IN TRANSFER – A New Condition presents the work of artists operating in the space where art, technology and society intersect, artists who are always in the places where transformation is happening. In the exhibition, visitors will meet a generation of artists who, as citizens of this world, wish to contribute new perspectives that can help us make farsighted decisions.
The Möllerei is a former steelworks that is transforming itself into a place for culture and art. The surrounding industrial area right on the border of Luxemburg and France is becoming a new district, a place for people. It is about transformation and change. These are the attributes that Ars Electronica is highlighting in the exhibition IN TRANSFER – A New Condition. It approaches these concepts and wants to explore what the nature of change is. What are the issues compelling us to change as a society and which ones are in urgent need of change? What are the mechanisms that drive change, why is it prevented, by what means can it be accomplished? And what role can art play in this?
IN TRANSFER – A New Condition is organised into 19 Art Works/Projects
masharu The Museum of Edible Earth 2017-ongoing
“Geophagy” is the scientific name for the practice of eating earth and earth-like substances such as clay and chalk. Eating earth is an ancient practice and is an integral part of many cultures all over the world.The Museum of Edible Earth is a cross-disciplinary project with a core collection of earth samples which are eaten for several reasons by different people across the globe. It invites the audience to physically question our relationship to the environment and the Earth as well as to review our knowledge about food and cultural traditions. The project addresses questions like: What stands behind earth-eating traditions? Where does the edible earth come from? What are the possible benefits and dangers of eating earth? What engagement are we as humans establishing with our environment and non-humans? The Museum of Edible Earth consists of more than 400 samples originating from 34 countries, for example many types of clay, such as kaolin and bentonite.
masharu (NL/RU) is an earth eater and an earth lover. masharu’s projects combine scientific research with a personal approach and traditional practices. In 2011 they obtained a PhD in Mathematics from Eindhoven University of Technology and graduated with honors from the Photo Academy Amsterdam. In 2013-2014 they were Artist-in-Residence at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunst in Amsterdam. In 2018 masharu was an artist fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS-KNAW). Born in Moscow, masharu lives and works in Amsterdam.
Tega Brain, Julian Oliver & Bengt Sjölén Asunder 2019
Asunder intends to question assumptions of computational neutrality, our increasingly desperate reach for technology-driven fixes to planetary challenges, and the broader ideological framing of environment as a system. More specifically, it responds to the growing interest in the application of artificial intelligence to solving critical environmental challenges. Taking this approach literally, the project combines state of the art climate and environmental simulation technology, a super-computer and machine learning techniques. The result is a fictional “environmental manager” that proposes and simulates future modifications to the planet by using data on climate, geology, biodiversity, and topography for a series of regions. Although the intention is to prevent harm and stay safely within planetary boundaries, the suggestions are often completely unacceptable, even absurd. As cities are relocated, nations combined, or rivers moved, the work shifts from humorous to preposterous, and from uncannily eco-fetishistic to tediously bureaucratic.
Tega Brain (AU) is an Australian born artist and environmental engineer whose work examines issues of data, ecology and infrastructure. Julian Oliver (NZ) is a critical engineer, artist and activist based in Berlin. Bengt Sjölén (SE) is an independent software and hardware designer/hacker/artist based in Stockholm, with roots in the home computer demo scene.
Cod.Act ,André Décosterd & Michel Décosterd: Cycloïd-E 2009
The starting point for Cycloïd-E was a desire to approach the undulatory movements of pendulums and how they could be set against the development of sound waves. But what if this “pendulum” was made up of horizontally articulated segments? What if a motor replaced the gravitational effect? The segments of the pendulum became metallic tubes equipped with sound sources and measuring devices to enable them to resonate according to their rotations. This sets off a series of unexpected movements. The balance in the energy exchanges between the segments is almost perfect. Also, the trajectories are surprisingly right and natural. Together, this creates harmony. Through its fascinating and hypnotic dance, Cycloïd-E delineates the space of sound orbits and creates a unique kinetic and polyphonic work.
Michel Décosterd (CH) started out with photography and kinetic devices which produced moving images from light and translucent material. After leaving this field he acquired more competencies in material technology and mechanics. Currently, he focuses his research on machines and on movement in particular to build kinetic sculptures. André Décosterd (CH) is a musician and composer. He specialises in computer programming of musical applications. His research focuses on composition systems specific to electroacoustic and contemporary music, in particular algorithmic composition.
Quayola Remains 2018
Remains is an ongoing project focusing on nature and the tradition of landscape paintings. Highprecision laser scanners are used to capture natural landscapes at vast resolutions, resulting in complex digital renderings printed on large-format archival paper. The combination of highly detailed geometric reconstructions and the imperfections of the 3D-scanning process create hybrid formations, somewhere in between the real and the artificial. While recreating similar conditions to “en plein air” (outdoor) painters of the late 19th century, the natural landscapes are actually observed and analysed through extensive technological apparatuses, and re-purposed through new modes of visual synthesis.
Quayola (IT/UK) employs technology as a lens to explore the tensions and equilibrium between seemingly opposing forces: real and artificial, old and new. Constructing immersive installations, he engages with and re-imagines canonical imagery through contemporary technology. Landscape painting and classical iconography are some of the historical aesthetics referenced in Quayola’s work. Deriving from custom computer software his practice also includes audiovisual performance and sculpture
Agnes Meyer-Brandis One Tree ID ? How To Become A Tree For Another Tree 2019-2022
One Tree ID condenses the identity of a specific tree into a complex perfume that can be experienced by human visitors to apprehend the tree’s communication system at a biochemical level. By applying it on their skin, people can invisibly wear characteristics of the tree they are standing next to. They can also use parts of its communication system and potentially have a conversation. Although invisible and inaudible, the conversation might still take place on the biochemical level plants use for information exchange. The work is based on the fact that plants emit and communicate via Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC) – gases and molecules that contribute to cloud formation, which we recognise as the fragrance of a forest. These emissions are specific to each individual plant. The artist aims at creating empathy and suggests an exploration of how to question the way we use our senses to generate new connections and interactions between species. Like humans, trees and plants also have their individual odour. One Tree ID’s perfumes offer alternative ways to exchange information with the plant kingdom upon which humankind depends.
Agnes Meyer-Brandis (DE) is a Berlin-based artist with a background in sculpture and new media. She creates works on the fringes of science, fiction and fabulation. Educated first in mineralogy, followed by studies at the art academies in Maastricht, Düsseldorf, and Cologne, she has been the founder and director of the Research Raft, an Institute for Art and Subjective Science that purposefully “asks questions but gives no answers” in fields such as climate research, environmental studies, meteorology, as well as synthetic and artistic biology. Meyer-Brandis’ work has been exhibited worldwide and awarded many prizes, including a Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction, and the European Kairos prize.
REMIX EcoDesign Remix EcoDesign 2021-2022
REMIX EcoDesign works with natural dyeing, moulding, 3D printing, laser cutting and other digital fabrication techniques, through co-creation and design-driven material innovation. Beyond the exhibition, REMIX EcoDesign has transformed into a collective that explores circularity, not only by creating materials with olive pits and avocados, coffee peels, vegetable and fruit skins or restaurant waste, but also by exploring collaboration, inclusivity and self-management towards shared knowledge with local actors. The collective behind this project believes that mapping the local neighbourhood resources, socialising technologies and empowering citizens with open knowledge and horizontal co-creation methodologies, are the solution for closing circular waste streams that add value while educating people on environmental impact. The project created a local impact in district scale through the synergies and connections of diverse stakeholders and a global impact through the knowledge transfer and open-source culture promoted through online tutorials.
Remix EcoDesign (ES) is a collective of designers and supporters of the local and circular economy that proposes a new productive paradigm. They advocate for the collection and processing of food waste, in order to upcycle it into biomaterials. Through artisanal techniques and digital manufacturing, the materials are shaped into new sustainable products, services, and artistic projects as an alternative for consumption and coexistence.
Špela Petric Institute for Inconspicuous Languages: Reading Lips 2018
The journal Science recently published an article in which scientists described the first meaningful exchange between a ficus tree and a human being that could, in a broader sense, be considered a conversation. The visionary experiment required utmost patience and full commitment from both parties: over the course of eighteen years (2025-43), the young ficus tree(Ficus benjamina) and the linguist M.L. had to negotiate a shared code of signs. Like all plants, ficus trees maintain rigorous control over the amount of water they absorb through the roots by opening and closing leaf pores. Each ficus leaf has thousands of such tiny openings, called stomata. M.L.’s idea was to read stomata just as people with hearing loss read lips to comprehend speech. First, M.L. taught the ficus tree the basic signs for “more,” “less,” and “stop,” adjusting the level of light according to the openness of its mouths on the underside of each leaf. They perfected the code over time and established the first scientifically recorded conversation between a plant and a human.
Reading Lips is an attempt to repeat this experiment.
Institute for Inconspicuous Languages
Špela Petric (SI) is a new media artist with a background in the natural sciences, currently a researcher at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (biophysics of photosynthesis research group), VU Artscience laboratory hybrid forms. Her artistic practice combines biomedia practices and performativity to enact strange relations between bodies that reveal the underpinnings of our (bio)technological societies and to propose alternatives. Petric? has received several awards, such as the White Aphroid for outstanding artistic achievement, the Bioart and Design Award, and an Award of Distinction at Prix Ars Electronica.
h.o What a Ghost Dreams Of 2019
What is a “ghost”? Generally, it is understood as an inner “soul” and a mysterious outward appearance. What a Ghost Dreams Of grapples with a new “ghost” of our time: digital surveillance in our society. Here in the booth, visitors are recorded by computer vision and the images are fed directly into a “ghost” that
creates new digital faces of people who do not exist in the real world. These “new” faces are subsequently displayed on screen in the hall. We must ask ourselves as humans, what we are projecting into the digital counterpart we are creating with artificial intelligence (AI). After all, it is getting to know our world without prior knowledge and generates data that never existed. Furthermore, What a Ghost Dreams Of raises questions like: What are the effects of using AI to produce works of art? Who holds the copyright? What is AI, the “ghost,” dreaming about when doing so? And ultimately, how are we intending to use AI and what effects will it have on our self-image as human beings?
h.o (hdoto) [INT] is an international artist group based in Europe, Japan and the United States. Under the mission of “Sense the Invisible”, the collectice creates experimental and artistic expressions with the speed of technological progress. The presentation of this work in the exhibition is supported by the EU-Japan Fest Japan Committee. Important notice: All images will be deleted after the exhibition.
DISNOVATION.ORG Life Support System [Ecosystem Services Estimation Experiment] 2020-ongoing
This artistic provocation seeks to estimate the orders of magnitude of critical ecosystem services that are fundamental to all planetary life processes. It is common to describe our relationships with society, the world, and the biosphere with metaphors from economics, which has specific understandings of value. Today’s prevailing economic conventions are unable to recognise the inherent value of the ecosystems on which all life depends. In cultures overdetermined by concepts from economics, we are left without adequate discursive instruments to address the importance of ecosystem contributions to life on Earth socially or politically. This experiment consists of 1 square meter of wheat, cultivated in a closed environment. Critical inputs such as water, light, heat, and nutrients are measured, monitored and displayed for the public. This procedure makes the immense scale of ecosystem contributions palpable and provides a speculative reference for a reckoning of the undervalued and over-exploited “work of the biosphere.”
DISNOVATION.ORG (FR, PL, CA) is a research collective set up in Paris in 2012, whose core members include Maria Roszkowska, Nicolas Maigret, and Baruch Gottlieb. They work at the interface between contemporary art, research, and hacking, and compose tailor-made teams for each investigation together with academics, activists, engineers, and designers. Their recent artistic provocations seek to empower Post Growth imaginaries and practices by challenging the widespread faith that “economic growth” and “technological fixes” will solve the ecosystem disruptions they produced in the first place. They recently co-edited A Bestiary of the Anthropocene, an atlas of anthropic hybrid creatures, and The Pirate Book, an anthology on media piracy. Their works have been exhibited, published, and reviewed worldwide.
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley BLACKTRANS- ARCHIVE.COM 2020
Traditionally Black Trans people have been misrepresented or absent within archives. BLACKTRANSARCHIVE. COM also known as “We Are Here Because Of Those That are Not” is an archive built and designed by and for Black Trans people. The archive’s aim was to find a way to more accurately store Black Trans existence, an archive that would erase us as it attempts to remember us. Culminating in an 3D animated game the project preserves the stories of Black Trans people generating a space where our existence cannot be ignored. The piece was designed alongside the artists Ebun Sodipo, Tobi Adebajo and Jacob V Joyce and the contributors. It is assembled and developed from the ground up by a team of Black Trans people drawing on their own lived experience. From these conversations, all characters, landscapes and stories were enfleshed into a breathing resemblance of themselves. In the style of a “Choose Your Own Adventure” and influenced by PlayStation 1 games, visitors are required to reveal their own identity in order to access the work. Depending on how you treat the archive, your journey through the work will mirror your treatment of it. WELCOME TO THE PRO BLACK PRO TRANS ARCHIVE.
Artist and game developer Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley (DE/GB) weaves the lived experiences of Black Trans people into the fabric of their fictional space. Through animation, sound, and performance, they pay reverence to the many creative narratives of “those living, those who have passed, and those who have been forgotten.” Much like a Black Trans archive, their practice cements the posterity of black trans people. Throughout history, black queer and trans people have been erased from our archives. Because of this, it is necessary not only to archive our existence but also the many creative narratives we have used and continue to use to share our experiences. Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s work has been shown in Albright Knox, David Kordansky Gallery, Quad, Arebyte Gallery, Science Gallery, MU, Barbican, Tate, and Les Urbaines, and has been part of the BBZ Alternative Graduate Show at the Copeland Gallery. Play online at home: blacktransarchive.com
Adam Harvey VFRAME: Visual Forensics and Metadata Extraction 2017-2022
VFRAME is a computer vision toolkit designed for human rights researchers. They often rely on videos shared online to document war crimes, atrocities, and human rights violations. Manually reviewing these videos is expensive, does not scale, and can cause vicarious trauma. As an increasing number of
videos are posted, a novel approach is needed to understand these large datasets. Therefore, VFRAME makes state-of-the-art artificial intelligence used in the commercial sector accessible to the needs of human rights researchers and investigative journalists. Most recently, VFRAME designed a computer vision algorithm to analyse videos from Ukraine for evidence of cluster munitions. To detect this munition a computer vision algorithm was trained using a 3D-rendered synthetic dataset. For that, a virtual 3D model of the munition was 3D printed and photographed in staged scenes to create a benchmark dataset. Together, the training and benchmark datasets were used to forge a new algorithm, which detects the cluster munition and helps the conflict zone researchers analysing war crimes in Ukraine.
Adam Harvey (US/DE) is an artist and research scientist based in Berlin. He focuses on computer vision, privacy, and surveillance. He is a graduate of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University (2010) and is the creator of the VFRAME.io computer vision project, the Exposing.ai dataset project, and the CV Dazzle computer vision camouflage concept. Harvey has worked as an adjunct professor at New York University and School of Visual Arts in New York City, a research fellow at the Künstliche Intelligenz und Medienphilosophie programme at working in with technologies as a tool that affect his artworks. On the other hand, he shows how these tools shape and manipulate his creative output. By doing so, he would like to show how machines were introduced to optimise the working processes, save time, or increase accuracy, and open the question of how we became so dependent on them that we often forget what they actually do. Instead of hyping or damning the technology, his work invites visitors to reflect on the meaning and modes of existence of technology in a critical and sober way.
Bjørn Karmann & Tore Knudsen Project Alias 2018-2019
Alias is a teachable “parasite” designed to give users more control over their smart assistants, both in terms of customisation and privacy. Using a simple app, users can train Alias to react to a custom wake word and, once trained, it can take control of the home assistant by activating it for users. Until Alias is
activated with the custom wake word it makes sure that the assistant is inactive and unable to listen by interrupting the microphones. In this way, Alias acts as a connecting element that can communicate with the smart assistant and manipulate it when placed on top of it. The entire process works disconnected from the internet, as Alias is equipped with a Raspberry Pi that operates locally to detect the wake word. This project demonstrates how maker culture and open source can be used not only to redefine our relationships with smart home technologies, but also to transfer power and control from companies to end users.
Tore Knudsen (DK) is a Copenhagen-based designer who currently works with design and strategy at Noodl, a visual programming platform. His personal work is driven by an interest to explore and challenge our relationship with modern technology. He has received multiple awards.
Bjørn Karmann (DK) is a designer working at Tellart, Amsterdam. He holds a master’s degree in Interaction Design from the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design and a bachelor’s degree in Communication Design from Kolding Design School. Bjørn combines his curiosity for new and emerging technologies with his passion for physical and human interactions, while finding a balance between nature and technology. With experience in design, art installations, robotics, and physical computing, he works across multiple disciplines and manifests between physical and virtual space.
Climate Action Tech Branch Magazine: Sustainable and Fairer Internet for Everybody Ongoing
Branch is an online magazine written by and for people who dream of a sustainable and just internet for all. The internet is the world’s largest fossil fuel-powered machine. If we continue business-as-usual, the IT sector will be responsible for 14% of the world’s carbon emissions by 2040. They believe that the internet must instead serve our collective liberation and ecological sustainability. That is why we created Branch Magazine. The magazine is a space for personal reflection, critical engagement with technology, and experimentation. Branch Magazine articles strive to connect sustainability to root causes and to inequalities experienced at different intersections—gender, race, class, ability, and so on. Creating change requires all kinds of practices, this is why contributors include climate activists, open-source technologists, indigenous leaders, artists, energy scientists, and degrowth experts, who are reflecting on the many possible paths towards a sustainable and fairer internet for all. The online magazine is itself a model of this mission—it was not only developed in a resource-saving way, but also adapts its appearance to the current share of renewable energies
Climate Action Tech (EU/global) is a community of practice of tech workers that provides support and guidance for systemic change in our organisations and industries for rapid, far-reaching, and unprecedented change. The climate crisis requires a serious and sustained response from across civil society, and that includes the tech sector and technology professionals. Climate Action Tech’s purpose is to empower technology professionals to play our part—to meet, discuss, learn about, and take climate action. Our vision is that everyone is working on the climate crisis at all levels. Climate Action Tech’s Branch Magazine was honoured with the new Ars Electronica Award for Digital Humanity. Continue reading at home: branch.climateaction.tech
Mimi Onuoha and Mother Cyborg (Diana Nucera) A People’s Guide to AI 2018
Systems that use artificial intelligence (AI) are quietly becoming present in more and more parts of our lives. But what does this technology really mean for people, both right now and in the future? Written in 2018 by Mimi Onuoha and Diana Nucera, the founders of the non-profit press A People’s Guide to Tech, A People’s Guide to AI is a comprehensive beginner’s guide to understanding AI and other datadriven tech. The guide uses a popular education approach to explore and explain AI-based technologies so that everyone—from youth to seniors, and from non-techies to experts— has the chance to think critically about the kinds of futures automated technologies can bring. The mission of A People’s Guide to AI is to open up conversation around AI by demystifying, situating, and shifting the narrative about what types of use cases AI can have for everyday people.
Mimi Onuoha (US) is a Nigerian-American artist and researcher whose work highlights the social relationships and power dynamics behind data collection. Her multimedia practice uses print, code, installation, and video to call attention to the ways in which those in the margins are differently abstracted, represented, and missed by sociotechnical systems.
Mother Cyborg (Diana Nucera) grows out of more than twenty years as a musician, technologist, community organiser and educator. She is motivated by a vision of the future where the greatest possibilities for collective liberation, art, and technology merge. She develops music, art, and educational tools to reveal the complexities that occur where technology intersects with social spaces, economies, and relationships. Continue reading at home: mimionuoha.com/a-peoples-guide-to-ai
Artists Portraits
Artists often follow the deeply human trait of curiosity, which leads them across different educations, disciplines, and many other areas of life. Having an open mind and ear for a wide range of people, be they activists, scientists, journalists, or any other group of interest, is key here. The manifold collaborative efforts, which made the artworks in this exhibition possible, are solid proof. Still, rather than “just seeing” the result, it is interesting to learn more about the people behind the artworks. In the Artist Portraits they share some of their thoughts, practices, encounters, and collaborations that led them to where they are today. Find out more: ars.electronica.art/export/en/esch-2022/artist-portraits
tranxxeno lab TX-1 2020
The enchanting Earth is too-often made inhospitable to those marked as transgender. To survive “we xenomogrify ourselves through social and biological technologies, altering our surfaces, our viscera, our molecular balances. None of us have been to space even if we possess somatic knowledges of deep bodily transformations, experiences that are necessary for extraterrestrial environments.” “TX-1 launched bits of my hormone replacement medications to the International Space Station (ISS), marking the first-known time that elements of the transgender experience orbited the Earth. TX-1 includes a fragment of my spironolactone pill, a slice of my estradiol patch, and a miniature handmade paper sculpture included to gesture towards the absent-yetpresent xenoentities of the cosmos. A symbolic exodus to an orbit high above, the return of TX-1 to Earth was also a sign of resilience, of not being disposed of, of coming back to thrive once again.” While space is, in many ways, one of the most inhospitable places for life, it simultaneously holds an aura—naïve, perhaps—as a place of transformation where the usual constraints of life on earth can be refashioned, where those who are “tranxxeno” can exist without earthly prejudices.
tranxxeno lab / Adriana Knouf, PhD (US) works as an artist, writer, and xenologist. She engages with topics such as wet media, space art, satellites, radio transmission, non-human encounters, drone flight, queer and trans futurities, machine learning, the voice, and papermaking. She is the founding facilitator of the tranxxenolab, a nomadic artistic research laboratory that promotes entanglements among entities trans and xeno. Andriana Knouf regularly presents her artistic research around the world and beyond, including a work that has flown aboard the International Space Station. She was recently a Biofriction artist-in-residence at the Kersnikova Institute in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Adriana Knouf is currently an artist-in-residence at Waag in the Netherlands, Amsterdam, as part of the Art4Med project. She lives and works in Amsterdam.
Another Farm Modified Paradise: Dress 2018
Another Farm works with genetically modified glowing silk to create surreal sculptures that incorporate textiles and traditional handicraft. Glowing silk is created by inserting the GFP gene into silkworms. Advancements in genetic modification today often raise ethical questions and inspire dystopian science fiction. However, silkworms, domesticated animals, livestock, and flora among many other examples, have been genetically modified through controlled or selective breeding for centuries and are often not associated with this topic and its ethical implications. Modified Paradise is a series of sculptures that aim to integrate new and radical technologies with traditional industries that have exploited nature to rethink the boundaries of ethics and humanity’s interaction with nature.
Another Farm (JP) is a collaborative project between Hiro Ozaki and Masaya Kushino. Working with scientists and engineers, Another Farm explores the relationship between humanity and nature to produce works that bring together new technology and traditional techniques and cultures. Past exhibitions include Nature, Cooper Hewitt Museum, New York (2019), Triennale di Milano (2019), Ars Electronica (2019), Future and the Arts, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2019) and Mode Surreal: A Crazy Love for Wearing, Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum (2022). The presentation of this work in the exhibition is supported by the EU-Japan Fest Japan Committee.
Etsuko Ichihara & ISID OPEN INNOVATION LAB. NAMAHAGE in Tokyo 2017
NAMAHAGE in Tokyo is an attempt to reinterpret the functions of traditional deities and folklore and
implement them in the city of modern era. Focusing on the contemporary urban relevance of the NAMAHAGE ritual, NAMAHAGE in Tokyo seeks to reconstruct and implement the NAMAHAGE system in a modern city. It translates and reinterprets for the urban context the ritual´s functions, including maintenance of rural community through mutual surveillance, initiation into adulthood, and reinforcement of family bonds. Making the city their habitat and evolved in adaptation to individual areas like Akihabara, Harajuku, and Sugamo, the “urban NAMAHAGE” identify “bad children” (adults in need of discipline) in each neighborhood based on the data accumulated by mutual surveillance via social media as well as other networks of surveillance spread across the city. When they emerge on New Year´s Eve, these NAMAHAGE enforce discipline by mind hacking, taking full advantage of sensing and VR technologies and bringing growth, happiness and blessings to the people of the city.
Etsuko Ichihara (JP), is a media artist / fantasy inventor. Etsuko Ichihara has been creating artworks that interpret Japanese culture, customs, and beliefs from a unique point of view, and present new, technology-based approaches. Thanks to their strong impact, these works have been introduced across a wide range of media. Etsuko Ichihara’s Digital Shaman Project was included in the Excellence Award at the Japan Media Arts Festival, Honorary Mention in Prix Ars Electronica 2018 and STARTS Prize Nomination. In April 2011, ISID established the Open Innovation Lab to collaborate with companies and educational institutions in technology research and service development by making practical use of cutting-edge technologies, including those that are still in experimental phases. The presentation of this work in the exhibition is supported by the EU-Japan Fest Japan Committee.
IN TRANSFER- A New Condition presented by Ars Electronica 3rd September – 27th November Möllerei Esch-Belval. Esch2022 Europen City of Culture.
CURATORS
Martin Honzik is an artist, CCO and Managing Director of the Ars Electronica Festival, Prix and Exhibitions. After studying visual experimental design at Linz Art University and earning a master’s degree from the University of Linz and ICCM Salzburg, he joined the production team of the OK Offenes Kulturhaus in the OÖ Kulturquartier in Linz. From 2001 to 2005 he worked at the Ars Electronica Futurelab where his responsibilities included exhibition design and project management among other things. He has curated several exhibitions including 40 Years of Humanizing Technology, Sea World Culture and Arts Center, Shenzhen (2020), human (un)limited, Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing, Seoul, Moscow (2019) and the Ars Electronica Festival theme exhibitions since 2006. He contributes regularly to round tables and publications.
Laura Welzenbach is Head of Ars Electronica Export where she manages international collaborations with the aim to connect art and science through creating new experiences. She holds a master’s degree in theatre, film and media studies as well as in European studies and was the recipient of a research scholarship from the Austrian Federal Art Management Program. She has ran the artist residency programme at Eyebeam in New York and was executive manager of the sound:frame festival in Vienna. She has collaborated with distinguished art organizations such as the Guggenheim Museum and the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York, tiff Toronto International Film Festival, MAK Museum of Applied Arts, MuseumsQuartier and k/haus Kuenstlerhaus in Vienna. Recent exhibition projects include Translation of Complexity, sound:frame x improper walls (2019), Step into Space, Ars Electronica Festival (2019) and CIVA Festival, Vienna and internationally (2021).
Institution & locations
Ars Electronica is a platform working at the intersection of art, technology and society through organising exhibitions, educational programmes, and research projects focused on the future of our societies. Founded in Linz as a festival in 1979, it has since expanded to include a laboratory, an award, and a museum dedicated to the study and promotion of media arts as well as digital culture. ars.electronica.art
Located in Luxembourg’s former steel-mining south and crossing the border into France, Esch2022 – European Capital of Culture aims at promoting the cultural and artistic diversity of the region. The programme comprises a vast array of events from all artistic disciplines with a specific thematic focus on the transition of the region from the industrial past to a contemporary society of knowledge. Media arts and immersive exhibitions developed in collaboration with renowned international institutions are therefore cornerstones of the visual arts programme unfolding in a stunning post-industrial site: Esch-Belval.
The Möllerei is a large industrial building originally used to store raw materials (coke and iron ore) before they were fed into the blast furnaces to produce cast iron. With a total length of about 160 meters the Möllerei is a characteristic feature of the former Belval steel plant and local area. Opened to the public in 2018 after extensive transformation work, the North section is now home to the Luxembourg Learning Centre. The South section has recently undergone thorough restoration work. Today it accommodates a 500 square meter exhibition space over 3 floors and connects to Blast Furnace A via a metal footbridge.
