European Platform for Digital Humanism

at the 2020 Ars Electronica Festival

While it is true that digital technologies have merely accelerated processes already unfolding across the industrialized world, they have changed our world and our lives radically over the last four decades. From the outset, Ars Electronica has viewed this as a societal rather than a technological development, and Ars Electronica’s European Platform for Digital Humanism has focused not on technologies but on their impacts.
Taking up these developments, the European Platform for Digital Humanism wants to show new pathways to a digital society and invites audiences to imagine a new future: it is time for us to resign our roles as mere consumers and data-generating machines. We must take responsibility for our futures.

AILab
at the 2020 Ars Electronica Festival

The European ARTificial Intelligence Lab emerged from the European Digital Art and Science Network, a creative collaboration between scientific institutions, Ars Electronica and cultural partners throughout Europe that unites science and digital art. The European ARTificial Intelligence Lab takes up this theme and addresses the visions, expectations and fears that we associate with artificial intelligence.

AIxMusic

This year, the AIxMusic Festival focuses on a deep insight into the latest research and artistic practices developed in conjunction with artificial intelligence and paying special attention to its potential to facilitate networked remote collaboration among musicians.

Creative School
Ars Electronica (AT), Dedale (FR), Cap Sciences (FR), Michael Culture Association (BE), STePS (Italy), Radiona Makerspace (HR), Heretic (UK), Chester Beatty Library (IE), Finnish Museums Association (FI).

In 2020 a generation of Europeans born during the dawn of social networking graduated into an era of social distancing and isolation. For many of them, their last days of school took place not in the classroom but on their digital devices. While the circumstances that led to this definitely were not normal, the student experience of inhabiting and interacting in the digital space was.

EMAP
at the 2020 Ars Electronica Festival

The basic purpose of the European Media Art Platform (EMAP) program is to enable European artists to collaborate on projects and consequently to create closer bonds between European media organisations.

OSHub.Network
Ars Electronica (AT), Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin (IE), Impact Hub Siracusa (IT), La Casemate (FR), Onl’Fait (CH), SCIENCE IN (CZ), Município de Figueira de Castelo Rodrigo (PO), SciCo (GR)

The pace of change in society – from technological innovation to global interconnectedness – is rapidly increasing and has fundamentally altered the way people live, work and learn. Moreover, the societal challenges of the 21st century bring with them an urgent need to integrate the knowledge and expertise of different societal actors, and to develop meaningful and inclusive ways of connecting schools, universities, enterprises, civil society, governments and local communities using more innovative, efficient and open methodologies.

child in front of a tousch screen showing planet earth
Welcome to spaceEU Linz
Ars Electronica (AT)

​Ars Electronica has a long history of working with space related content and narratives. The EU project spaceEU allowed them to open new collaborations on a European level. Together with eleven organizations, Ars Electronica developed and produced a wide range of space engagement activities addressing youth, families and teachers.

STARTS – Science, Technology, Arts
at the 2020 Ars Electronica Festival

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.

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.

STEAM INC
Ars Electronica (AT), Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin (IE), Birmingham City University (UK), University of Arts London: Central Saint Martins (UK), Aalto University (FI), Technische Universität Dresden (DE), University of Amsterdam (NE)

Rapid change requires rapid adaptability, and our capacity to adapt is informed by our ability to integrate diverse approaches. To accommodate this, higher education has needed to transcend an historically embedded approach to learning that has seen different types of knowledge segregated across disciplinary silos. Policy ambitions throughout Europe and across the world have recognized that knowledge in science, engineering and mathematics need to be nurtured to engage with rapid advances in technology. However, it has also become increasingly evident that art as a unique and adaptive form of knowledge should also be combined with our approach to STEM education. Art thinking offers a holistic way of understanding complex connections and can act as a translator between different communities of knowledge. By including art, STEAM education ensures that there is an interdisciplinary switchboard operator actively integrating different approaches to solving the same problems we face today.

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.

SySTEM 2020

SySTEM 2020 is an EU research project lead by Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin  focusing on exactly these kinds of science learning initiatives, and committed to developing programmes for science learning outside of formal education.

Can, or should there be, something like a European way into the digital society, between the “data capitalism” of IT monopolists and the “data totalitarianism” of authoritarian regimes? If so, would a European “data humanism” also be competitive? Could applications of digital technology aimed towards human needs and established social conventions, which respect the autonomy of users over their data, be precisely this competitive advantage? Or, in other words: Is it possible to create a digital society that fosters competition and generates value while also reflecting European values?

A good argument can be made to the effect that the success of many digital products and services will shortly no longer depend on whether the processor is a little faster or the screen more colorful, but rather on the confidence the users have in services and on the credibility of the providers. To the extent that digital data will actually be the “new oil,” the raw material of the future; the “refinement” of this raw material will soon play a greater role than the material itself. Besides profitability, this also opens up opportunities for social appropriateness in dealing with our data seriously.

The cooperation of art and technology is much pined-for, and a large number of EU projects and cooperation initiatives have set themselves the goal of strengthening the role of art, creativity and education in the development of the ideas, concepts and scopes of action necessary for digital humanism. As a platform for art, technology and society, Ars Electronica currently coordinates and participates in several such cooperation projects funded by the European Union in the fields of culture, research and education.