Six festival locations and just as many exhibition openings, excellent research, award-winning media art, gaming, immersive art treasures, a critically lapidary NOPE – there are many good reasons to mark the pre-opening walk on your calendar.
Officially, the “Pre-Opening Walk” is only the unofficial opening of Ars Electronica (see Festival Opening). However, because the walk from one exhibition opening to the next has long enjoyed great popularity, it is now practically part of the festival. Stops are made at six festival locations, where curators and artists give an insight into their work, the international and local art scenes mingle, old acquaintances are cultivated and new contacts are made.
Free admission! Participation in the Pre-Opening Walk on September 3, 2024, is free.
The event starts at 4.00 pm on the JKU MED Campus. For the first time as an Ars Electronica Festival location, the Linz medical university, which opened in 2019, stands out with its striking architecture and the “medSPACE” developed by the Ars Electronica Futurelab, in which virtual anatomy is taught. As part of Ars Electronica 2024, Stefan Koch (Rector of JKU Linz) and Gerfried Stocker (Artistic Director of Ars Electronica) are opening an exhibition here that celebrates the transformative potential of art and science. On display are nine projects developed by students and teachers at the Johannes Kepler University Linz (JKU) and selected as part of a call by the Linz Institute of Technology (LIT).
The event continues at 5.30 pm at the Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz. The Prix Ars Electronica exhibition will be shown here for the first time, with Hemma Schmutz (Director of the Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz) and Gerfried Stocker hosting the opening. An exquisite selection of the best media art projects of 2024 will be on display, including those that have just been awarded the Golden Nicas. The artists will also be present that evening.
Everything meets at 7.00 pm at the Linz University of Arts, the center of the “Festival Campus”. Initiated in 2002, the Campus has long since become an integral part of every Ars Electronica Festival and an international networking platform for universities from all over the world. Around 40 of them will be guests in Linz in September, presenting projects by their students and teachers. This year’s “Special Featured Guest” is the Moholy-Nagy University of Budapest, which will be presenting a sample of its excellence in the Splace on Linz’s main square. The Campus will be opened by Brigitte Hütter (Rector of the University of Art and Design Linz) and Gerfried Stocker, while Manuela Naveau (Professor of Critical Data at the Interface Cultures Department, Institute for Media at the University of Art and Design Linz) will guide visitors through the exhibition(s).
At 8.30 pm we invite you to the Atelierhaus Salzamt, where Jürgen Hagler (Professor at the Research Center Hagenberg) and Gerfried Stocker will open a show on interactive media and gaming.
At 9 pm sharp, the Ars Electronica Center will then launch a top-class evening event dedicated entirely to cultural heritage. In Deep Space 8K, the experts from Iconem and Histovery will take you on an immersive tour of the venerable Notre Dame, after which the art historians from the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza Madrid will present gigapixel images of Vittore Carpaccio’s “Young Knight in a Landscape”. The first part of the evening is supported by the Institut français d’Autriche, the Institut français de Paris and the French Embassy, the second by the Spanish Embassy. The Dorotheum is sponsoring the event.
At 11.00 pm, the “Pre-Opening Walk” continues one door down, at the Linzer Stadtwerkstatt. Under the motto “STWST48x10 NOPE. 48 HOURS OF VARIOUS COMMENTS”, the 10th edition of the annual 48-hour non-stop showcase extravaganza STWST48 will be celebrated here. You can experience genre-free art and critical production in the Anti-White Cube of the legendary Linz venue.
At midnight sharp (and until 4 o’clock in the morning), Bill Fontana’s Silent Echoes finally resound. Using vibration sensors, the US sound artist makes the bells of Notre Dame audible, transmits their sounds into the ice caves of the Dachstein and lets them resound there as if in a duet with the sounds of the melting glacier. This site-specific duet in turn forms the basis for “sound bridges” to various places in Europe, including the Mariendom in Linz. “Silent Echoes” will be premiered on September 3, 2024 as part of the European Capital of Culture 2024 at the Goiserer Musiktage in the ice cave.
A project of the European Capital of Culture Bad Ischl Salzkammergut 2024 in cooperation with IRCAM, OÖ KulturEXPO Anton Bruckner 2024, Ars Electronica Festival, Goiserer Musiktage, Kunstradio Ö1, Kunsthaus Graz, MuseumsQuartier Wien. With the support of: Institut français d’Autriche.
The project is presented at Ars Electronica in the framework of the More-than-Plant project and co-funded through the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.