Another Intelligence is Possible
This year’s Ars Electronica Festival theme exhibition is dealing with the many different forms the relationship between the digital and all scales of life can assume. The artworks demonstrate the links technologies evolve to living things from the tiniest microbial organisms to the methods of examining our bodies and even shows the potential to facilitate the creation of life itself.
The journey through the selected works also present ways in which technology connects us to our surroundings. Beginning at the recreation of sea water from human tears, our artificial children are taken to space to see whether creative imagination can be infused in computational brains, facilitating viewpoints different from the human-centered ones. Emerging technology even enables us to examine processes derived from enormous amounts of data that otherwise cannot be grasped, let alone be observed by the naked eye.
Last but not least another challenge is to regain agency over seemingly overpowering economical entities. Presented are ways in which technology helps gain proficiency in the inner workings of big tech, big data or machine learning and consequently empowers users to ask for a different and potentially more equal kind of distribution, maybe even advocates for data sovereignty. This empowerment at the same time directs the question back at ourselves: how our lives will look like not only with, but also through our technology in the future.
Many of the projects presented within the theme exhibition have been developed in the framework of several residencies within the European ARTificial Intelligence Lab. The selection also includes winning projects of the STARTS Prize and the Prix Ars Electronica as well as works developed in collaboration with Deutsche Telekom and the Johannes Kepler University Linz.
This project is presented in the framework of the European ARTificial Intelligence Lab, which is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union and the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport