Edge Experiences: Entangled Lives of Matter, Technology, and Environment

This exhibition aims to illuminate how our sensory and technological extensions mediate our understanding of place and time, revealing layers of political logics, material transformations, and environmental change. Together, the artworks ask how aesthetics might serve as a form of sensing—and sense-making—in an era of accelerating sociotechnical and ecological change. This question is particularly important in view of the current multiple crises that the Ars Electronica festival is addressing this year with the theme PANIC – yes/no. In order to locate and orient ourselves in the midst of constantly shifting, unprecedented circumstances and events, we must learn to understand and become attentive to the ways new technologies, historical concepts, political goals, and individual needs come together in emergent situations. Our exhibits allow a playful, meditative, and critical approach to these questions, elevating art’s potential to reveal the conditions of perception and meaning-making. We present four artworks that explore how we sense, interpret, and shape our environments. Using sound, robotics, and computing, they translate the complex entanglements of ecological systems, cultural narratives, and technological infrastructures into traceable aesthetic forms.