Exhibitions, Projects

Rêverie Reset
Yan Lei (CN)
Rêverie Reset is a system that expands on Yan Lei's practice of dissolving images into concepts. The video-installation makes use of cutting-edge computational systems and networking technologies in order to reaffirm the artist's notion of the artificiality of representation and the irrelevance of the image.

Stereospacer: Nature Space
Michael Markert (DE)
Explore how virtual insect and physical city sounds mix and discover how this experience changes the perception of the area outside the exhibition space.

The Hudson
Maria Marshall (CH/UK)
Men in suits and ties carrying briefcases appear on the Hudson River and walk onto the beach and beyond the frame. Their clothes are wet. The same men appear with dry clothes and walk out of frame. The soundtrack is of a Trump speech about putting up the wall, sped-up to sound like Mickey Mouse.

PRESSURE
Julian Pixel Schmiederer (AT), Gregor Franz (AT), Johannes Rass (AT), Lara Rabitsch (AT)
The movie is a mirror of modern society where uniqueness is demonized, where striving for freedom is something uncommon and where chasing your dreams is not cool anymore. In a society like this it´s hard for people to identify themselves, because we are taught not to be different. We are always trying to push our psychological limits to the edge, just to do what others think is good for us. The film is dealing with these issues and looks at them from an artistic perspective.

Global Consciousness Interface
Sebastian Kaye (UK/DE)
Global Consciousness Interface is a portable interface that allows users to connect themselves to this net of consciousness whenever they feel the need. As “esoteric electronics,” this device mirrors a part of the tantric approach in Tibetan Buddhist meditation; by using body, speech, and mind, one's totality is applied. Here, the body is reflected in the use of the user's heart rate, the bell symbolizes speech, and the mind is united with itself through this interface.

SLAP – See Like A Pony
Sabine Engelhardt (DE)
With SLAP I want to make robotics not only understandable but truly approachable. Clifford Nass drew the comparison of robots with domesticated animals. They are useful, but also dangerous. But, how do we communicate with animals? Can we feel them? How does it work?

Not Invented Here / Proudly Found Elsewhere
Fette Sans (DE)
When consuming Fette Sans pills, we expect solution, salvation, reaction, enlightenment, modification, relief, or at least a truly good high. Her pills, all individual and artisanally crafted from various kinds of digestible matter, disappoint and refuse any shift to reality.

Pig Simulator
Stephan Isermann (DE)
The Pig Simulator takes place in virtual reality but also in real space. The goal is to escape the slaughter in virtual reality – and, as in the real life of the real pig, this idea becomes futile. The user will live and die like a pig and experience the habitat of the animal as closely as possible through the virtual embodiment of an artificial and cruel habitat designed by humans to satisfy our desire for mass consumption of meat. The Pig Simulator may subvert common expectations about gaming and fights the dark irony of a just world of unequal life forms living in the shared habitat called Earth.

Estuary Poem for Wyndham Lewis
Robert Montgomery (UK)
A memorial fire-poem to Wyndham Lewis at the point in which the River Thames, having left London, meets the North Sea. This work is both a ceremonial elegy to Lewis (an important figure in British Modernism and the editor of the concrete poetry journal BLAST) and an updating of his phrase “Enemies of the Stars” for the age of ecological crisis. It seems that we have now all become the enemies of the icebergs and the stars...

FUNGUAGE - the FUN spirit in the future
Panel Discussion
What is the future of playfulness? How can we work on this future in the present, in the midst of our current societies? At the Panel Discussion FUNGUAGE - the FUN spirit in the future, these questions will be examined, using the example of a shared research project between BANDAI NAMCO Research Inc., Hakuhodo and the Ars Electronica Futurelab - FUNGUAGE. FUNGUAGE is a new form of language that enables humans and non-living material to communicate more effectively, creating a speculative scenario that uses FUN as a universal language, transcending cultural boundaries.