It's wonderful to have so many guests, so many friends, and so many teachers and students here at our opening of the Ars Electronica campus of the University of Arts. Welcome! Welcome! Welcome! Especially we give a warm welcome to cooperation partners which are here on the stage with me. I would like to introduce Vice Mayor Tina Blöche. Then City Chancellor Doris Langmeierhofer. Then the well-known friend Gerfried Stocker, where is he? He is not on the stage but everybody knows him. And from the federal government of Upper Austria, Romana Stauffer-Hutter. First what I would like to express and mention is the big, big performance and the big work of Manuela Navó. She is the chief curator, the chief organizer of our team of Ars Electronica Campus. A big applause to Manuela Navó. And we would like to thank all the students, all the teachers, all the researchers and all the scientists and artists of our university who did a great job in our holidays after the semester and before starting the new autumn semester. A great applause and great thanks to all of them. We are at the Ars Electronica, it's autumn in Linz. Tomorrow there is the birthday of the great composer Anton Bruckner, a big celebration party all over the country. And so we are celebrating at every place and every village in this country and it's a good feeling I think. celebrating the Ars Electronica, a collaboration which exists about 20 years with Ars Electronica and with our university. There are 19 departments of our university involved in the campus, in the Ars campus, and it's not possible to name all of them but they all do a great job. One department I would like to mention is the Department of Interface Cultures. It has a birthday, it's 20 years old and we have a big birthday party on Friday at the ship Florentina and there is a big exhibition or big a wonderful a nice a great exhibition with the name and the motto new for we or we're at the post city and happy birthday interface cultures. We have the theme hope who will turn the tide at our Ars Electronica 2024. Hope is the theme which we need and hope is the question we ask. We ask for a diverse artistic approach and we ask for all these presentations we see here at the Post City and all over the city of Linz. And we have on our main square an 18-meter-high tower, and we have the motto there, Lunkois Dream. Lunkois is a figure of Greek mythology, and it means that we need an overview, but also a very detailed view on things and on ourselves. So on our surrounding, on the world, and on ourselves. So on our surrounding, on the world and on ourselves. So we have a very diverse program and we have 15, we have 40 partner universities at our campus all over the city but we have here in Hauptplatz 6 and Hauptplatz 8 15 partner and guest universities with which we collaborate. And I would like to name them. It's the Babes-Bulay University of Klusnabokur. It's the Faculty of Theatre and Film of the University Klusnabokur, the Estonian Academy of Arts, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the K-Arts AT Lab Korea National University of Arts, the Masaryk University Faculty of Arts, the Department of Art and Design, Osaka University of Arts, the Shanghai Tech University, the Royal College of Art London, the Meta Creation Lab of Creative AI School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University, California, the Technical University Berlin and the Berlin University of Arts, the Faculty of Fine Arts Universitat de Sevilla, the Cyprus University of Technology and the Sungkyunkwan University of Korea. All of them are friends and guests and we are proud to have them here. And as a very special guest we have the Moholy-Nagy University of Budapest. It is our this year's guest university at this place gallery and it has its presentation under the title Future Sense. sense. For the first time a separate Kunstuni campus award will be presented and will be given for all exhibitions, projects and so on which are in the campus at the Ars Electronica. So I'm so glad you are all here and all this expresses and means hope and it all expresses and means Lünköy's dream. So I have the role to declare the exhibition is open. And now I wish you a great time at the campus here. Thank you. Yeah, thanks a lot to Brigitte Hütter. Thanks a lot for this great cooperation. Welcome to the Ars Electronica Festival 2024. Welcome to the UNESCO City of Media Arts. Welcome to all the international guests and artists here in Linz. It's a really great pleasure to have you here in our city. With the Ars Electronica Festival, Linz offers an international stage for universities all over the world and as well for young media art. The Linz University of Art is an essential part and location here at the Ars Electronica festival. In this year, especially with the main square tower, it creates a really public sign in the public space, a really creative sign in the public space. And that's what we need. We need new perspectives. We need the young artists who can show us the new perspectives on society and on the future. And thanks a lot to all the artists who made it. And get inspired by art and culture to approve a new perspective, get inspired by them, hope. Who will turn the tide is the big, the really big question at this festival. And who knows? I think we together are able to turn the tide. So thanks a lot for all the projects from Interface Cultures, from the department, to Manu Naveau, to the whole festival team of Ars Electronica. It's a really great collaboration and get inspired by us electronica. A very warm welcome here in Linz at the University of Art. The Union University of Art is a very important institution here in Linz. The University of Art is known for the best education, it is known for connecting people all over the world and it's known for political messages. Political messages that are actual, that are changing minds and so it is in the Ars Electronica festival. this new message of the different perspectives in the society will set a new mindset in the next days. So there are many people confronted in Linz with these new messages and I hope that there will be a good future in this very difficult time we are in now and the Ars Electronica Festival is a very important cultural event in Linz. So in the next few days the University of Art is a very important institution in this festival of the Ars Electronica Center and I want to thank you for the very different kind of exhibitions you are setting in Linz so that there are many possibilities for the Linzer and also for many people from all over the world which are visiting Linz to change perspectives in a positive way. So thank you very much for playing such a central role in the Ars Electronica Festival. I wish you all, all the visitors of Linz, very new perspectives for the future. Thank you for coming here to the campus of the University of Arts. Thank you very much. I would like to mention and welcome some very important people who are here. It's Christa Sommerer from Interface Cultures, Laurent Mignonon also from Interface Cultures. It's the Spanish ambassador which we will welcome here and it's the director of the Institut Francais d'Autriche and it's the former rector of the Arts University it's Reinhard Kanony. A big applause please. Thank you very much in the name of the Upper Austrian Government being part of this movement because it's not enough to say that it's a project, that's a movement. The University of Arts is a place of freedom where creative and critical potentials can progress. This space for freedom must be explored, investigated and captured. It is up to the students to identify how they shape this freedom. However, freedom also means taking on responsibility. How do I make use of this freedom and do I defend it? How? The students can really rely on a strong basement and network supported by the rectory and faculty of this university. Equally important, the stable partners, Ars Electronica, Municipality of Linz and the Upper Austrian Government try to provide the strong basement. I'm very much looking forward to see the 150 pieces of the students to see how they fill the places with hope and changing our perspectives. Thank you. From the Moholy-Nagy University. Thank you. Thank you. On behalf of Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, it's my utmost pleasure to welcome you here and to be here as well. We are a small university that's based in the green, hilly, quiet part of Budapest. We have about 900 students, so it's a rather small community. We and our educational approach is deeply rooted in the legacy of our namesake in Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Bauhaus artist, creator, and also educator. So we emphasize holistic approach to personal development. We emphasize social responsibility of artists and designers, as well as interdisciplinary approach. And while our university is small, our dreams and ambitions are certainly not so small. Over the past years, over the past five years, we have moved into a completely renovated campus. We have opened our first six English-speaking master's programs. And we also have established an innovation center, a place that is dedicated for art and design research. And it is really with true happiness that I see that our journey has taken us to the most renowned art and technology festival in Europe. So I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to University of Art Linz, to the rector and also to Professor Manuela Novo for this invitation and for this opportunity. The exhibition that we will have and that you will be able to see just right behind us in the room, it's called Future Sense. And it is selection of the most outstanding works from our students and also from our research projects. And Future Sense might be a weird name when you first hear it. And I would like to emphasize the sensing part. So the idea of sensing, intuiting, feeling the future, which I don't think is opposite from analyzing trends or having a data-based approach to future, rather it's a complimentary one, and our students and their future sense has really created different types of responses that connect to technology, art, death, data, food, materials that you can see in the exhibition. And while you do that, exhibition. And while you do that, I also invite you to engage with your own personal future sense. What pieces resonate with you? What pieces challenge you in which you think your future sense is very different? Because I hope that this can inspire you to think deeply about what is next for us collectively. So thank you once again. And I invite you to get immersed into the creativity of the whole campus and Ars Electronica. Thank you. Thank you. And last but never, never the least, Gerfried Stocker. Thank you very much, thank you very much. As the saying goes, shit happens. Also the pigeons in this wonderful construction already got excited. I'm very excited. I mean, it's the third stop now in our meanwhile famous pre-opening tour. The crowd is growing. The speeches are getting longer and longer. So I think it's fair to say the festival has a great start and is really set to be the best festival since last year. Thank you very much to all the artists for these wonderful contributions. You are making the festival the best festival since last year. Thank you to the collaboration partners. Thank you. Have a great evening and have a great festival.