On the eve of the official festival kickoff, this year’s Ars Electronica goes into medias res. The program includes a Pre Opening Walk that starts at the OK in the OÖ Kulturquartier and continues with the example of award-winning artworks in the CyberArts exhibition to show how civil society in the 21st century is using new technologies to document subtle and deadly forms of violence and to hold their creators accountable (Cloud Studies / Forensic Architecture). Or how a unique collection of edible earth samples can become the starting point for reflecting on our complex and partly lost relationship with nature (The Museum of Edible Earth / masharu).

We continue our walk to the University of Art and Design Linz on the main square of Linz, where the exhibition “Loops of Wisdom” explores the question of how we generate our knowledge about the world and why – given the state of this world – we develop very little wisdom despite all this knowledge. A guide to action is proposed to help us finally make more of our knowledge and get into action.

The last stop of the evening is the Ars Electronica Center, which makes it clear with the show “There is no Planet B” that the species Homo Sapiens will not be able to cheat its way through. Artistic projects make us aware that we don’t lack solutions, but rather the will and the consistency to use them and to develop ourselves as individuals and as a society in such a way that the generations after us will still find a future worth living on this planet. Freely adapted from Carl Sagan: „There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.“ Additionally, the Ars Electronica Futurelab’s “Alchemists of the Future” invite you to embark on a tour through their vision and ideas for the future, which are distributed throughout the Ars Electronica Center.