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.
Phonos / Marc Vilanova - Photo: Anna Benet
Collection
For Art Lovers
Art and Culture in Times of Uncertainty: From Artistic Practice to Social Action
Art and Culture in Times of Uncertainty: From Artistic Practice to Social Action situates art and culture at the intersection of disciplinary paths—a site of collective and individual sense-making where complexities are translated across disciplinary narratives.
Dancing Plague
2girls1comp (CH/IT)
In Dancing Plague, a mod for Grand Theft Auto V, the game’s traditionally gendered choreography is subverted, forcing every male NPC to dance feverishly. This intervention spotlights the inherent gender biases within the game, creating a spectacle where masculinity is both liberated and challenged.
Der Atem 17/19
Lee Jung In Creation (KR)
Der Atem 17/19 is an engaging and immersive dance performance that fuses Korean tradition with a contemporary interpretation. Drawing on traditional rhythms and the “Ganggangsullae” dance, six dancers move in dialogue with a sequence of evolving, dynamic patterns, and irregular forms, creating a compelling interplay of movement and sound.
Feeding the Future: Robotics and technology as a practice of care
Mónica Rikić (ES)
Have you ever imagined a robot feeding you in old age? Would that mean you’re not dining alone? Is it care — or just convenience? And how political could those questions become? Join this participatory workshop by Mónica Rikić for a glimpse into a possible future.
Guanaquerx
Paula Gaetano Adi (AR/US)
Guanaquerx retraces the historic crossing of the Andes to reimagine technology as a tool for liberation, decolonization, and renewed relationships between humans, machines, and the earth.
Meet the artist: Alona Rodeh
Alona Rodeh (IL/RO)
Alona Rodeh, artist, scenographer, and urban planner, is renowned for her nuanced engagement with public space—especially the city at night. Rodeh will present her awarded work CORE DUMP, alongside two additional works: Fogging (2025) and Runway Freefall (2022–2024).
Meet the artist: Alessandro Bavari
Alessandro Bavari (IT)
Pioneer of experimental animation, Alessandro Bavari, presents a recent AI-generated film together with Metachaos (2010), the short film that earned him a Golden Nica. The session explores how his artistic language has evolved across media and time.
Meet the artist: Collective Total Refusal
Total Refusal (AT)
Winners of an Honorary Mention at this year’s Prix Ars Electronica in the New Animation Art category, the pseudo-Marxist media guerrilla Total Refusal will present their latest work World at Stake, which offers a sharp reflection on collective inertia in the face of global crisis.
NEBELKEGELN (Fog Bowling)
STADTWERKSTATT / STWST (AT), Combatants and Guests
This year’s Stadtwerkstatt art event NEBELKEGELN stages a spectacle of reduced visibility, diffuse events, invisibility, and unverifiability with its bowling tournament in fog.
New Media Art Trajectories
Christa Sommerer (AT), Laurent Mignonneau (FR/AT), Claudia Hart (US), Jill Scott (AU/CH), Kurt Hentschläger (AT/US), Olga Kisseleva (FR), Paul Thomas (AU), Victoria Vesna (US)
On the occasion of the publication of the Encyclopedia of New Media Art (ENMA) by Bloomsbury Press London (2025), we will run a non-traditional roundtable event at Ars Electronica—featuring groundbreaking artists to assist and stimulate a broader discussion on new media art practice.
Patterns and Politics
Claudia Hart (US)
Patterns and Politics is the first museum retrospective of the work of US media artist Claudia Hart. Since the mid-1990s, she has constructed complex scenarios in virtual 3D spaces in which mathematical structures, scientific models, and the visual rhetoric of consumer society are abstracted and merged.
Pavilion against Indifference
Lisa Ackerl (AT), Paul David Daubek-Puza (AT), Tobias Peherstorfer (AT), die architektur – University of Arts Linz (AT)
The Pavilion against Indifference, designed and realized by the department of Architecture at the University of Arts Linz, functions as the physical center of the project in POSTCITY. It serves both as stage and gathering point.
Phonos
Marc Vilanova (ES)
Phonos is a sculptural installation of speakers attempting to emit infrasounds: vibrations below human hearing that shape more-than-human worlds. Programmed by an algorithm modelled on swarm behaviour, it generates an intimate polyrhythm that attunes us to imperceptible acoustic ecologies.
Requiem for an Exit
Frode Oldereid (NO), Thomas Kvam (NO)
Requiem for an Exit reflects on the recurring violence in human history, raising questions of guilt, memory, and the influence of technology.
The lost limbo: Sister Lin-Tou
MeimageDance (TW)
In this VR journey inspired by the a Taiwanese folk tale, the dancer’s body expands into a vast performance space resembling flesh or intertwining like vines. Viewers are led into Sister Lin-Tou’s ghostly realm and reflect on women’s social position in the age of human-machine interaction.
World at Stake
Total Refusal (AT)
A golfer fails to strike, a soccer team plays against itself, and a rally co-driver faces an identity crisis—surrounded by an audience unable to act. Shot in sports video games, the film upends victory and defeat and explores roles between individual sovereignty and collective passivity.
The Oracle: Ritual for the Future
Victorine van Alphen / Brave New Human (NL), IDlab (NL)
The Oracle: Ritual for the Future is a poetic, thought-provoking immersive performance starring the evolving relationship between humans, bodies, and AI. Blending personal story with an eerie systemic presence, participants delve into sensuality, death, agency, censorship, and irreversible change.
The Trial Against Humanity
Det Norske Teatret (NO)
The world teeters on the brink of collapse. The Artificial Intelligence Omnitron proposes a radical solution: to eradicate the species responsible for the chaos—humans. This interactive performance titled The Trial Against Humanity invites the audience to question and defend themselves against Omnitron’s accusations.
White Hunger
Oulu Theatre (FI), Oxi Koskelainen (FI), Antti Leppäniemi (FI), Tero Takalo (FI), Autuas Ukkonen (FI), Mika Ryynänen (FI), Antti Lindholm (FI), Eija Juutistenaho (FI), Jaana Kahra (FI), Henri Tuominen (FI), Elviira Kujala (FI), Joose Mikkonen (FI)
The special edition of Oulu Theatre´s White Hunger created for Ars Electronica brings the work’s audiovisual world and dystopian-carnivalesque theatrical ethos to Linz.