FLOCK OF / bit.studio (TH)/Photo: tom mesic

HOPE: the touch of many

Theme Exhibition

Theme Exhibition Co-Curator
Olga Tykhonova (UA)

During the five days of the festival, the exhibition inhabits the architecture of the POSTCITY’s bunker and unfolds as a shared space and a contact zone. It is a tapestry of conceptual, sensual and emotional journeys through and within artistic inquiries and research domains. It is also an interface that reveals the collaborative and empowering endeavours of Ars Electronica, its multiple partnerships and commitments. The extensive journey through the concrete underground maze is divided into five parts. A prologue in the festival’s opening area is followed by an underground descent unfolding across three chapters that follow the twists and turns of the bunker’s architecture. The journey concludes with an epilogue before resurfacing from the depths of POSTCITY.

POSTCITY, Basement
WED Sept. 4 – SUN Sept. 8, 2024
Admission with FESTIVALPASS+, FESTIVALPASS, DAYPASS, POSTCITY Ticket

  • AI and the Art of Historical Reinterpretation

    AI and the Art of Historical Reinterpretation

    Claudia Larcher (AT)

    A key focus of this project is the elimination of gender-specific biases in historical datasets used by AI. By examining the consequences of AI’s reliance on historical data, it raises ethical questions, exploring how AI can complement, rewrite and reinterpret data archives. The project creates an inclusive and diverse fictional image archive to address historical…

  • All Directions At Once

    All Directions At Once

    Luiza Prado (BR)

    All Directions at Once is a web-based artwork that charts histories of reproductive control in Latin America. The animated graphic essay relies on the input of a user: when they stop moving the cursor, the website layers vividly coloured, flashing GIFs. With each visit to the website, the user creates a unique iteration of the artwork.…

  • Anatomy of Non-Fact

    Anatomy of Non-Fact

    Martyna Marciniak (PL)

    Anatomy of Non-Fact is concerned with the phenomenon of distorted and excessive information in the context of the looming threat of AI-generated images. The work seeks a definition of the aesthetics of fact, via an in-depth analysis of known cases of visual hoaxes, fakes and conspiracies, through visual mapping and artistic responses. Anatomy of Non-Fact…

  • Anthropophagic Myths, Biopiracy and Opera in the Amazon

    Anthropophagic Myths, Biopiracy and Opera in the Amazon

    Klaus Spiess (AT), Emanuel Gollob (AT)

    Can Amazonian myths give us hope for new modes of entanglement with our en- and in-vironment? We explore our longing for nature, seen in both the commercial collection of microbiota in the Amazon and its representation in operas. In our installation, the vibrational needs for growth of the microbiota and Caruso songs, sung by a…

  • Biosymbiotic Exoskeleton

    Biosymbiotic Exoskeleton

    Dorotea Dolinšek (SI)

    In the artificial atmosphere of orbital habitats, the dependence on numerous non-human organisms that make bodily functions possible emerges as a dysbiosis—shedding of the human microbiome necessary for survival—that in the Biosymbiotic Exoskeleton project offers an imaginary pact between the somatic and the biotic.

  • Black Movement Library

    Black Movement Library

    LaJuné McMillian (US)

    The Black Movement Library’s projects Movement Portraits and Spirit and Child showcase the evolution of LaJuné McMillian’s art practice, integrating performance and extended reality tools to celebrate and dive into Black embodied realities.

  • Cascade

    Cascade

    Marc Vilanova (ES)

    Waterfalls emit infrasounds, which are vital for the navigation of migratory birds, though inaudible to us. Recent noise pollution threatens this navigation. Cascade attempts to reproduce infrasonic recordings of waterfalls using a series of speakers incapable of emitting such low frequencies. This failure generates vibrations that activate an optical fiber through which the sound “falls,”…

  • Cold Call: Time Theft as Avoided Emissions

    Cold Call: Time Theft as Avoided Emissions

    Sam Lavigne (US), Tega Brain (AU)

    Cold Call: Time Theft as Avoided Emissions is an unconventional carbon offsetting scheme that applies strategies of worker sabotage to the fossil fuel industry.

  • Compost as Superfood

    Compost as Superfood

    masharu studio (NL)

    Discover a groundbreaking exploration into Compost as Superfood by masharu studio. Delve into the potential of organic materials for human consumption and the transformative impact on health and sustainability. Join us on a journey of innovation and cultural dialogue in redefining the human relationship with the earth. Hopefully, the project outcome will be both delicious…

  • Digital Ruins

    Digital Ruins

    Stefan Schönauer (AT)

    Digital Ruins envisions a future in which we are forced to leave behind our personal, digital archives. How can we cope with the loss of our most important memories and the grief that comes from being expelled from our digital spaces?

  • Distorted Flower

    Distorted Flower

    Ryo Kishi (JP)

    Distorted Flower explores the dilemma caused by the distortion of fixed concepts. The continuously transforming petals symbolize such deformation at first glance, but from another angle, they appear to be dynamically creating new forms. Distorted Flower poses to the audience the question of whether the distortions of the stereotypes that come with technological evolution are…

  • Exploration and Exploitation – AI Interactive Video

    Exploration and Exploitation – AI Interactive Video

    Simple Noodle Art (TW): Zi Yin Chen (TW), Hsiang Feng Chuang (TW)

    When AI tailors social media information in a pandering way, does it lead to the formation of filter bubbles, making it difficult for people with different standpoints to understand each other? This work aims to explore whether AI is exacerbating social divisions, when faced with the dilemma of exploring and exploiting humans, through a self-media…

  • FLOCK OF

    FLOCK OF

    bit.studio (TH)

    Blurring the boundary between imagination and reality, helium balloons become a living organism. Sensors, software and physics combine to create a spectacle that redefines our perception of the natural world.

  • Fu(n)ga

    Fu(n)ga

    Tiziano Derme (IT), Nadine Schütz (CH)

    Fu(n)ga is a spatial and bio-sonic experiment that explores the relationship between enzymatic processes with fungi, controlled environments and acoustic vibrations. For the first time, it reveals the creation of space as metabolic growth, stimulated, mediated and supported by temperature, humidity, air and sound. Fungal activity and visitors’ presence are entangled within an auditory landscape…

  • Hevea Act 6: An Elastic Continuum

    Hevea Act 6: An Elastic Continuum

    Bethan Hughes (DE/GB)

    An Elastic Continuum is an audiovisual installation that traces the story of a rubber-containing plant better known as the Kazakh or Russian dandelion. From the Tien Shan mountains in Kazakhstan to collective farms across the former Soviet Union, greenhouses at Auschwitz to the laboratories of multinational tire corporations in Europe, how does the journey of…

  • Human Powered Toaster

    Human Powered Toaster

    Florian Sapp (AT)

    Electricity powers nearly everything we do in the modern world, yet only few people understand how much energy is needed for common tasks. The aim of this project is to show how much power is required for everyday activities and what numbers such as 100 watts actually mean. This is achieved by translating electric power…

  • iBody & Auditory culture bring body and environment to life

    iBody & Auditory culture bring body and environment to life

    Werner Jauk (AT), Laura Sophie Meyer (DE)

    Interactions via the symbol, icon, index, different re/presentations of the environment, create different “realities”—this is what the project aims to make understandable and allows to be experienced. Understanding seeing is the willful assignment of symbols to what is seen. Visual culture thus led to feasibility and the Anthropocene. Experiential hearing is stimulative. “Tension-solution” regulates the…

  • Iron 56

    Iron 56

    Carlos Sfeir Vottero (CL/ES)

    Iron 56 invites humans to engage with the fundamental forces of nature that organize the universe and shape the core of our planet. An intertwined series of compasses hang from the ceiling. The mobile structures are calibrated to point to the south pole. Each compass’s tendency to align with the Earth’s gravitational field is disrupted…

  • Is there

    Is there

    Aoi Serizawa (JP)

    Is there is a media art work using water droplets. The work explores the reality and materiality of matter by giving movement to water and generating forms.

  • Just asking for a friend

    Just asking for a friend

    Time’s Up (AT)

    How dare you maintain hopeful visions in times like these? Is hope a privilege? Or is hope a muscle, a practice, a ritual or a discipline? An axe, a tactic or a strategy? A distraction, a tangent, an excuse? We take an old saying and modify it to remind ourselves that;I hear futures and I…

  • La Machine à Tubes

    La Machine à Tubes

    My name is Fuzzy—Bastien Bron (CH)

    LA MACHINE À TUBES combines pop music and new technology, creating unique songs by My name is Fuzzy. Bastien Bron explores AI’s potential for entertainment and creativity, rather than its impact on humanity. Audience interaction influences the song generation. This playful, ironic work questions algorithms’ impact on our tastes and the artist’s identity, blending contemporary…

  • Mutualidad de Fantasmática Electrónica

    Mutualidad de Fantasmática Electrónica

    Federico Gloriani (AR)

    The installation, composed of four overhead projectors and recorded material, is the result of the systematic work carried out by a group of electronic artists in Rosario, Argentina. Mutualidad de Fantasmática Electrónica (Mutuality of Electronic Phantasmatics) is a performative and relational project aimed to gather and reuse electronic devices found in waste containers around the…

  • Organism + Excitable Chaos

    Organism + Excitable Chaos

    Navid Navab (IR/CA), Garnet Willis (CA)

    The chaotic movements of Excitable Chaos, a robotically-modulated triple pendulum, conducts the turbulent thresholds of Organism, a robotically-prepared pipe organ. What is seen in Excitable Chaos’s motion is heard in Organism’s compositional form, as it destabilizes its own socio-historical tonality to sound its turbulent materiality. Turbulent sonifications of chaotic motion serve as emergent meditations on…

  • Pawsitive Charge

    Pawsitive Charge

    Julia Hahnl (AT/JP)

    Pawsitive Charge is a brazen startup that spots a unique opportunity to capitalize on this untapped resource. With their trio of innovative and “playful” gadgets, our furry friends are suddenly more than man’s best friend—they’re our power providers. It’s a twisted tale where love for our dogs meets the thirst for power, blurring the lines…

  • Project Patching—Ti hoeh koe

    Project Patching—Ti hoeh koe

    Dimension Plus (TW)

    AI, as a powerful subjective tool, may suppress cultural diversity and the discourse power of interpretive history. This project aims to counter AI bias by enhancing the diversity and representativeness of the database through collaborative participation from various regions. It involves collecting and integrating data from different cultural backgrounds, geographical locations and socioeconomic groups in…

  • Proteus 4.1

    Proteus 4.1

    Maria Smigielska (PL/CH), CompMonks (FR/CH)

    Interacting on the networked planet Proteus 4.1 evolved into a web-based application using gaze-tracking in mobile devices and a modular, non-site-specific installation. It embodies interactions across digital infrastructure in a single space. Inspired by Yona Friedman’s post-war megastructures and “proteinic architecture,” it mirrors the internet’s distributed nature with scattered digital screens and mirrors. Slow evolution…

  • Rise: From One Island to Another

    Rise: From One Island to Another

    Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner (MH), Aka Niviâna (GL)

    Watch this poetic expedition undertaken by two islanders, one from the Marshall Islands and the other from Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), connecting their realities of melting glaciers and rising sea levels. Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Aka Niviâna use their poetry to showcase the linkages between their homelands in the face of climate change. Through this video we…

  • Solar Protocol

    Solar Protocol

    Tega Brain (AU), Alex Nathanson (US), Benedetta Piantella (US), Solar Protocol Collective (INT)

    Solar Protocol is a network of solar-powered servers, installed and maintained by volunteers around the world. This community-run cloud, powered by renewables, collectively hosts the Solar Protocol web platform and other web projects, serving them from wherever there is the most sunshine in the network. The work explores natural rather than Artificial Intelligence.

  • Toguna World and the Sanctuary of Dreams

    Toguna World and the Sanctuary of Dreams

    Pierre-Christophe Gam (FR)

    The accelerator of the Imagination Toguna World and the Sanctuary of Dreams is a mixed-media art installation, which combines virtual reality, art, film and music to support a Future-dreaming ritual through which participants can envision desirable future scenarios guided by their innermost desires.

  • Triangle of Sacrifice

    Triangle of Sacrifice

    Sonandes (BO): Guely Morató Loredo (BO), Víctor Mazón Gardoqui (ES)

    This work bears witness to the environmental impact of lithium mining in the Andes, home to 65% of global reserves. It consists of a durational installation with three sculptures carved from local minerals, monitored in real-time and exposed to a water-dropping mechanism which translates the two million liters needed per ton of lithium carbonate. This…

Hope is a great intangible.

Neither a belief that everything was, is, or will be fine, nor a substitute for action, hope is rather a basis for action. We choose to hope. Amidst defeatism and cynicism, amnesia and ignorance, we choose to recognize, commit to and develop radical possibilities built on alternative views of a more compassionate, communal and cooperative human nature. To be hopeful without being delusional we need an account of the complexities and uncertainties that provide openings for collective power and action towards collective transformation. Scientific arguments alone apparently cannot compel us to act, as the urgency of climate change clearly demonstrates. But if scientific evidence is not enough, what is?

It can be—the power and impact of affecting our sensory and emotional capacity can be. As Rebecca Solnit warned us, we need to recognize the shades of grey between black and white to maybe see the world in full colour, to be hopeful in a meaningful and impactful way. How can we cultivate and enhance this sensitivity if we aim for actionable hope, hope that bridges the gap between envisioning a better future and taking action in the turbulent present? Affects, emotions and our entire sensory capacity—rather than rational arguments alone—play a decisive role in and impact on changing behaviour and culture. As a society, we depend on an ongoing boost of imagination activism to set up better (if not new) and more mindful ways to communicate and organize in exhilarating alliances across distance and difference. Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould argued that mutual aid is an important evolutionary factor among all non-humans. Despite difference, time pressure and resources scarcity, not because of altruism, calculation, advantage or survival mechanism—but from a deep understanding of kin, interconnectedness and structurally embedded mutuality and interconnected wellbeing. Our lifestyle choices are not driven solely by rational factors. To counter the destruction of the earth and foster coexistence, we need to develop more complex ways of thinking that go beyond the logical cause and effect and ensure that poetry too survives in the world.

That powerhouse of imagination and worldbuilding, the writer Ursula Le Guin has heeded great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories. “What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel – or have done and thought and felt; or might do and think and feel – is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become… For the story is one of the basic tools invented by the mind of man, for the purpose of gaining understanding.” Within the overarching theme of this year’s festival, “HOPE,” the exhibition spotlights and underlines the “superpower” of artists and their role in society as significant critical others and storytellers.

Artists have the superpower to eliminate indifference, to ignite hope that moves us, ultimately and at its best, hope that moves us to act. Hope is neither a gift nor a remedy, but something that artists can spark and cultivate within us all. They inspire confidence to endeavor and a commitment to pursuing possibilities, protecting the ineffable, the unmarketable, the poetic and the eccentric. Artists challenge us to see beyond the confines of what is, highlighting and activating what is or should be within our view, and scattering seeds of awareness and courage. The exhibition showcases various strategies and methodologies, including scanning the horizon, intertwining social design with eccentric engineering, creating interfaces for dialogues and polylogues and triggering, translating and expanding the senses.

And as we move along the concrete maze, artists stress and stretch both our sensory and our emotional capacities as far as possible. The power and impact of this influence must go beyond mere aesthetics of watching and listening. It should enhance compassion, collaboration and mindful coexistence rooted in solidarity and kinship. As artists translate future uncertainties into present-day choices and we encounter both their tangible and imaginative worlds, we might discover personal and collective power and a sense of connection that is both emotional and political. To follow Octavia Butler’s notion of “new suns,” artists help us collectively to envision these new horizons, allowing other landscapes to emerge. Embarking on a journey in a bunker, we embrace two forms and promises of hope: hope created by us and for us to create. We are challenged to feel and urged to act, invited to touch and be touched.

Text: Olga Tykhonova

Presented in the context of the European Digital Deal project, part of the theme exhibition is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. The exhibition features works from EMAP (The European Media Art Platform) residency created through the European Media Artist in Residence Exchange (EMARE), the CIFO x Ars Electronica Award supported by the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO) and a work supported by the Institut Ramon Llull. The exhibition also includes artworks awarded the ArTS (Art, Technology, Society) Production Grant for Swiss Artists, a grant supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia and a project awarded the Ars Electronica Award for Digital Humanity, supported by the Austrian Federal Ministry for European and International Affairs. Another work was co-produced by Ars Electronica and the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts and one project has been developed during the TAICCA x Ars Electronica Art Thinking program.