The Ars Electronica Festival will present the STARTS initiative and a selection of the award-winning and nominated works for the 2021 STARTS Prize: From Circular Economy to the Relationship between Ecology and Technology, from Digital Humanism to Empathic Approaches to Artificial Intelligence. The exhibition showcases the outstanding diversity of artistic practice stemming from the STARTS context.

STARTS is an initiative launched by the European Commission that aims to combine technology and artistic practice in the best possible way in order to benefit European innovation policy as well as the art world. The focus is on people and projects that help to master Europe’s social, ecological and economic challenges. One of these projects is a prize that Ars Electronica has established in collaboration with BOZAR and Waag with the aim of selecting the most outstanding collaborations and achievements in the field of creativity and innovation at the interface of science and technology with the arts.

The STARTS Prize has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 956603

Data Garden

Cyrus Clarke (UK), Monika Seyfried (PL), Jeff Nivala (US)

Working with nature to respond to the threat of Data Warming, Data Garden invites visitors to experience a new materiality around data, and explore a world in which data storage is truly green. This type of organism-based data centre is designed to inspire new models that bring principles of working with nature to data, creating regenerative data ecosystems.

Remix el Barrio, Food Waste Biomaterial Makers

Anastasia Pistofidou, Marion Real and The Remixers from Fab Lab Barcelona, IaaC (INT)

In Catalonia alone, every day, 720,000 kg of food is thrown away. This wasted food, totaling 260,000 tons per year, is equivalent to the food needs of 500,000 people for one year. Remix el Barrio was born with the ambition to propose a learning space to encourage and nurture new practices based on food-waste crafts.

ELEVENPLAY x Rhizomatiks “border 2021”

MIKIKO (JP), ELEVENPLAY (JP), Daito Manabe (JP), Motoi Ishibashi (JP), Rhizomatiks (JP), Takayuki Fujimoto (JP), evala (JP)

The dance company, ELEVENPLAY, the director-choreographer, MIKIKO, and the collective led by Daito Manabe and Motoi Ishibashi, Rhizomatiks, presented a dance piece border in 2015. We developed and updated our experiment of 2015 to establish a new expression model for both online and on-site experience for the post-COVID-19 era.

Face Lab

Håkan Lidbo (SE)

A series of projects exploring the outer limits of how we use our face as an interpreter of our environment—or for the surroundings to find out what is going on in our minds.

In a Small Room

KyungJin Jeong (KR)

In a Small Room focuses on two social issues, the first being the problem of poor living conditions in modern metropolitan areas, such as London and Seoul. The demand for housing in large cities, such as London, has greatly increased, but supply has not caught up with demand, a problem that has given rise to a cramped, prison-like residential environment.

mEat me

Theresa Schubert (DE)

As an artistic research project, mEat me applies innovative biotechnological advancement beyond a scientific purpose or monetary intent. For the lab process, a serum, gained out of her own blood, was used to reproduce her muscle cells that had previously been extracted. The resulting cultured human meat shifts normative borders and dissolves the consumerist hierarchy between humans and animals.

In Event of Moon Disaster

Halsey Burgund (US), Francesca Panetta (GB)

In Event of Moon Disaster invites you into this alternative history and asks us all to consider how new technologies can bend, redirect, and obfuscate the truth around us. The project has a physical installation as well as an online component.

Oceans in Transformation

Territorial Agency – John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog (INT)

Oceans in Transformation investigates the impact of human activity on the world ocean. The global ocean is changing its circulations, energies, interactions, and ecologies. It is the most dynamic and sensitive component of our living planet. The ocean is in a new phase of its dynamic history, shaped by intensifications of the impact of human activities on planetary systems—the Anthropocene.

The Living Light

Nova Innova (NL)

There is a ground-breaking technology, called Microbial Fuel Cell (MFC) technology. This technology enables us to generate energy from organic waste: from compost to mud, from urine to plants. All organic waste streams are turned into sustainable energy sources thanks to this innovative technology.

TheirTube

Tomo Kihara (JP/NL)

Theirtube is an open-source web service that provides a look into how videos are recommended on other people’s YouTube. Users can experience how the YouTube starting page would look for six different personas: Conspiracist, Climate Denier, Conservative, Liberal, Prepper, and Fruitarian.

Credits

The STARTS Prize has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 956603.