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The Ars Electronica Festival 2020 “In Kepler’s Gardens – a global journey to measure the ‘new’ world” takes visitors to 120 locations around the world where festivals will take place from September 9-13. Best possible in times of pandemic, with an unlimited online and local audience for everyone. In Linz, the Kepler’sche Garten is located on the university campus.
Ars Electronica director Gerfried Stocker, his team and local partners presented an excerpt from the program at a press conference in Linz on Tuesday. Young people would say “it’s the biggest LAN party in the world,” Stocker said, enchanted by “once again the best Ars Electronica of all time.” To have provoked such a dynamic again is great. “The festival measures the world again with Linz as its starting point,” said Doris Lang-Mayerhofer, city councilor for culture (ÖVP).
Real festivals with real audiences
The trip around the world does not include 120 virtual projects, but real festivals with a real audience on the site. These “gardens” have become the mainstay, contributing 3.2 million euros to the festival’s 6.2 million dollar budget. Only 1.4 million euros come from the public sector, 1.1 million euros are generated by Ars Electronica itself and 525,000 euros are donations in kind. This means the budget is 23 percent higher than the previous year, Stocker noted, not including the projects from the Johannes Kepler University (JKU) in Linz.
Veronika Liebl and Christl Baur gave an idea of gardens on five continents. You go to metropolises and small, independent places, even on a research ship in Antarctica. Two topics that many partners are addressing this year are culture in relation to Covid-19 and ecology, especially new technologies for climate protection. Because the artists cannot travel to Linz, they were asked “to take us with them to their studios, which resulted in some fantastic video work,” Baur said.
Stocker noted a new cooperation with the Deutsche Telekom Art Collection, which funds a three-year artist residency program. The “big black hole ‘online'” is new to this dimension and an experiment in a new way. There will be offers in the form of live streams, Mozilla Hubs, Zoom conferences, and social media and they don’t necessarily end on September 13, but should continue beyond.
But there is also the home game in Linz with the city center and campus. In the city you can see the presentation of the winners at CyberArts, the VALIE EXPORT exhibition at the Francisco Carolinum, the Crossing Europe Festival’s homage to VALIE EXPORT at the Moviemento, the “Wild State Network” of the art university, with the rector Brigitte Hütter wants to counter the ubiquitous headlines “Something Wild, Loud”, the Klangwolke and the Expanded Animation Festival.
Science and art networks
The current festival “hijacked” the JKU campus, as rector Meinhard Lukas put it. The university, mainly the Linz Institute of Technology (LIT), will participate in projects. The LIT was founded to allow technology transfer to go far beyond technology, Lukas said. The network of scientists and artists spawned things like a dart board, which always hits the mark, and an artificial intelligence-based truth machine, which can be seen in the new learning center. In addition, there will be many lectures and discussions on campus that will shed light on the festival’s central theme, autonomy and democracy in the AI era.
Regarding the crown measurements, Stocker said: “It doesn’t help, that’s right.” That is also an experiment. The traditional Sunday closing concert with Maki Namekawa and Dennis Russell Davies has 1,000 visitors in normal years, this year it will be held twice in a row, with an audience of 150 each at Keplerhall. “I have no idea if there will be total overbooking or if no one dares,” Stocker was excited. In any case, you can take the risk of a visit, everything is safe. (apa)
