IT:U addresses societal challenges with interdisciplinary innovations
Stefanie Lindstaedt, IT:U Founding President
Linked to the overall Ars Electronica Festival-theme “HOPE–who will turn the tide,” IT:U-Interdisciplinary Transformation University Austria addresses the relationship between societal challenges and innovative digital technologies—with a focus on medicine and healthcare in the different perspectives across the fields.
As a collaborative effort between IT:U – Interdisciplinary Transformation University Austria and Ars Electronica, the FOUNDING LAB has been created as a prototyping environment at IT:U. As a mission-driven learning approach we address digital transformation challenges through interdisciplinary collaboration.
The FOUNDING LAB, which has already started in 2023 with a summer school, followed by a fall and spring term, now brings six standout students from the initial cohort to the Ars Electronica Exhibition 2024 to present their final projects.
The five projects of the six FOUNDING LAB students, coming from the UK, Austria, India, Australia, China and Canada, address a wide range of social issues—from virtual reality experiences for disabled people, to health monitoring with machine learning and artistic innovation, re-experiencing dreams through cutting-edge VR, combining AI-generated images with historic texts revealing surprising parallels and finally, questioning our social vision of care and how we wish to encode it in our technologies.
By dissolving disciplinary boundaries, experts, artists, scientists, leading thinkers and innovators from a wide range of disciplines are brought together to discuss the contradictory realities of today’s world, lighting new beacons of hope in the process.
That’s what IT:U’s mission stands for.
POSTCITY
WED Sept. 4 – SUN Sept. 8, 2024
Access to the IT:U exhibition is free of charge.
IT:U Founding Lab Exhibition
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Reassembling Bolts of Care
Julie-Michèle Morin (CA)
Care is vital for fostering solidarity, yet it also serves as an essential resource for sustaining a capitalist society. These tensions between care as an exploited resource and the emergence of a new market for robotic care demand critical scrutiny. How do we nurture and care for technologies deployed in the care field? Reassembling Bolts…
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Do Algorithms Care?
Amanda Bennetts (AU), Johanna Einsiedler (AT)
Do Algorithms Care? is a collaboration between artist Amanda Bennetts and data scientist Johanna Einsiedler. The project is realized in an installation that mimics a tech store, turning a critical lens on the commercialization of bio data. Using the duo’s open-source DIY smartwatches and interactive data interface, they explore the predictive potential of personal data…
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ReVerie
Pinyao Liu (CN), Keon Ju Lee (KR/CA)
In collaboration with dream scientists, the ReVerie AI system reflects on the misuse of dream technology by inviting participants to relive their dream experiences and develop new understandings about their waking lives. The audience enters a ritual of whispering their dream objects. A generative diffusion AI model then manifests the dream objects in the shared…
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GPT 1400: The AI Apothecary
Nathan Cornish (GB)
If medieval people had had artificial intelligence, would it have made any difference? In fact, AI systems produce very similar nonsense from large databases as pre-scientific Western European physicians! Neither of them has much conception of critical thinking, but rather pulls from ancient texts to throw out cure suggestions from an abstract corpus of ideas.…
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Crip Sensorama
Puneet Jain (IN), Yesica Duarte (AR)
Re-imagining XR with (and for) People with Sensorimotor Disabilities Crip Sensorama is a multisensory, interactive XR experience where audience members move, navigate, and interact in VR/AR environments using a set of mouth gestures as a narrative around disability; art and culture unfolds itself. The chosen set of mouth gestures which are developed to enable people…
IT:U Founding Lab Forum
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GET.Inspired: Innovating Higher Education through Interdisciplinary Practice
Laura Veart (GB), Georg Russegger (AT), Ken Nakagaki (JP/US), Andreas Ingerl (DE), Qian Ye (CN), Nikoletta Karastathi (GB), Carla Barreiros (PT/AT)
In this engaging session, seven distinguished educators from diverse institutions will come together to share their experiences in advancing interdisciplinary practices within higher education. Each speaker will present a unique program or project that exemplifies their commitment to integrating multiple disciplines to address complex societal challenges.
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Hurtling Towards Sustainability: Education, Work, and the Arts
Joanna Bryson (GB/DE
What are the limits of what we can do with AI? Will there be a role for humans in the future? For how many humans? Can we all find a place in society?
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The Future of Open Research and Practice-based Learning
Stefanie Lindstaedt (DE), Laura Veart (GB), Georg Russegger (AT), LaJuné McMillian (US), Daniela Jacob (DE), Joanna Bryson (GB/DE), Lauren Vargas (US)
Open Science is at the center of European research policy. Educational initiatives and research structures are being developed and implemented to open up European science and research, making them more efficient, seamless, transparent, and robust, as well as responsive to society’s needs and expectations. But how can we foster a common vision for opening education…
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Welcome to the IT:U FOUNDING LAB
Stefanie Lindstaedt (DE/AT), Pinyao Liu (CN), Amanda Bennetts (AU)
Welcome to the IT:U Founding Lab Day and presentation of the FOUNDING LAB publication, a documentation of the joint IT:U and Ars Electronica summer school and fall term program in 2023/2024
About IT:U
IT:U Interdisciplinary Transformation University Austria is one of the first public universities in Europe dedicated to digital transformation. On the campus in Linz, Austria, IT:U offers the students a project-based and inclusive approach to technical education. Students from a wide range of disciplines learn digital skills they can use in their own fields to tackle global challenges. The rapid acceleration of climate change and recent pandemic outbreaks are only two major examples out of a wide range of intensive or disruptive changes. At IT:U digital transformation university students are empowered to be the interdisciplinary, computationally empowered transformers of tomorrow.