Zugzwang - The Compulsion to Find a Common Baseline in Sound
Christina Gruber (AT), Samuel Hertz (US)

Zugzwang explores how a non-human centered approach to the use of technology can help us tune in to our companion species & environments. Though sound is omnipresent, we have problems understanding. Miscommunication and distortion happen constantly. Can listening become a central asset in learning about our environment?

Symposium "Unheimliche Freunde"

Around 1978, a metaphor found its way into English android research that the roboticist Masahiro Mori had defined in 1970: the "uncanny valley". Robots that resemble humans too much instill fear and terror. Like us, but never familiar, they inhabit the "uncanny valley."  But today, the uncanny valley has almost disappeared. Thanks to RFID chips, GPS and a wide variety of body sensors, our bodies and identities have themselves become interfaces, mouse pointers and prosthetic hands with which algorithms trace and continue to write our profiles. The valley that Mori dug out between the industrial robot and the Nō mask is now levelled. What remains is a suspicion: that the ghosts and the undead are not only the robots, but ourselves as well..

Elsa On The Moon
Mathieu Zurstrassen (BE)

Elsa on the Moon is a kinetic sculpture tribute to Elsa Von Freytag Loringhoven, eccentric baroness and contemporary of Marcel Duchamp; ambiguously attributed with the creation Fountain, in 1917. Or was it Louise Norton? The work consists of a robotic leg capped with a ceramic urinal. The device is balanced with counterweights through an extended aluminum arm.

God is Dog spelled Backwards
Mathieu Zurstrassen (BE)

God is dog spelled backwards is a 360° kinetic artwork, and a tribute to Guy Debord’s La société du Spectacle, first published in 1967.

Above the Below
Mathieu Zurstrassen (BE)

_ /bəˈloʊ/ is an exterior sound installation, featuring a pipe emitting an audio file emerging from the ground. The audio file is a lecture from the book *How to Analyze People on Sight*, written in 1921 by Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict.

Political Atmosphere
Felix Lenz (AT)

“Political Atmosphere” is an experiential installation amplifying the invisible connections between flight turbulence, climate change and war. It consists of a data-driven mechanical siren and an ADS-B antenna, which allows for receiving, processing and visualizing the surrounding flight traffic. Each flight slowly accelerates the latent build-up of potential until a threshold is passed and a mechanism releases the siren.

Ars Electronica AIxMusic Online Hackathon
Philippe Esling (FR), Lamtharn Hanoi Hantrakul (TH), Carmine Cella(IT), Edward Tiong (US) and Yishuang Chen (US)

For the occasion of the first online Festival, Ars Electronica will host its first international AIx Music Hackathon as part of the AIxMusic Festival 2020. The hackathon will take place online during the Ars Electronica Festival from 9-13 September 2020. Join our workshops and engage with other hackers, develop prototypes that musicians will be able to integrate, stimulate the use of open data and public resources!

AI x MUSIC FESTIVAL Opening Ceremony
The Grid (US/EU), Gray Area (US), Codame (US), ZERO1 (US), MUTEK.SF (US), EUNIC Silicon Valley (US), EUNIC Washington DC (US), EUNIC New York (US), Ars Electronica AIxMusic Festival (AT), STARTS, European Commission (EU), Center for Humane Technology (US), Salesforce (US)

Your guide through the AIxMUSIC FESTIVAL Opening Ceremony with Livestream.

THE WILD STATE: State of Intimacy
Fabrizio Lamoncha Martinez (ES)

This unique exhibition reflects, in many respects, the diversity of the international Interface Cultures students group. Many of the students’ art and technology projects seem to encourage us to consider new collective values. We hope you’ll be inspired and alerted by their intimate, artistic, socially engaged, technical informed or critical views on our life over the last half year.

THE WILD STATE: Sound Campus
Enrique Tomás (ES)

Sound Campus is a new program especially oriented towards examining the state of experimental sound practices at universities and research centers. It opens a possibility for students and researchers to present new forms of understanding sonic art to the big audience of Ars Electronica Festival. This year’s program, curated by Enrique Tomás, presents uneasy sound performances resonating in the face of a critical present. Intrusive music touching us despite lockdowns.

site-inflexion
Fulldome / VR & AR Lab

The immersive installation site-inflexion invites visitors to take part in a site-specific virtual and acoustic journey. The scenery and soundscapes of the JKU campus are the main actors in the work, alluding to Johannes Kepler's activity as a landscape mathematician. A laser-scanned topographic survey of Kepler’s gardens becomes an audio-visual environment transfigured by the everyday sounds that inhabit them. Oscillating between urban pollution and phantasmagoria, structures and lawns bend and curve under the effect of sound waves, reaching their inflection point by tipping towards the unknown.

Cross Perception  - work in progress
Fulldome / VR & AR Lab

A limitless space. Everything moves—light, shapes and colors. Human and machine let their sight wander and try to recognize something. The human beings search for orientation, the device calculates.

Future Room  and  Liminal Spaces (re-edited) 360˚ film screening
Fulldome / VR & AR Lab

The Fulldome Program of the Digital Arts Department at the University of Applied Arts Vienna presents experimental immersive works, collaborations between the Department and the University’s Science Visualization Lab, Trans-Media Academie Hellerau, and the transdisciplinary performance company, kondition pluriel. Future Room and Liminal Spaces (re-edited) reveal the artistic potential of the fulldome, as does the 360˚ film screening selection of works by researchers, teachers, and students.

BR41N.IO Hackathon - The Brain-Computer Interface Designers Hackathon

The BR41N.IO Hackathon brings together programmers, engineers, designers, artists and/or enthusiasts, who collaborate intensively as an interdisciplinary team. Each team must design and build a unique, playful and wearable headpiece that can measure useful EEG signals in real-time to create any sort of interaction. The hacking projects use EEG electrodes and amplifiers, and challenge programmers to code an interface that enables them to control devices, robots or applications, post messages on social media, make paintings, or enact a myriad of other applications only with their thoughts. BR41N.IO also challenges creative minds to design a BCI headset with 3D printers, handcrafted materials and sewing machines.

AUGENSCHEIN
Sylvia Eckermann (AT), Stieglerhaus

The Ars Electronica Garden St. Stefan ob Stainz takes us on a journey to Sylvia Eckermann’s public art project AUGENSCHEIN. AUGENSCHEIN takes the eye as a symbol for how our society relates to vision and visualisation, in its encouraging and more dangerous aspects.

Fashion & Technology presents IN THE LAB
Liquid Objects, Disobedient Materials

The exhibition takes a surprising look at the sustainable, inclusive and democratic future of fashion. Waiting to be discovered are the inner life of virtual bodies, seamless garments made from experimental jacquard fabrics and second-hand clothing that dissolves and reconfigures.  IN THE LAB makes innovative processes visible and invites visitors to observe new shapes and materials as they grow.

Latency Now, Telematic Improv Workshop
Theatre of Making #4 

The interdisciplinary workshop series Theatre of Making (TOM) focuses on real-time audiovisual improvisation by exploring how continually evolving artistic methods, media and processes overlap and are reconfigured to unfold a constant flow of visible, audible, and experiential events. These cross-media jam sessions engage all senses and abilities, synthesizing processes and outcomes into a live, durational, closely-knit total work of art.

Fertile Methodologies
Tactical Space Lab (AU)

The Tactical Space Lab is a research initiative focusing on the intersection of art and technology. We are committed to expanding the diversity of stories and voices represented through new technologies via collaborative projects and educational programs across all ages, with the aim of ‘demystifying’ VR, not just for artists, but for the wider community.

CRAFTING FUTURES
Growing Together 

Crafting Futures shows works by students of the bachelor course Design: Tech.Tex, teachers training for technical and textile works, which were created during the last year. Its focus is on the active examination of questions concerning the future of craft, the craft of the future and the crafting of futures.

Visit the Moon with an astrophysicist!
Cité de l’espace (FR)

Come visit the Moon with French astrophysicist and co-discoverer of ice on the Moon, Sylvestre Maurice! He will guide you through the “Moon exhibition” in Cité de l’espace, the space museum in Toulouse, France. These 4 videos were made as part of the “children’s science conference” that invited pupils to imagine their schools on the Moon. Through the eyes of an astrophysicist who has dedicated his life to solar system exploration, click and discover step by step the immersive "Moon exhibition".