The Ars Electronica Festival thrives on its diversity – and on the people who visit it. Whether music lover, artist, researcher or social activist: everyone finds their own approach to the central themes of art, technology and society. Our festival offers many ways to get involved, discover and be inspired. We would like to show you some of these approaches here – welcome!
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Festival for
For AI Inquirers
From self-playing instruments and virtual debates to databases that make the deadly dimensions of automated warfare visible: Artificial intelligence is shaping the present and the future in radical ways. At the festival, artistic works and forums explore how democracy can be rethought, how education can become a protective shield against digital dangers and how intimacy, emotion and language are transformed by AI.
For Art Lovers
When cities become stages at night, game worlds are transformed into dance floors and voices from loudspeakers make invisible ecologies audible, then art unfolds its power beyond the usual boundaries. This year's works invite you to engage with visions, fragments and stories that touch on intimacy and memory as well as politics and technology. A festival experience that not only needs to be seen, but also experienced and shared.
For Cultural Heritage Explorers
Whether Egon Schiele's haunting self-portraits, Van Gogh's luminous sunflowers in digital close-up or hidden perspectives on St. Mary's Cathedral - cultural heritage tells of the diversity of human forms of expression across time and continents. Treasures from Japan and Korea as well as works by forgotten artists are made newly accessible using state-of-the-art technologies. The festival invites you not only to look at history, but to bring it to life in ever new images, voices and spaces.
For Digital Arts & Culture Professionals
How can art strengthen social resilience, reshape community and open up critical perspectives on digital technologies? With discussions, town halls and performative formats, the festival offers experts from art, culture and the creative industries impulses to further develop their practice in the field of tension between art, technology and society - and to forge new alliances.
For Families
Whether tinkering with ideas for the future, exploring interactive worlds or trying out how machines learn to think - the festival is an adventure playground for young and old. Here, the next generation can give free rein to their creativity and adults can discover new things. Five days full of exploratory spirit, imagination and hands-on moments await you!
For First Movers
Attending the festival for the first time? Then a world full of surprises, inspiring encounters and impressive experiences that make art, technology and society tangible awaits you from September 3 to 7, 2025. Discover the exhibitions in POSTCITY, the former postal distribution center at Linz Central Station, on your own or let WE GUIDE YOU give you exciting insights on guided tours.
For Innovators
From robotic caregivers and empathy-triggering machines to quantum art and collaborative XR worlds, citizen science initiatives and new approaches in neurotechnology - the festival will be a laboratory for pioneering ideas. Meet researchers, developers and artists who are pushing the boundaries between science, technology and society and discover perspectives that radically challenge familiar ideas.
For Music Lovers
From a festive opening and the rediscovery of an opera composed in the ghetto of Theresienstadt at the Big Concert Night, to a glittering Nightline and concerts in which organs awaken as living worlds of sound - the festival opens up extraordinary spaces in which music becomes an experience between tradition and the present. Whether rousing electronic live sets, piano works with visualization or experimental sound adventures: music is not only heard here, but experienced in all its diversity.
For Sustainability Advocates
From microorganisms in rain clouds and algae as life-givers to questions about energy, consumption and the hidden costs of urban growth - the festival opens up spaces in which sustainability can be both sensually experienced and critically scrutinized. Installations, workshops and artistic experiments reveal how technologies can be conceived in a regenerative way and how plants, soil and people interact to create new visions of agriculture.