Ars Electronica 2006

Ars Electronica is the most important European festival for exploring the interrelationship between technology, art and society. The festival showcases latest thinking and practice around the convergence of these areas and is a key cultural event and meeting point for international curators, media arts organisations and practitioners. It has been running since 1979 and takes place in Linz in Austria every September. If you want a glimpse into the future of digital art then Ars Electronica is the place to visit.

Watershed’s programme team attended the festival in 2006 in order to get some context to our developing portfolio of media artists commissions, primarily through the Clark’s Bursary but also increasingly for the sheer range of artists’ work in the digital field which we were coming across.  We kept an online journal of the visit with our observations and thoughts about what was striking in the 2006 festival.

'Simplicity – the Art of Complexity' was the theme of the festival, which took a flexible approach to creativity and technology. The curation combined origami workshops and Zen Archery with electronic music installations and performance. In other parts of the festival exhibitions of work by leading programmers/designers such as John Medea were combined with outdoor computer gaming.

In 2009 Ars Electronica opened a new Museum of the Future. For more information and extensive archives of all the editions of the festival visit www.aec.at

Related links:
Ars Electronica Festival