was an annual conference that the Ars Electronica Futurelab staged between 2001 and 2013. It was succeeded in 2018 by the Open Futurelab, an annual glimpse behind the scenes of the Ars Electronica Futurelab that continues to this day.

  • Spaxels / Klangwolke – Quadrocopter

    Spaxels / Klangwolke – Quadrocopter

    Ars Electronica Futurelab’s quadcopter swarm was one of the highlights of the 2012 voestalpine Klangwolke (Cloud of Sound) in Linz. More than 90,000 spectators lined both banks of the Danube to witness a then world record: a formation flight by no fewer than 49 quadcopters. Never before had such a large squadron of whirlybird drones…