The Ars Electronica festival in Linz, Austria began in 1979 as a collaboration between art, science, and industry. It serves as both an interface between these fields and a catalyst for cultural transformation as societies transition to being knowledge-based. Ars Electronica seeks to constantly explore new ideas and technologies through artistic projects and the Prix Ars Electronica competition. It aims to reveal relationships between art, technology, and society by bringing together artists and scientists to address challenges posed by new technologies. Major events like the outdoor "Cloud of Sound" performance help share innovative visions with the wider public. Ars Electronica has played a key role in Linz's development from an industrial city into a cultural center with a strong economy

1. Ars Electronica – a network for art, technology and society
The development of the city of Linz and its signature cultural brand Ars Electronica, can be
seen prototypic for an intense collaboration between art, science, and the industry, as well as
art and society. But it is also an interesting role model for the strong impact that artistic and
cultural activities can have onto the development of a city, its identity as well as its economic
background. Ars Electronica also has to be understood as an interface and catalyst in the
ongoing process of the cultural transformation into a modern information and knowledge
driven society.
The long standing success of Ars Electronica thus proves the importance and relevance of this
creative and artistic work in and with new media. Creativity is all about open spaces. It’s
about thinking the unpredictable, thinking against the mainstream, creating and opening up
spaces where new ideas, alternative ideas can develop. Since its first inception in 1979 it has
been the very nature of Ars Electronica to constantly seek out what’s new. But with all the
innovations in structure and content, the basic orientation remains unchanged. The focus is on
the issues of critical significance to our society. In going about this, attention is never focused
exclusively on art, on technology or on society; instead, the effort is always made to reveal
the multi-layered shifts and reciprocities taking place among them.
Ars Electronica has been living out this curiosity for three decades now, since 1979, the year
the first “Festival for Art, Technology and Society” was taking place in Linz. An
inquisitiveness that is always manifesting itself in unexpected and refreshing new ways—as
speculative designs for the future, as philosophical debates and analytical scrutiny of the latest
developments. At all times, though, Ars Electronica conceives this artistic-scientific search
for traces of emergent reality as work with and in the public sphere. In all these years, Ars
Electronica has become a significant source of inspiration in the process of cultural and
economic change that has been underway in this city. As a result, Linz has come to epitomize
the model municipality whose orientation on the future is not just a question of commerce and
industry, but rather one that is envisioned primarily as a cultural undertaking. This
demonstrates the social relevance of artistic work and also serves as a prototype for urban
renewal and cultural policy development options that go beyond traditionalism and tourism.
The fact that the rather small city of Linz has been selected as European Capital of Culture for
the year 2009 is one of the widely visible results of these changes the city has been going
through in the last decades, from a grey industrial city to a colourful and inspiring modern city
with high quality of life and a very stable and strong economy that is mainly based on new
and innovative industries.
Chapter I
Lets make a brief look back into the history, when Ars Elecronica startet in this rather small
city of Linz in Austria. A city of less than 200,000 inhabitants located right between Vienna
and Salzburg. While Vienna has all the big, imperial culture and Salzburg has all the tradition
of old, classical music and, of course, Mozart, Linz always has been an industrial city, and the
economy and the identity of the city have long been based on the steel industry. Only in the
70s the city got its first concert hall. In the late 70s and 80s, however, the steel industry went
into a global recession and crisis; and the city of Linz had to look for a new economic
direction and also for a new identity.

2. Being between these the cultural capitals—Vienna and Salzburg—the city of Linz decided not
to look back into history, but to look forward and go for the future. And they made three
important steps. One was to create a lot of incentives to help new industries and new
companies settle in Linz, and motivate them to move their business to Linz. The second thing
was to invest in education, so the local technical university was expanded and new
universities were established. And the third was to start cultural activities. In this attempt Ars
Electronica was established in 1979 as a festival for Art Technology and Society and soon it
became an important element in the development of the city.
The driving force behind this initiative was the former Director of the Austrian Broadcasting
Corporation, Dr. Hannes Leopoldseder. The very important idea behind Ars Electronica is
that it is not just an art festival, and not just a scientific conference. It is the attempt to develop
an interdisciplinary platform where, at the same time, at the same level, artists and scientists
meet each other. Every year, there is a specific topic, a theme that is based on very important
new technological and scientific innovations. Both artists and scientists are asked together to
present their way of looking at these problems, their way of thinking. The conference as well
as the exhibition is a common platform for artistic and scientific projects and ideas. It’s
always about the idea to join both forces to work on solutions to cope with the challenges that
arise from the cultural impact of new technologies. Being a festival for art technology and
society is the basic principle or Ars Electronica up today.
The second very important principle of Ars Electronica is that there is always the idea—as the
title says— to not only look at art and technology, but also on their impact on our society. In
practical terms this means that if you start to deal with very advanced ideas and topics, it is
not enough to discuss it among the elite audience of scientists and artists. You also have to
reach out for the general audience. You have to create events that raise the attention of
everybody. And one of the initial projects for art in the public space was the so-called,
“Klangwolke,” the “Cloud of Sound,” which is basically a kind of big, open air, outdoor
concert, a huge sound, light, and laser performance. And although it doesn’t feature
mainstream music it’s really a mass event. About 70,000 to 100,000 people come to this event
every year. (looking at this numbers one always has to remember that the city has less than
200.000 inhabitants)
„The Universe“ - Isao Tomita created the spectacular event for the 1984 Klangwolke, Foto:
Ars Electronica Archive

3. This is one of the elements which have helped strongly to bring Ars Electronica and its
visions to the attention of everybody, to make it an event for every person in the city of Linz,
and in the region. This idea of combining the avant-garde thinking of artists and scientists
with projects that are reaching out for everybody is still a very important element of our
programs.
The next step in the development of Ars Electronica happened in 1987, when the Prix Ars
Electronica, the first international competition for computer art, was initiated. A competition
totally dedicated to digital art the artistic work had to be created with computer technology.
The Prix Ars Electronica started with three categories: Computer Animation, Computer
Graphics and Computer Music. Today the Prix Ars Electronica is still the most highly priced
and reputated competition for Cyberarts. Meanwhile it has 8 Categories: 5 Major Categories
for Computer Animation, Digital Musics, Interactive Art, Hybrid Art and Digital
Communities, since 1998 there is also a special category called, “U-19” (Under 19). This is a
category for young people under 19 years and their creative use of computers. This is
probably one of the most interesting areas right now, to see how very young people are using
computer technology in highly creative ways. Among the many prize winners in the 14 years
of this competition, you can probably find almost every important person who has ever
worked in the field of computer art. John Lasseter, Peter Gabriel, or Toshio Iwai and Ryuichi
Sakamoto, or Aphex Twin but also Neil Stephenson, Tim Berners Lee, Linus Thorwalds and
Jimmy Wales for example, have been among the prize winners. This year the competition
again got more than 3000 Submissions from artists from about 60 countries worldwide.
Prix Ars Electronica Awards 1988, Foto Ars Electronica Archive
With these activities, the festival and the price competition, Ars Electronica has also served as
a logbook recording the development of new art forms and new artistic practices as well as
the accompanying transcendence of boundaries to science and technology. The enormous
archive that has taken shape as a result constitutes powerful testimony to the manifold
currents and trends to which the interplay and friction between art and technology have given

4. rise, and also documents Ars Electronica’s unique breadth as a discussion forum providing a
staging ground for confrontation and dialogue, for provocation and bridge-building.
Chapter II
In the 1990ies, the digital revolution and the success of the World Wide Web swapped over
from the United States to Europe, and so, in Linz people started to think about the next step in
the development of Ars Electronica. They considered how to create an educational and
informational structure to help the local people to understand the transformation of the old
economy into the new economy, from the old society into the new information society. The
idea was to create the Ars Electronica Center, a “museum of the future” as a prototype for
new forms of media based education and communication. Again it was Dr. Hannes
Leopoldseder who developed this idea in 1993 and I had the big honour and pleasure to be
taken on board in 1995 to shape and to realize this visionary concept and transform it into a
real and operational exhibition infrastructure. The first Ars Electronica Center opened in 1996
and it was not conceived as an art museum for the digital art, and also not as a science center.
It was build as an educational, didactic environment that would use interactive technologies
and digital art projects to help people understand the cultural and social impact of new media
and digital information technologies. One of its core missions was to stimulate creativity and
innovative thinking. And even if it was by far not a typical art museum where you would
collect art projects and exhibit them, most of the projects that we had shown in this Ars
Electronica Center were created by artists. We invited artists to help us with all their
competence and know-how in creating interactive, communicative environments, in
communicating very complicated matters to a general audience.
The first Ars Electronica Center that opend in 1996, Foto: Pilo, Ars Electronica Archive
There is by far not enough space here to present all the projects, since even the elevator in this
museum had a special installation. From high end virtual reality installations like the CAVE
(the first ever to be installed outside the US and the first that was made accessible to the

5. public) to the basic infrastructures of an electronic classroom, from the most entertaining
flight simulator "Humphrey", to exceptional art projects from world famous media artists like
Toshio Iwai. The range of installations and projects was very wide but all of them were made
to involve the visitors and transform them into users, participants and creators.
The CAVE at the old Ars Electronica Center (1996), Foto: Pilo, Ars Electronica Archive
The Electronic Classroom in the old Ars Electronica Center, Foto: Pilo, Ars Electronica
Archive

6. The flight simulator "Humphrey" one of the main attractions in the old Ars Electronica
Center, Foto: Pilo, Ars Electronica Archive
The "Telegarden" (realized by a group of artists and engineers led by Ken Goldberg) was one
of the most famous projects in the old Ars Electronica Center

7. Morphovision, exceptional media art by Toshio Iwai, Foto: Pilo, Ars Electronica Archive
Chapter III
To bring such concepts into reality it is very important to consider that in our time, it is maybe
more important to support the production of new ideas than just the exhibition of it, and that’s
why we also established the Ars Electronica Futurelab.
Launched in 1996, the Futurelab is blending elements of atelier and laboratory. It is Ars
Electronica’s inhouse think tank as well as engineering team. It is the place where we produce
new projects for our own exhibitions and where many new art projects for the Festival are
realized within our Artist in Residence program.
The Futurelab is the model of a new kind of media art R&D laboratory in which artistic
experimentation and technological innovation inspire one another. Each of the lab’s working
groups brings together a wide variety of skills; their approach to a project is characterized by
interdisciplinarity and international networking. At present, the staff of 40+ includes artists,
computer scientists, physicists, media & product designers, architects, game developers,
telematic engineers, sociologists, art historians and scholars in the fields of cultural studies
and communications they are coming from almost all over the world. Conceiving and
executing exhibitions and artistic installations as well as collaborations with university
facilities and joint ventures with partners in the private sector frame the Futurelab’s broad
spectrum of activities.
Ars Electronica has partners and sponsors, and they can get access to the knowledge and
experience of our people and the possibility to work together with them in workshops and
commissioned R&D projects. (among those are big players like Siemens, SAP but also many
small local companies)
For example the simulation of working processes of a steel plant: Not just as a visualization
but also the simulation of all the different steps that are used to manufacture steel. And the
same group of people that was working on this project was also working on a very interesting
art project at the same time. Software solutions that have been realized for art projects could
be used in industrial projects as well.

8. « CAVE » an artistic VR-Environment of Peter Kogler, realized in the Ars Electronic
Futurelab (1999), Foto: Ars Electronica Archive
Virtual Steel Plant Simulation, Research project of the Ars Electronica Futurelab in
collaboration with VAI and the Christian Doppler Institute for Software engineering (1999).
Foto: Ars Electronica Archive

9. Another important part in the range of activities of this Future Lab is exhibition design and
the development of interactive experiences for other museums and other big exhibitions like,
for example, for the Millennium Dome in London. But also big media art projects for public
spaces and buildings have been realised in the last years
Gullivers World / Citypuzzle (2004 - 06), an interactive exhibition project from the Ars
Electronica Futurelab, Foto: Pilo, Ars Electronica Archive
"SourceCode", a Futurelab project for the SAP Headquater in Waldorf, Germany (2007),
Foto: Ars Electronica Archive

10. The debut of the extended new Ars Electronica Center on Jan. 2nd 2009 is the latest step in a
long lasting effort to educate, inform, engage and inspire the people from Linz as well as
curious and interested guests from all over the world. Rooted in the long tradition of Ars
Electronica, the new Center defines itself first and foremost as a gateway, as infrastructure for
an active, creative encounter with issues of great current relevance. In addition to the long
term themes around the new digital cultures, the new Ars Electronica Center shifts new
themes into the spotlight. Fields in which the most massive and controversial innovative
thrust is in the process of emerging now: the so-called Life Sciences, a field subsuming
biotechnology, genetic engineering and the neurosciences. Here, we encounter imaging
processes and mankind’s quest to blaze trails into the microcosm. Images of the human body.
Images that get under your skin. Images which question the very ways we think about human
beings and the world.
The new Ars Electronica Center, opened on Jan. 2nd 2009, Foto: Andreas Hirsch, Ars
Electronica Archive
All the programs and exhibits are centered on the interplay of art and science. Staging
exhibitions, conducting research activities and running a program imparting knowledge &
skills are no longer separate strands; at the AEC , they’re completely intertwined. The
watchwords: interaction and experimentation opening up new realms of ideas and images.
Joint ventures with top-name research institutions in Austria and abroad sustain this facility’s
strong scientific orientation; collaboration with artists opens up unaccustomed perspectives.
With Ars Electronica, the city of Linz embarked on its route towards the future and it has
been joined by communities of cyberartists and digerati dispersed throughout the world as
well as by the local inhabitants. It functions like an ongoing expedition that blazes trails into
new and barely chartered territories, gathering samples and artifacts as it continues on its
journey, encountering milestones and signposts indubitably pointing the way as well as
transient phenomena and experiments of uncertain outcome. Thus, bearing witness to

11. contemporary developments and accumulating authentic experience have proven to be most
reliable methods for settling in the new realm of our networked and global time.
Impressions from the new exhibits at the Ars Electronica Center, Fotos: Andreas Hirsch, Ars
Electronica Archive