Ars Electronica Festival 2024: HOPE – who will turn the tide

• Ars Electronica Festival 2024
• Press release as PDF
• Press Briefing / April 22, Ars Electronica Center
• Photos via Flickr
• Accreditation for the Ars Electronica Festival 2024

(Linz, April 22, 2024) Ars Electronica 2024 will take place in Linz from September 4 to 8 and will be dedicated to the title “HOPE – who will turn the tide”. Like never before, the Linz Festival for Art, Technology and Society will focus on artists, researchers, developers, activists, and entrepreneurs from all over the world. The main location will once again be POSTCITY, which is due to be demolished and will become a hotspot for the international media art scene for the seventh time.

HOPE – who will turn the tide

Gerfried Stocker
Artistic Director, Ars Electronica

Optimism is not the belief that things will somehow work out, but rather the confidence in our ability to influence and bring about improvement. And that perhaps best describes the essence of the principle of hope, not as a passive position, but as an active force that motivates us to keep going despite adversity.

But don’t worry, this year’s festival will not be an examination of the psychological or even evolutionary foundations of the principle of hope, nor will it be a reflection on our unsteady fluctuation between hope and pessimism.

“HOPE” as a festival theme is not a resigned statement that all we can do is hope that someone or something will solve our problems, but rather a manifestation that there are actually many reasons for hope. This is expressed in the subtitle “who will turn the tide”, which does not claim to know how the turnaround can be achieved, but rather focuses on who the driving forces behind this turnabout are.

The festival’s goal is to spotlight as many people as possible who have already set out on their journey and whose activities—no matter how big or small—are a very concrete reason to have hope.

Believing in the possibility of change is the prerequisite for bringing about positive change, especially when all signs point to the fact that the paths we are currently taking are often dead ends. But belief alone will not be enough; it requires a combination of belief, vision, cooperation, and a willingness to take concrete action. A willingness that we need, even if we are not yet sure how we will turn the tide, how we will solve the problems, and how we will deal with the effects of the problems that we are (no longer) able to solve. What we cannot afford is to wait to make the necessary changes until we have found these solutions. What we also cannot afford to do is believe that technology will solve our problems; because that would mean once again that we not only don’t understand our technologies, but also that we understand our problems even less.

This is exactly what Ars Electronica’s thought model, which has been successful for 45 years, puts in the spotlight: the synopsis of art, technology and society, the alternatives and new perspectives that open up to us, when we also use the means of art and the eyes of artists to look at the social and cultural aspects of technological development.

Yes, technology will not solve our problems, but a lot of technology will be needed to address the problems. But this requires a different understanding both of technology and of our responsibility for using technology. But such visions must not be used as an excuse not to act; they must not tempt us to sit back and wait for the “super technology that solves everything”.

“HOPE” as the festival motto also poses an important question about the role and tasks of a festival in challenging times and is seen as a clear statement against the stupid, short-sighted pseudo-concepts and fake arguments of populist politics, against the nonsense-causing cries the mass media swamps (analog and digital), as well as against meaningless whitewashing and ignoring things.

To some, this appears to be a “crisis of imagination” because they no longer see large, spectacular plans for the future. But what has changed is not the power of imagination, the visionary courage, but the perspective. The spectacular and radical ideas are suddenly no longer concerned with growth, but with reduction. The diagram that shows the dramatic curve in which we must reduce CO2 emissions in the next few years has become a new icon, the radicalness of which also shows how radical our ideas must be. What courage it takes to even think about this radicalism without losing heart.

Hope is the opposite of fear, but there are many reasons to be afraid. The Ars Electronica Festival 2024 will show that there are also many reasons for hope — people, many people,  who have started working to bring about change with their ideas, projects, actions, and attitudes.

Young architects who no longer want to build new houses but rather renew the existing infrastructure; villages that successfully practice zero-waste; industrial designers who base their concepts on reuse instead of recycling and not only think about new materials, but also design the necessary changes in the design of the products; African open source communities of computer scientists who do not want to leave powerful AI systems in the hands of just a few large corporations. But also technical visionaries who are developing new, more efficient forms of energy generation; economists who design new models of a socially and globally fair distribution of work and profits in a future characterized by automation and digital systems; people who are not committed to the dismantling but to the further development of democracy; seniors who fight together with their grandchildren for the human right to climate protection; artists who design gardens for insects, etc., etc., etc.

First you are amazed at how much is already happening around the world, and then hope arises. HOPE — who will turn the tide.

Das Ars Electronica Festival 2024

POSTCITY and Festival Mile in Downtown Linz

The epicenter of Ars Electronica 2024 will once again be POSTCITY. The themed exhibition, the STARTS exhibition—this year also with the award-winning projects from the first-ever STARTS Prize Africa—and the Ars Electronica Gardens Exhibition will be on display here. The theme symposium and the Big Concert night will take place here and last but not least, POSTCITY will once again become the playground for create your world, the future festival of the next generation.

There will be eight additional festival locations in the city center; St. Mary’s Cathedral (Mariendom), Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, University of Arts Linz, Atelierhaus Salzamt, Ars Electronica Center, Stadtwerkstatt, Anton Bruckner Private University and, for the first time, the JKU MED Campus will be used.

Events & Concerts – Pre-Opening Walk to Final Concert

The traditional start of the festival week is the pre-opening walk on Tuesday, September 3, 2024. The first stop is the JKU MED Campus (4:00 p.m.), where the Linz Institute of Technology (LIT) of Johannes Kepler University Linz (JKU) shows selected projects by its students and teachers, the second stop is Lentos Kunstmuseum (5:30 p.m.), where the Prix Ars Electronica exhibition will be on display for the first time. It then continues at University of Arts Linz (7:00 p.m.), where the campus opens its doors and this time the Moholy-Nagy University of Budapest is presenting itself, and at Atelierhaus Salzamt (8:30 p.m.), where FH Hagenberg is putting on a show all about Interactive Media and Gaming. At the Ars Electronica Center (9:00 p.m.), the art historians and developers from Iconem Paris and the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, together with Ars Electronica Futurelab, invite you to an immersive experience of world-famous art treasures in Deep Space 8K. Afterwards, night owls are in the right place at the Stadtwerkstatt (from 11 p.m.).

Wednesday, September 4, 2024, is not only the first day of the festival, but would also be the 200th birthday of the Upper Austrian composer and organist Anton Bruckner. Reason enough to hold this year’s festival opening in St. Mary’s Cathedral, where a team of artists, organists, computer scientists, and physicists not only perform Bruckner’s “Perger Prelude” but also have it conducted by entangled photons. What do you need for this? On the one hand the cathedral organs, on the other hand an experimental high-tech laboratory made of lasers, mirrors, polarizers, and non-linearcrystals. Bill Fontana’s Silent Echos can also be experienced in St. Mary’s Cathedral — the sound installation was created in cooperation with Bad Ischl Salzkammergut 2024 and is a powerful artistic statement on the climate crisis.

The Prix Ars Electronica Award Ceremony will take place on Thursday, September 5, 2024, and the next day, on Friday, September 6, 2024, the Cello Octet Amsterdam and visual artist Nick Geist invite you to an unusual Big Concert night in the POSTCITY track hall. Eight musicians and eight robots stand on stage—the human protagonists “encircled” by meter-long mechanical arms—and form a “robotic cocon”. In the second part of this evening, the Cello Octet Amsterdam will perform together with pianist Maki Namekawa. Afterwards, the Ars Electronica Nightline acts can be enjoyed until 4 a.m.

On Saturday, September 7, 2024, Anton Bruckner Private University invites you to Sonic Saturday—and Ars Electronica Futurelab invites you to the Futurelab Night in Deep Space 8K.

Sunday, September 8, 2024, Dennis Russell Davies and his Brno Philharmonic Orchestra— with the M-Concerto by Philip Glass and Maki Namekawa as soloist—will bring the Ars Electronica Festival 2024 to a close in the POSTCITY track hall.

Exhibitions

Around 5,000 annual submissions to the Prix Ars Electronica, the STARTS Prize and STARTS Prize Africa as well as the European Union Prize for Citizen Science, a whole series of artist residencies as part of currently more than 20 EU projects and, and, and …  When it comes to designing exhibitions, the curators at Ars Electronica are spoiled for choice.

The most important show of each festival is the Prix Ars Electronica exhibition. It will be shown for the first time in Lentos Kunstmuseum in 2024 and brings together outstanding submissions from the “New Animation Art” and “Interactive Art +” categories. The winning project of the “AI in Art Award”, this year awarded for the first time, will also be on display here.

The exhibition on this year’s festival theme will be staged in the extensive catacombs of POSTCITY. You can experience new works that were created as part of the European Media Art platform, such as the Compost as Superfood project by masharu, or the EU-funded network European Digital Deal, in which partner organizations such as Onassis Stegi (GR), waag (NL), Braga Media Arts (PT), the Center for the Promotion of Science (RS) or Kersnikova (SL). Also part of the themed exhibition is the Living Room project by Tiziano Derme and Nadine Schütz, which won a joint award with Pro Helvetia. Together with the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO), Latin American projects will be presented at the festival for the third time as part of the themed exhibition, this time focusing on the use of resources in Bolivia and Argentina. There are also artistic positions from Chile — continuing the seven-year collaboration with the Ministerio de las Culturas, las Artes y el Patrimonio and the Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores de Chile.

On the first floor of the old postal distribution center— there is no entry fee—you can see the projects awarded with the European Commission’s STARTS Prize and STARTS Prize Africa, as well as the winning projects of the European Union Prize for Citizen Science.

In the format of “State of the ART(tist),” this year’s Ars Electronica, together with the Federal Ministry for European and International Affairs, is once again presenting works by artists who are politically persecuted or threatened by environmental and natural disasters.

In collaboration with V2_Lab for the Unstable Media (NL), LEV Festival (ES), Kontejner (HR), iMAL (BE), and Chroniques (FR), the festival shows the exhibition “Realities in Transition” on Virtual & Extended Reality. The show is supported by the EU.

Under the title “Label4Future”, an EU-funded presentation will focus on artistic and creative practices that can be groundbreaking for the development of sustainable materials, circular economy, and the Green Deal. The project is being implemented together with Creative Industry Košice, the European Creative Business Network, and the Austria Wirtschaftsservice AWS.

At the Atelierhaus Salzamt, the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria—Campus Hagenberg is showing an exhibition about interactive media and gaming for the first time.

At the new festival location on the JKU MED Campus, students and teachers from Johannes Kepler University Linz present projects in which art and science merge in a unique way. The exhibition — as well as the open call that has already been concluded—is being designed and implemented by Linz Institute for Technology (LIT) at JKU.

Conferences, Talks and Workshops

Lectures, discussions and workshops are another central part of the Ars Electronica program. Artists, developers, researchers and activists present their projects and positions for discussion. The most important formats include the three-day symposium on the festival theme, the S+T+ARTS Day organized in collaboration with DG Connect of the European Commission around innovation in and for the 21st century, a conference organized in collaboration with IT:U (Interdisciplinary Transformation University Austria) on the topic of education, a three-day symposium on the topic of expanded animation curated by the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria—Campus Hagenberg and of course the artist talks at the Prix Ars Electronica.

University of Arts campus — Performances, DJ Sets, Exhibitions

From exhibitions to performances to conferences—the campus curated by the University of Arts Linz combines all festival formats. More than 30 universities from all over the world are expected in 2024. The Moholy-Nagy University of Budapest presents itself as a Special Featured University at Splace on Linz’ main square. The buildings of the University of Arts Linz on the main square include projects from Simon Fraser University Vancouver, the School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT) (CA), Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) (CN), Bauhaus University (DE) , the Royal College of Art (RCA) (GB), Korea National University of Arts (K-Arts) (KR), Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), the School of the Arts in Qatar (QA), the Interactive Materials Lab of the National University of Singapore (SG), National Tsing Hua University (NTHU), the Center for Technology and Art (TW), the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and Art and Technology Studies (ATS) (US).

Of course, the University of Arts Linz also uses the Festival Campus to present projects by its own students and teachers. Thematically, the focus is on seeing: What can we see and what not? How do we see? In order to be able to address these questions with the appropriate foresight, architecture students will build a tower on Linz’s main square. The Sound Campus and the exhibitions in the university buildings on the main square complete the program.

create your world – from Open Labs to Hebocon

This year’s edition of create your world will focus on mental health (especially of young people) and civil society activism. The multi-layered program again includes exhibitions, presentations, performances and hands-on experimental stations.

Digital Cultural Heritage in the Ars Electronica Center

During the festival, the Ars Electronica Center will be dedicated to Digital Cultural Heritage. Following renowned partners such as the Grand Palais Immersif Paris, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía Madrid, the Vatican Museums, the Museo Nacional del Prado, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, this year it is the startup Iconem from Paris, the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza from Madrid, and the Kaiserschild Foundation, which present digitized art and cultural treasures in Deep Space 8K.

Thanks to the collaboration with Iconem Paris supported by the Institut Français d’Autriche, visitors will be able to experience a giant 3D model of Notre Dame Cathedral that caught fire in 2019. The model is based on scans by art historian Andrew Tallon (1969-2018) and is being prepared for Deep Space 8K by the Ars Electronica Futurelab team.

The cooperation with Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza Madrid, supported by the Spanish Embassy in Vienna, focuses on the early Renaissance: Gigapixel images of Vittore Carpaccio’s painting Young Knight in a Landscape (1510) will be shown.

Together with the Kaiserschild Foundation, the Alte Galerie in Eggenberg Castle in Graz and other museums, works by the Dutch master and famous still life painter Pieter Claesz are presented. The contribution to Ars Electronica 2024 is part of the “Kaiserschild Art Defined” project, with which the foundation makes works taken from its own and other collections accessible to a broad public in an innovative way.

The Ars Electronica Festival 2024 is funded by the City of Linz, the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, Public Service and Sports, as well as the state of Upper Austria, and numerous sponsors and partner institutions.

Statements

„Hope is in high demand in the 21st century. We hope that military conflicts do not get out of control, that climate change does not worsen our living conditions too much, and that knowledge, prosperity, and freedom do not become the privilege of a few through disruptive technologies. All of these concerns and therefore harbored hopes are more than justified. This year’s Ars Electronica underlines this and shows why we can hope. More than ever, the festival for art, technology and society focuses on those people who, with their creativity, openness and courage, are doing everything they can to turn things around.”

Klaus Luger, Mayor of the City of Linz & Owner Representative of Ars Electronica

„Ars Electronica 2024 wants to spread hope. It wants to show that new things are germinating in all the cracks that our world has developed and that it is artists, researchers, and activists who are making us aware of the associated future opportunities. The festival invites you to get to know people, projects, and initiatives from all over the world who inspire and motivate us with new thinking. The voice from Linz may seem small, but Ars Electronica has international significance. There is growing hope in its global network that we are the ones who can turn the tide.“

Doris Lang-Mayerhofer, City Councilor for Culture, Chair of Ars Electronica’s Supervisory Board

„The JKU Medical Faculty will celebrate its 10th anniversary in 2024. I am all the more pleased that the MED Campus is one of the venues for the Ars Electronica Festival for the first time this year. In the heart of Linz, visitors can expect fascinating insights into the world of medicine and innovative projects at the interface between science and art. This year, selected JKU projects will once again contribute to this as part of a LIT call, in which human-centered research in the areas of artificial intelligence, medicine, law, natural sciences, and society is conveyed artistically. For example, the world-famous Turing Test is being further developed in a playful way for the general public or the dark sides of AI are being shown in the context of the labor market. The focus is also on the critical examination of existing systems in order to sharpen our view of positive future prospects. Following on from this year’s festival theme “HOPE – who will turn the tide”, we would like to infect festival guests with our enthusiasm for science. Because research today can positively change our future tomorrow.“

Stefan Koch, Rector of Johannes Kepler University Linz

„’Who will really turn things around?’ is the big, hopeful question at the Ars Electronica Festival this year. In view of our complex and conflict-ridden times, young media artists from different fields of study as well as from our partner universities will present their possible answers and unusual approaches to them on the campus of the University of Arts Linz in the form of exhibitions, installations, performances, screenings, and workshops. We are really looking forward to entering into dialogue and discussion with the interested public about all of this as part of the Ars Electronica Festival.“

Gitti Vasicek, Vice Rector of the University of Arts Linz

„The fact that this year’s Ars Electronica Festival begins on Anton Bruckner’s 200th birthday can be seen as a lucky coincidence, or you can simply say: Typical Linz! Here tradition and avant-garde have always had a close relationship, so it is only logical to celebrate the traditional avant-garde together. We do this on our birthday with a Concert Night in which the first quantum physics concert in music history or Bill Fontana’s Silent Echos will be played. This is where the Capital of Culture comes into play: It will be a celebration! Typical Linz!“

Norbert Trawöger, Artistic Director OÖ KulturEXPO Anton Bruckner 2024 & Artistic Director Bruckner Orchestra Linz