Ars Electronica Center
Attendance Up by 8.4% in 2015
Visitor survey indicates a high level of satisfaction and long retention time
Press release: Attendance Up by 8.4% in 2015 / PDF
Feature: Summary of Ars Electronica’s activities in 2015
Ars Electronica Blog: Story on two new employees at the Ars Electronica Center
(Linz, January 5, 2016) The Ars Electronica Center is pleased to announce strong attendance growth once again in 2015. 171,808 visitors toured the Museum of the Future, an 8.4% increase over the previous year. Providing a major impetus to the uptrend was the late-summer opening of a major attraction: Deep Space 8K with its breathtaking high-resolution imagery. And more good news was provided by the results of a visitor survey conducted since January 2015. The degree of satisfaction is an extraordinarily high 97.8%, and most visitors, 63.4 %, spend more than two hours touring the Ars Electronica Center.
“Considering the three key parameters—attendance, time spent in the museum, and visitor satisfaction—the Ars Electronica Center is performing on a very high level,” noted Andreas Bauer and Christoph Kremer, directors of the Ars Electronica Center.
Fascinating Worlds of Imagery in Deep Space 8K
Despite the hot summer, the Ars Electronica Center achieved excellent attendance growth. The main reason is Deep Space 8K, which premiered in August 2015 and has been getting rave reviews from all age groups. Now, in addition to 16×9-meter wall & floor projections and laser tracking, the quantum upgrade of Deep Space’s technical infrastructure provides 8K resolution to deliver images with breathtaking sharpness, brightness and contrast. The spectrum of applications being screened ranges from 3-D visualizations of precious art treasures to time-lapse videos of solar activity to medical educational material.
Ars Electronica Center: An Educational Institution
Another positive development is the increasing demand for the Ars Electronica Center’s educational offerings. In 2015 in conjunction with school programs featuring workshops and guided tours, the AEC hosted 33,439 pupils on class trips. Last year also witnessed the debut of the Kids’ Research Lab, a specially designed space in which 4-8-year olds can playfully experiment to develop their own motor, intellectual and social skills. Also new in 2015 are the Ars Electronica Center’s FutureWorkshops held in cooperation with the Province of Upper Austria to provide attractive prospects for young people in career training programs.
Long Visitor Retention Time
Since January 2015, the Ars Electronica Center has been conducting a visitor survey, and the results are gratifying indeed. For starters, 60.4 % of all visitors in the past year were taking their first tour of the Museum of the Future. In response to the question of how these first-time visitors heard about the Ars Electronica Center, personal recommendation came out on top with 33.7%, and 18.4% learned about the Center online. Once inside the Museum of the Future, visitors make very intensive use of the highly diverse installations: 63.4% spend more than two hours in the Ars Electronica Center, and 26.7% spend three hours or more.
High Visitor Satisfaction, Excellent Word-of-Mouth Advertising
The opinion poll indicates that visitor satisfaction is an almost unanimous 97.8%: 74.6% are very satisfied, and 23.2% are satisfied by the Museum of the Future. Correspondingly high is the proportion of those who would recommend the facility to their acquaintances: nearly all those surveyed, 98.5%, plan to pass the word about the Ars Electronica Center.
Representative of the reactions of many visitors is the blurb a user posted to tripadvisor.at in December 2015: “There’s lots of stuff to discover and try out here (for instance, how you can operate a keyboard using only your eyes). We were there with youngsters aged 8 and 14, and it took about 4 hours until we were ready to leave the AEC. It’s totally amazing and highly educational!”
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Deep Space 8K / Florian Voggeneder / Printversion / Album
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Ars Electronica Center / Nicolas Ferrando, Lois Lammerhuber / Printversion / Album
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Kinderforschungslabor / Martin Hieslmair / Printversion / Album
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Zukunftswerkstatt / Martin Hieslmair / Printversion / Album
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Deep Space 8K / Florian Voggeneder / Printversion / Album
