Following last year’s brilliant 40-year festival, which brought more artists, exhibitors and international experts to Linz than ever before, this year Ars Electronica is going on a journey, or rather the festival itself is becoming a journey – a journey through “Kepler’s Gardens”, which are not just located in Linz at the JKU Campus but also 120 other locations worldwide. 120 locations between Tokyo and Los Angeles, where universities, museums, galleries, clubs, communes and businesses will hold hundreds of exhibitions, conferences, performances, concerts and workshops that are aimed at the local audiences.
Moderated by Martin Honzik (Managing Director, Festival / Prix / Exhibitions, Ars Electronica), Veronika Liebl (Director European Cooperation, Finance & Organisation; Festival / Prix / Exhibitions, Ars Electronica) will speak about the various digital formats that will be introduced with this year’s online journeys.
Starting in Linz and working with partners from Ars Electronica’s vast and storied international network, “real” events, headed by “real” artists and scientists for “real” audiences, will be networked into a global festival. Given this simultaneity in local-physical and globally networked events, Ars Electronica will once again become an exciting experimental laboratory and prototype for a next-level network primarily focused on new forms and possibilities of fusion and coexistence between analog and digital, real and virtual, physical and telematic proximity. From a broader vantage, the networked festival reflects the myriad existing strategies of online interaction, from live-streaming to participatory virtual environments. Ars Electronica Journeys is one of the new concepts designed to provide interactive guided tours that do not require the audience’s physical presence. In these explorations, artists and scientists will not only share exclusive insights into their practices, but also their surroundings, labs or favourite routes to walk when thinking. With Mozilla Hubs, an open source project by Mozilla that allows anybody to create and design virtual rooms, we introduce another powerful tool to the online festival that investigates how communication in mixed reality can come to life. This year, more than 60 Mozilla Hubs with a multitude of content were created by Ars Electronica and its partner gardens worldwide.
