Ars Electronica Futurelab Key Research Topics

Ars Electronica Futurelab (AT)

Ars Electronica’s research and development department, the Ars Electronica Futurelab, bases its research approach on a transdisciplinary concept: At the interface between art, technology and society and in a constant dialogue regarding the future, it explores the realization of visionary concepts for innovative businesses, social life and the creative sector. The Ars Electronica Futurelab has been living this approach systematically and intuitively since its beginnings in 1996 in one way or another, while constantly reflecting on its own role as a laboratory for future in this triad.

The laboratory encourages each individual in their team to develop their own interpretation of art, technology and science, to exploratory transform it into new artistic spaces and to conquer unknown scientific terrain. The individual research question of each member forms the basis of the Ars Electronica Futurelab’s systematic concept, its art and its science. By combining innovative technology with a social and artistic mindset, a decisive relevance is given to every single result. The following research topics therefor reflect not only the Ars Electronica Futurelab’s current team members’ research interests, but also are a mirror of current societal changes and trends:

Algorithmic Apperception

Algorithmic Apperception investigates ways to admit artificial systems into physical spaces. It is the ambition to enable machines to not only sense their environment but make sense of it.

Art Thinking Research

Artificial Collectives

Artificial Collectives refers to the development of systems that are multitudes of technical units, and how they can be imbued with decentralized, coordinated decision-making.

Coimmersive Spaces

In recent years, the focus of Virtual Reality research lied mostly on single-user systems like VR glasses, but those systems still have inherent limitations, especially for groups of users. The Deep Space 8K has profoundly shown how VR spaces for multiple co-located users can be designed.

Creative Intelligence

Creative Intelligence research focuses not only on the technological aspects of AI in creative and artistic applications, but also on new ways of interaction and collaboration between humans and AI systems.

Future Narratives

Creative Intelligence research focuses not only on the technological aspects of AI in creative and artistic applications, but also on new ways of interaction and collaboration between humans and AI systems.

Origami Robotics

Robotic Origami is concerned with the study of folded mechanisms where researchers are generally interested in applications of folding in mechanical, electro-mechanical, and bio-mechanical systems.

Poetic Systems

Artistic works—Poetic Systems—transform systems not accessible to us into a new level of meaning. They speak a sensual-emotional language and create them through their immediate, aesthetic appearance: free space.

Symbiotic Creativity

Tangible Link