This year, too, the Ars Electronica Festival will emphasize its significance as an international platform by engaging different communities, disciplines, and sectors in a dialogue. Award-winning artists and high-ranking representatives from art and culture, renowned scientists and emerging students, entrepreneurs as well as political decision-makers from Europe and all over the world are to be expected.
Visitors can look forward to topnotch exhibitions, concerts, performances, symposia, talks, and Townhall Meetings. The multi-faceted program will consistently focus on psychological, neurological, and philosophical aspects of panic, the synchronicity of and tension between collapse, transformation, and new beginnings. Furthermore, the role of art in times of radical change will be addressed.
Events and concerts
The Pre-Opening-Walk (Tuesday, September 2) will kick off the festival week. At the Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, the University of Arts Linz, the Atelierhaus Salzamt, and the Ars Electronica Center, curators and artists will welcome the audience and provide exclusive insights into their exhibitions. Admission is free.
The official Ars Electronica Opening (Wednesday, September 3) will invite all visitors from Linz and international guests to celebrate the opening of the festival together. Highlight of the evening will be excerpts of the Walzersymphonie, a project by the Ars Electronica Futurelab in cooperation with four renowned music universities, commissioned for the festival year “Johann Strauss 2025 Wien”. Here, the world-famous music by the Viennese “Waltz King” becomes the subject of an inspiring research program on AI and creativity. Musicians from the Bruckner Orchestra Linz will perform, the St. Mary’s Cathedral will provide an impressive stage. The Ars Electronica Opening will be held as a guest performance of this year’s Brucknerfest. Admission is free.
The Prix Ars Electronica Award Ceremony (Thursday, September 4) at the Design Center Linz will be a further highlight of the festival week. On this evening, the focus will lie on art—and with it on the exceptional artists who were awarded the Golden Nica of the Prix Ars Electronica in 2025. In addition, the winners of the STARTS Prize, the STARTS Prize Africa, and the European Union Prize for Citizen Science will be asked to the stage—these prizes are financed by the European Union, the competitions are organized and conducted by Ars Electronica.
The Big Concert Night (Friday, September 5) in the train hall of the POSTCITY will take place in commemoration of the end of World War II 80 years ago. The chamber opera The Emperor of Atlantis or The Disobedience of Death, created 1943/44 by Viktor Ullmann and Peter Kien in the Theresienstadt Ghetto, will be staged in an interplay of orchestral music and scenically visualized performance. The production is a cooperation between Ars Electronica, the Filharmonie Brno, the Landestheater Linz, and the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna (mdw).
The Ars Electronica Nightline (also Friday, September 5) will invite DJ sets and performances to the train hall.
The Sonic Saturday (Saturday, September 6) at the Anton Bruckner Private University will again open up fascinating worlds of sound. This time, too, a musical highlight will take place at the Ars Electronica Center, performed in cooperation with the Brucknerfest as the opening of the Klangwolke in Deep Space 8K: With their piano concert chroma, Daniel Oliver Moser (composition) and Konstantin Semilakovs (piano and visuals) will present a piece that combines piano sounds and generative visualizations.
The Futurelab Night (Saturday, September 6) will also invite visitors to Deep Space 8K and show them how new technologies and artistic approaches can be combined to exceptional and fascinating experiences. Projects by the Ars Electronica Futurelab, including the Europe-wide XR research project SHARESPACE, will be presented.
Exhibitions
The Prix Ars Electronica exhibition is the most important exhibition of the festival and will be presented at the Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz for the second time in a row. It will feature media art projects submitted in 2025 to the categories New Animation Art, Artificial Life & Intelligence, and Digital Musics & Sound Art and awarded the Golden Nicas, Awards of Distinctions, or Honorary Mentions by the international jury.
The S+T+ARTS Initiative (Science, Technology, and the Arts) of the European Commission will play a crucial role at the festival location of the POSTCITY, the former mail distribution center: an exclusive exhibition space will be dedicated to the award-winning projects of the STARTS Prize 2025. The STARTS Prize is realized by a group of European partner institutions, including Sónar, the Salzburger Festspiele, the TUD Technische Universität Dresden, as well as the High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart. Furthermore, with the STARTS Prize Africa exhibition and the exhibition on the European Union Prize for Citizen Science, more award-winning projects and initiatives from major European competitions will be presented at the POSTCITY.
The exhibition on the theme of the festival will be on show in the expansive bunker of the POSTCITY. In 2025, the manifold contributions will also include the results of the one-year residency program for artists in the context of the European Digital Deal (co-financed by the European Union). The works were created at renowned cultural institutions such as Onassis Stegi (GR), Braga Media Arts (PT), Waag Futurelab (NL), as well as in Linz at Ars Electronica. The Ars Electronica Features exhibition will also take place in the POSTCITY, bringing together artistic projects from partner institutions from the international network of Ars Electronica.
Also on show at the POSTCITY will be the winners of the State of the ART(ist) competition as well as the Ars Electronica Award for Digital Humanity. Both are awarded by Ars Electronica and the Austrian Federal Ministry for European and International Affairs. They will be joined by works by Latin-American artists who received the CIFO x Ars Electronica Award in 2025 as well as Chilean contributions at the interface between science, technology, and media art which were selected from an open call by the Cultural Ministry of Chile, and the Foreign Relations Ministry of Chile as well as Ars Electronica.
The LIT – Linz Institute of Technology, located at Johannes Kepler University Linz, will present unique projects by JKU researchers and artists that find innovative approaches to scientific topics. The repeated involvement of the LIT deepens a long-term partnership between Arts Electronica and JKU, emphasizing the added value of a permanent exchange between art and science.
The University of Arts Linz has been a key partner of Art Electronica for more than two decades and will also provide a stage in 2025 for manifold works from its own fields of study as well as for contributions by students from international partner universities. The Ars Electronica Campus—curated by the University of Arts Linz and Ars Electronica—will span two buildings of the University of Arts and the POSTCITY. Works and performances by young artists, who mesmerize with creative approaches and topics, will be on show. This year’s Special Featured University in the splace gallery at the main square will be the National Academy of Art from Sofia/Bulgaria.
Conferences, talks and workshops
From September 3-7, the POSTCITY will not only be a hub for a series of exhibitions but also a forum for exciting talks, presentations, and panels on the topic of the festival, which will accompany the visitors throughout the festival week. In addition, further symposia are scheduled:
In 2025, Ars Electronica will focus on education for several days. The symposium, which has been organized together with the University of Education Upper Austria for years, will be complemented by an international conference focused on the topics of democracy, media literacy, and didactics as part of the EU-funded project Critical ChangeLab.
Together with partners like the Oulu University of Applied Sciences, the European Theater Convention, and more than ten European theaters, the topic AI and Artistic Creation will be explored in the context of the EU-co-financed project ACuTe, and the focus will be placed on Digital Theater. Applications of AI in content design, production phase, ticketing, or in the field of Audience Engagement will be presented and discussed. Furthermore, a STARTS Day will also take place in 2025, providing a forum for protagonists from industry, art, and technology to discuss the digital sovereignty and future of Europe.
On January 1, 1995, Austria joined the European Union. On the occasion of this anniversary, Ars Electronica together with the Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport are planning a focus event on 30 years of Austria in the EU. Furthermore, in the light of European exchange, a workshop series for culture managers at European institutions is planned for 2025. Here, the EU-funded project EXCENTRIC, which was initiated in 2025, plays a key role. It focuses on the digital transformation in cultural organizations and is realized by Ars Electronica together with institutions such as the der Erasmus University Rotterdam, KEA European Affairs, Europeana, or the European Festival Association.
Special presentations and discussions on the topic of Citizen Science—as part of the EU-funded project IMPETUS—will complete the conferences in the POSTCITY. The focus will be on pioneering methods and the question, how especially artists and young people can actively contribute to the research process.
In the Sky Loft of the Ars Electronica Center international experts will meet at the Expanded conference from September 3-5 to discuss current trends in animation art. The program of presentations and panels is organized together with the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria – Campus Hagenberg. In line with this conference, the Atelierhaus Salzamt will once again turn into a place of innovative animations for the duration of the festival.
Specials
create your world will once again take place on the first floor of the POSTCITY. On an area of 2,000 square meters, visitors can experiment, tinker, present, and discuss—a colorful array of open workshops will make the hearts of young and young-at-heart explorers skip a beat. Highlight will be the exhibition of the projects awarded a prize in the u19 category at the Prix Ars Electronica.
A premiere will be the ceremony of the Media Literacy Award for teachers from Austria who excelled with innovative teaching concepts. The first prize of the competition, which is jointly awarded by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research, Ars Electronica, and Austria’s Agency for Education and Internationalisation (OeAD), is a media education workshop for a school class worth 2,000 euros.
If you are interested in the role and impact of art in times of radical change, you should not only look to artists but also to institutions. Therefore, which role does Ars Electronica play and what does it aim to achieve?
Ars Electronica is “more” than simply a festival and a museum. Ars Electronica Futurelab and Ars Electronica Solutions in particular conduct research and develop for companies and industry, administration and politics, as well as clients from science and research —and want to make an impact. In the context of the festival, the teams from Ars Electronica Futurelab and Ars Electronica Solutions will, for the first time, create a common space where they will address not only what but also how and with which goals projects are implemented. The focus will be on talks and discussions on how art and culture institutions such as Ars Electronica define and implement their role in society. Which forms of innovation do Ars Electronica Futurelab and Ars Electronica Solutions want to promote? Which added value do they aim to create for whom?
The Pavilion Against Indifference will be in the POSTCITY. It is being established as part of the Flood the Zone with Courage project by Ars Electronica und Circus of Knowledge (Johannes Kepler University). The focus lies on democratic processes, forms of protest, and collective action. Visitors of the festival will be invited to actively participate in interactive workshops, live discussions, and artistic interventions.
For years, Cultural Heritage has been a central part of the program of every Ars Electronica Festival. Following the Louvre, the Uffizi, the Museo Reina Sofía, and the Vatican Museums, the National Gallery London will present high-quality digitizations of artworks in Deep Space 8K.
We look forward to your visit to the
2025 Ars Electronica Festival
September 3-7, 2025, POSTCITY Linz