Format
STARTS Day
The Science+Technology+Arts = STARTS Initiative is a program of the European Commission to encourage synergies between the arts and technology that support the innovation industry and society. STARTS promotes the inclusion of artists in research and innovation activities thoughout Europe.
STARTS Exhibition
Kepler's Garden on the JKU campus
STARTS is a platform aiming to foster alliances of technology and artistic practice that effectively implement European policymaking to nurture innovation and that also benefit the art world.
Key Note: Lynn Hershman Leeson
Lynn Hershman Leeson (US)
For over fifty years, Hershman Leeson’s practice mines the intersections of technology and the self. She is known for her groundbreaking contributions to media art from Artificial Intelligence to DNA programming, often anticipating the impact of technological developments in society.
Key Notes
Ars Electronica (AT)
In this edition of Key Notes, the focus will be on extraordinary female visionaries that are forming the very world we are inhabiting now and for generations to come. Thought leaders in the digital ethics of AI and bridge-builders with business will give insights on current research, artistic projects, and experiments.
DARV_ Abandoned Land
Lee Jung In (KR/AT) Mihaela Kavdanska (BG/RO/AT) Violeta Ivanova (BG/AT) Florian Weinrich (AT)
DARV_ Abandoned Land is an intermedia dance performance which sprouts connections between analog and digital. The performers interact with large-scale objects and video projections, resembling the endless migration from one world to another in search for the better. The DARV team and eight dancers perform in various locations in Austria, South Korea and Bulgaria, guiding the audience through dystopian realities and abandoned sites. Drained-off utopias, failed social mechanisms and ideologies are embodied, explored and ultimately abandoned.
Key Note: Joanna Bryson
Joanna Bryson
Joanna Bryson is Prof. of Ethics and Technology at the Hertie School. Her research focuses on the impact of technology on human cooperation, and AI/ICT governance. From 2002-2019 she was on the Computer Science faculty at the University of Bath. She has also been affiliated with the Dpt. of Psychology at Harvard University, the Dpt. of Anthropology at the University of Oxford, the School of Social Sciences at the University of Mannheim, and the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy
Virtual Anatomy – Preview of the JKU MedSPACE
Interactive multisensory environment, 2020
The Johannes Kepler University Linz (JKU) is currently constructing a modern, future-oriented multi-purpose learning space at the JKU Faculty of Medicine’s new medical education and research building. Scheduled to open in 2021, the space will not only be used as a virtual lecture hall for anatomy courses, but will also provide live surgery broadcasts from operating rooms to improve student education and post-graduate educational courses.
Mirage – An Interactive Experience
Carolina Bischof (AT), Andreas Dorner (AT), Lena Kalleitner (AT), Adam Lamine (AT), Thomas Tippold, Matthias Husinsky (AT), Clemens Scharfen (AT)
In Mirage – An Interactive Experience, Deep Space 8K visitors find themselves in an alien world, where they collectively partake in a story appealing to multiple senses. Up to 16 persons can actively participate in this encounter. In this abstract-looking world, visitors must find hidden pathways to a portal through teamwork, solve puzzles cooperatively and avoid manifold hazards.
Klangfahnen
Sounding Linz
The Klangfahnen were developed and woven for Sounding Linz to mark urban places with great symbolic power for the urban quality of the city.
Of Peacocks and Men
Irena Birsa (SI), Simona Korošec (SI)
"Of Peacocks and Men", an interdisciplinary project by Irena Birsa is all about fear and what we could have been without it. Original text and pre-stored sounds are the main items. The relationship between music and text is submissive, the sonic atmosphere of electronic sounds is merely accompanying the story and reacting to actress' sometimes improvised gestures. The text, music and light are working together to create an almost garish space for the audience in which little clicks can occur.
Creative Question Challenge: Radical change by working together
Kat Austen (UK/DE), Indrė Žliobaitė (FI), Laurence Gill (IE), Andrew Newman (AT/AU)
'Let us finish what we started'. This is how the UN introduces its first Sustainable Development Goal - to end poverty in all forms and dimensions by 2030. The 17 Sustainable Development Goals and their 169 targets have been described as a sprawling, misconceived mess of grandiose intentions. The title of the development agenda itself - 'Transforming our World' - oozes utopian ambition. It was adopted by 193 nations in 2015. Five years later and with ten years left, how do you think our world will transform?
STUDIOTOPIA
STUDIOTOPIA is a European initiative that seeks to activate the collaborative and interdisciplinary expertise required to face these future challenges by implementing an inverse art and science residency model. Scientists from diverse disciplines responded to an open call to work alongside and learn from leading European artists. In Creative Question Challenges at this year’s Ars Electronica, future problems will be explored and future solutions hypothesized with the broadcast beginnings of a 17-month conversation between artists and scientists.
Gustav Klimt's "Kiss" as Gigapixel - On the Cooperation between Google Arts & Culture and the Belvedere in Vienna
Belvedere, Franz Smola (AT)
At the presentation initiated by ARS Electronica, experts from Google Arts & Culture will explain the technology of the Art Camera and its application in cooperation with museums worldwide in a vivid way. Belvedere curator Franz Smola, responsible for the scientific expertise and supervision of the project, will also explain the art historical aspects of Klimt's painting "The Kiss".
Jury Members talking about Computer Animation
Peter Burr (US) and Mathilde Lavenne (FR) talk about the jury process, trends and the Golden Nica winner of the Computer Animation category.
Jury Members talking about Interactive Art +
Sabine Himmelsbach (DE/CH) and Haytham Nawar (EG) talk about the jury process, trends and the Golden Nica winner of the Interactive Art + category.
2020 - Finally Digital?!
Christina Steinbrecher-Pfandt (US), Renger van Den Heuvel (NL), Sabine Himmelsbach (DE/CH), Nanne Dekking (US/DE), Alain Servais (BE), Paul Frey (AT), Alfred Weidinger (AT), Casey Reas (US), Kate Hollenbach (US), JiaJia Fei (US), Raina Mehler (US), Magda Sawon (US), Sharon De Mattia (US) and Thomas Kohler (DE)
2020 started with a bang that made the art industry pivot away from its established codes of conduct almost overnight for sheer survival. From the exchange of courtesies to remote work structures, old customs required immediate redesign in response to the crisis. As a result, the online space gained even more significance as the only platform for business and commercial transactions, affecting even the art industry and its age-old reliance on in-person interaction.
Pianographique
Maki Namekawa (JP/AT), Cori O'Lan (AT)
Philip Glass' piano solo piece Passacaglia: After a tranquil opening, we break into boiling and purely pianistic passages of arpeggios and scales. Philip Glass' trusted pianist Maki Namekawa (who has premiered several of his piano pieces) performs this work in its Austrian premiere.
Jury Members talking about Digital Communities
Here, Irini Papadimitriou (GR/UK) and Dietmar Offenhuber (AT/US) talk about the jury process, trends and the Golden Nica winner of the Digital Communities category.
Breaking up the gameplay – a talk about feminism and experiencing the abolished private
Rebecca Merlic (HR)
Artist Talk about the feminist aspects of The City as a House, an interactive visual novel, an experiment of a white European 30-year-old heterosexual human, living in Tokyo without inhabiting a private apartment over a period of time.
Prix Forum Visionary Pioneer of Feminist Media Art
The director of the VALIE EXPORT Center Linz, Dr. Sabine Folie, gives a talk about the achievements of VALIE EXPORT, which is followed by a talk of VALIE EXPORT herself.
