Ars Electronica

Ars Electronica Festival
Ars Electronica, 2009
Genre	Electronic music, art
Location(s)	Austria
Years active	1979– present
Founded by	Ars Electronica
Website
Ars Electronica website

Ars Electronica Linz GmbH is an Austrian cultural, educational and scientific institute active in the field of new media art, founded in 1979. It is based at the Ars Electronica Center, which houses the Museum of the Future, in the city of Linz. Ars Electronica’s activities focus on the interlinkages between art, technology and society. It runs an annual festival, and manages a multidisciplinary media arts R&D facility known as the Futurelab. It also confers the Prix Ars Electronica awards.

Ars Electronica began with its first festival in September 1979. Its founders were Hannes Leopoldseder, Hubert Bognermayr, Herbert W. Franke, and Ulrich Rützel. The festival was held biennially at first, and annually since 1986. The Prix Ars Electronica was inaugurated in 1987 and has been awarded every year since then. Ars Electronica Linz GmbH was incorporated as a limited company in 1995. The Ars Electronica Center, together with the Futurelab, opened in 1996, and was remodelled in 2009.

Funding is provided by the City of Linz, the Province of Upper Austria and the Republic of Austria, in addition to private partners. In 2014 the organization is headed by artistic director Gerfried Stocker and financial director Diethard Schwarzmair.

The annual Ars Electronica festival is a gathering of artists, scientists and technologists, intended as "a setting for experimentation, evaluation and reinvention". The festival has always exerted a public presence in Linz, mounting large-scale open-air projects and holding lectures, discussions and workshops in a wide range of public venues.

Each year the festival is devoted to a specific theme. The festival in 2014, from 4–8 September, had as its theme "C... What it Takes to Change", i.e. ways in which social change and innovation can be promoted. It attracted 579 participants and about 85,000 visitors.

A form of concept art, Device Art has been described as "...a rebellion of form, taking everyday objects and inverting them to tell you something different". Among the examples exhibited at the 2014 festival were:

A display called "Smart atoms: spaxels version" was developed by Ars Electronica Futurelab and shown at the 2014 festival. The "space pixels" – automatically controlled drones fitted with LEDs - fly in formation to create apparent three-dimensional objects against the night sky.