Interface Culture Exhibition at Ars Electronica The Interface Culture Exhibition The Interface Culture Exhibition The Interface Culture Exhibition The Interface Culture Exhibition Welcome to the Interface Culture Exhibition at Ars Electronica 2026. My name is Laurent Mignonneau. I'm the head of this department. And we have here also Fabrizio. Hello, my name is Fabrizio Lamoncha. I'm also working in this department as a senior artist. And we are all together with the students producing this exhibition at the Ars Electronica Festival. So we have here the title of the exhibition is called Colds and Rituals. It's not antinomic. A lot of coding is done through rituals as well. And the rituals is also part of what coding is about. So it's an interesting contrast, but at the same time, kind of word association. And we have here the booklet and we have here 11 works that are described in the booklet. We have also a book this year that came out, it's Interface Culture, described in the booklet. We have also a book this year that came out, it's Interface Culture, the 20 years celebration. So it describes a lot of what has happened over the time and who participated to the study program over the years. This is my project, sovereignty meters. It comes as a continuation to my practices to make the invisible power more visible. surveillance meter what it does it scans any domain and it gives you the location of the server and the distance from Lens to that country where the server is located and it gives you a score based on the ownership, who owns the infrastructure of the internet, who owns the internet cable, who owns the server and it names everything. 10 years ago the internet was owned the internet infrastructure was owned by telecommunication companies and but now it owned by big tech like Google, Meta, Amazon, besides telecommunication companies. But now with the rise of AI companies like OpenAI, Panentere, Anthropic, we don't know 10 years from now who will own the internet. And this is what I'm trying to archive in this project. So over time, we'll see the change of the internet infrastructure ownership. And I want to archive this. Hello, my name is Volkan Dinsher. Listening to Cats Fight is my work. And it's a stone disc, which we are listening with a turntable. And it's like there's a track on it, around 15 minutes. And you just put a needle like a vinyl. And there are other records also from different stones. Granite, limestone, different limestone, marble at the back with different fragrances they have. Yeah, this is work about listening to stone. These are first with hand chisel and hammer broken down. H are curved and polished. You put the polished stone for recording the track. And then, yeah, there's a diamond needle and you make the scratch all the way through inside. And then put it into turntable and listen it. My name is Patrick Ortiz. I'm a Bolivian artist and software engineer. This is my artwork called Mio. This is a livestream reimagined as a video game and on it the performers, Maque Pereira, Alireza Corrabadi and me activate this universe by providing the participants the possibility to interact and define the path of our movement or our displacement. So during the performance, participants do a payment of one euro and then they select a direction where then we will take in real life in Lens. So we will be walking and live streaming through Lens and then taking the directions from through a phone and then walking in the directions that the participants will will then decide. Really important to mention that all the participants or the performers are also in real life migrants in Europe and they will came to Europe for different from different purposes and from different motifs. The architecture or the aesthetics of it is basically how I imagine how artists or the art industry in Europe is, it plans or it imagines how we Latin American artists should look like, should behave. I'm Patricia Soton. I work in the field of intermedia and art and science, mainly lately within the field of physics. And the piece is based on an interdisciplinary dialogue with a researcher at CERN that has been going on for the past months, in which we've approached physics of the Standard Model and Higgs. Particularly, the piece approaches the way events are being reconstructed in CERN. And by events, I mean accelerating and colliding particles which is something they never get to see but like rather they reconstruct through the traces these collisions live in the detector so like the piece also approaches all these topics throughout fragments and also these like questions of why do we collide and the answer has to do with the with the fact that that way we can access early stages of the universe so like to understand time in a very like cosmological particle tiny way also mediated through us human perception and technology latency. The piece is also interactive, so you can enter the system. And it talks about also the fact that in this cosmological and particle approach, we are all, in a sense, made of the self. So we are kind of like universe exploring itself, because it's all made of like the same thing and our next artist is actually a collective of two artists Simon and Nico who have been working very intensively with mold thisこの先の学期で作ったモールドを作っていますこのプロジェクトの名前はInaffectionIn-fectionとはAffectionと言います私の作業はモールドを作ることですパートナーは音を作っていますこのプロジェクトはモールドから音を作っていますモールドは自分分の音を作っています。この音は、モールドは日々変化しています。音も日々変化しています。私たちのコンセプトは、人間の反応と、どこが境界線なのかを考えることです。悪くて美しい感じ、おー、こんな感じな感じ、それを考えることです。モールドについて、ビジュアルについて、音を聴いてみてください。何が起こっているか考えることです。これを考えることです。そして、私たちの場所を考えることです。 What they saying? We think about this and think about where we are. We got new perspective like a mold. Hello, I'm Hassan Waqaf. I come from Syria and I'm a visual artist and creative technologist. Today I'm showcasing Fogos, which is an interactive installation, it's an audio-visual installation that mimics an inner dialogue that would repurpose the way we would interact with AI in contrast to gaining certainty. It would push us to embody and embrace uncertainty and question what we believe in through a conversation that spans five questions that inspire and invite the visitor to reflect upon what they believe in and take the time to sit with their own thoughts. So it's basically a mirror display with the interactions purely audio. And so it's a conversation through the headset. The visuals and colors would change based on the individual. I'm negotiating the new interaction that we're having with AI in this installation. It's generally a personal interaction and it is visualistic interaction. So it's kind of private to each person, has a unique experience within this installation. This is my project called Cycle of Emotions Composition. This is the last series of Cycle of Emotions. I basically already did the previous exhibition in South Korea so I want to kind of making the composition or artwork in this project. So you can try with this tablet here and you can select up to three emotions. I picked the like a satin green and maybe you can customize but I pick like just randomly here but I prefer you think a little bit more about the colors and the emotion at the same time. So no I feel like red today. And now you can see the screen here. The webcam is capture your facial expression recognition. I'm using the technology and in real time, it change all your emotions at the same time. And I didn't choose the other emotions like neutral or disgust or something like that. So I borrowed the colors from the previous user's one. So you can see here, the frame over there is basically your emotion, but you didn't choose it. And then the colors from the previous user here. And the background, the layer is from the South Korea. The more than 1,400 visitors already put this artwork and then I want to, I did like a, what kind of colors and emotion put together and selected the representative colors on the background. My name is Carmen and this is my project Withdraw. Withdraw is a speculative lenses where I make use of a materiality to spot and remove a brand of my site. This project born because of personal reason in my country Colombia and there was this case where Coca-Cola was confronting serious like legal problems because they were making use of the water while a community could not could not have access to it so in the same place where they were producing there was people that could not drink it so I was really outrageous by the situation and this is my approach as an artist of how I would like to remove this brand of my life. And it's really speculative because I understand that normal people don't go out to the world using these glasses. But I would like to check, like, how would it be if we would have easier glasses? And if we could use this kind of tech in our advantage as a consumer and press the companies to improve and to follow the rules hello I'm link and I'm the artist that work more about with textile and audios. So this time I presented this artwork is based on the different materials with metal, plastic, and then with the plastic yarns and also the conductive threads. This is by the silver. So this is the work and the material that I'm normally working on. And this main topic is about the submarine cable, which is 95% transforming the data. And the idea of this artwork was because of the incident last year, that from Taiwan and China, there's a ship accidentally cut off our sea cable, the underwater cable, and it caused 50 days damage that one of the island cannot assess to the outside. And because of this, like last month in August, in our military rehearsal, the national wise, we also add this practice in the military practice so for the people to understand that the network is actually really important and how the people should react without any internet so and then for the artwork itself is this is the matrix river So it's trying to mimic the data is transforming through the cables and this also encrypts data. And I invited the audience to come to touch the fabrics or the installation. So for example, that I touch it, if I touch long enough, then I can have the messages decoded. And for example, like this. So you can get the three languages, different message, the information from this matrix river. And for there that also with the audio is the underwater sound. And if you find the right key that the underwater sound will disappear which means you decoded the environment sound and then you can hear the real time environment the people are talking and is so yeah so this is the artwork and and over there that i have the uh the real-time submarine cable map that the people can come to see in Taiwan. The situation now currently we have four cables is disconnected and need to be repaired. This is our exhibition at the Audimax of the Kunstuniversitat Linz in the Domgasse 1. Now we are moving into the Hauptplatz where Manuela Navó is curating her critical data research group in collaboration with ATTACK, an activist community from Vienna. And together they are curating and supporting the student projects that are going to be, that are right now presented at the Hauptplatz. that are already presented at the Hauplatz. We have here five works from the student in the first culture curated by Manuela Navo and it's displayed here at the main square of Linz. And we have containers where we have several works displayed inside. I am the artist of At Least I'm Making Money, which is talking about how the financial system is profiting from war. This artwork was also happening in collaboration with Carmen Cordoba-Martinez. She was doing the level design and the Unity prototype and the 3D models are from Joshua Madsen and the textures as well and Leandro Bischoff was helping me with the economic framework and Atak was also helping me with the credibility of sources. Here in this container are two artworks. Here in the beginning is at least the making money and I started with the research from three different research institutes which is the CIPRI which is publishing the military like the top hundred arms producing and military industries companies of the world and they are here with the red one and then it's like from there I got the military revenue of these companies. I then looked into which of those companies are part of the MSC World ETF and S&P 500. Those are stock indices and are very important lists for investors but investments are running through those lists not just not just like through direct investments but sometimes also through bank or through private pensions i also wanted to know how much influence those companies are having on policies and regulations so i was also looking into the lobby costs from eu why especially lobby costs from eu because the eu has a transparency register where they have to self-report those numbers to have certain benefits from and in like access to EU institutions. And then last, I also looked into the database of Who Profits, the research institute is Who Profits, which is talking about the occupation economy from Israel. They are corporates who are profiting from the occupation of Palestinian and Syrian land and who profits is doing this research. So what you see here is a portfolio. When you look at the map, you can see the companies who are part of which list so for example when i now like say i want to see like the ones which are involved and then it goes to the three different colors says like which company is part of which list here this company lernado is part of all three lists of the lobby cost eu of the military revenue from like the top 100 arms producing and then the occupation economy as well. You see a lot of data here and also on the left side which is all the companies who are right now included. If you turn around and want to see more data then on each phone there is the data of a different company right now which is seen on the portfolio in the middle there are my thoughts printed during the research process it was the starting from january until like every hour there is like one thought printed until like every hour there is like one thought printed. Sometimes it's personal, sometimes it's really much about the topic itself. And some questions, for example, is like, is this art? My name is Gustiela Pistarol and I have here my artwork that is called Spectral Roots. And this artwork was inspired by this tree called Palakian Guta, that in the 90th century was used by the British Empire, that by the time they had several colonies, to build their telegraph, first underwater telegraph cables. So from this tree, they can extract a material called gutta persia, that is like a rubber material, and they use it then for insulate these cables, these underwater cables. But by doing that they almost kill this piece of the tree. So when I got to know about this history, I also thought that actually now 150 years later we are still operating under the same colonialist and extractivistic logic and for that i start developing this artwork an attempt to make this abstraction of like for example when you think about internet when we think about the cloud or when you think about wi- when we think about the cloud, or when you think about Wi-Fi, or even our phones, we not always connect that to nature. We cannot see these infrastructures. They are too big sometimes. Or they are invisible, or they seem to be invisible. So my idea is to try to give body to this invisible infrastructure. So I'm tracking cell phones like devices and these devices the number of the devices and also how strong the signal is is affecting the projection so projected here we can see a tree that I'm calling a ghost tree that's turning itself, morphing itself into cables and also into rare minerals that are the ones that we found in our funds. For the signal string, when people turn in and off their Wi-Fi, it affects, it disturbs this creature, this tree that is morphing itself in other shapes. For example, if we have more people inside, the pace of the piece will be accelerated and also these transitions will be affected. I'm inviting also people to think with me if the signals that are around us, that are emitted by our phones, our devices all the time, if they had a body, what would they look like? My name is Vlada and I'm a part of M22 artistic group. There are two of us and at Ars Electronica we are presenting our project called into the air you can see on the rooftop the antennas so it's our project and here we research how ecology and politics are actually connected and how war influences the ecology and particularly birds. So the anthropogenic noise made by weapons and bomb explosions is a really disturbing factor for wild nature. And bomb explosions produce seismic waves and infrasound on special frequencies that humans cannot hear but the birds can perceive it and it highly influences their behaviour, their migration routes and even can cause PTSD symptoms. At the same time, these sounds produced by bombs can be the evidence of ongoing war and they can help the researchers to detect the exact locations where the bomb explosions are happening. So in our work, we are combining these two factors and we transmit the data from bomb explosions happened in the beginning of Russian-Ukrainian war and transmit them into hearable and visible vibrations, which you can feel when you look up at the antennas. So the antennas actually are vibrating, and these vibrations depend on the database of the explosions. This is our research poster. The poster demonstrates how the industry of drones developed through two separate tracks. Like civil technology, you know know the drones are used in filming and in different civil like spheres but also it's a military technology which is now used like everywhere in modern wars information how to make a drone is highly available in Instagram for example in Instagram reels and tik toks so it's kind of dangerous phenomena how the ordinary people civilians can make drone themselves so this is our scope of interest we are continuing our investigation my My name is Somil Bhandari. I'm from India. And so I'm like, my background is with engineering and then design and non-studying media art at Interface Cultures in Kunshuni. About my work, I have these electromagnetic coils which are wounded, two of the coils, and they make the pixels fall. And it's a work about repair and maintenance. So I have the data from research organizations like ACLIT and UCDP. And they have like in a day on 10th of September today, 2023, there are like 600 events that they documented all over the world. And my pixels react to those whenever there is an event. It pulses and it falls. And I make a shape here. And if it falls, then it's up to people to repair the shape back or it stays fallen. Some conflicts which are about political violence, there are some data about protests happening, and there's some data about battles. So the slight movements are about the protest happening in different places in the world and the fall is when there is actually a battle or explosion happening. Yeah it's also an irony that in our case it should stay intact for my installation if it stays intact then there is less things like a conflict happening gods love known Null. Bones. Head. The interface works this way. You place your hand on one side of the pedestal. You hold the hand of your partner or whoever is there. And then close the circuit here. So it triggers the video. The video is showing Alireza who is the student here. Alireza is the person on the left side. He's telling the alphabet and then there's an Israeli person next to him that also says the same alphabet. So he's trying to find out what the sounds are different and what is common to both. Here you see the Farsi alphabet that he's saying and then the Hebrew alphabet matching or not matching. He was talking about that he wanted to talk through languages to like see them in communication but also like saying how much power language holds and communication holds in either like trying to collaborate or not We move into the courtyard of the Hauptplatz 6, where there is the project from Christine, a huge warm installation. You will see. You can see here the collective instrument of maintenance inspired by warm ecologies. The idea was to research about earthworms and their impact on ecological systems. So I tried to put them from the underground and lift them up outside and make it visible and shine inside the tree. Additionally, I tried to collaborate with the Sound Campus, that it's also a stage where people can gather around. When I was researching about the earthworms, I was thinking, okay, this impact they have is actually similar to the impact in the society where we have this invisible labor or care work or unpaid work that is also unseen but has also a really big impact. The work is an interactive sound installation. If you touch the stitched patch, then it makes sounds. And it's positioned so that several repeaters can interact at the same time. Untertitelung des ZDF, 2020 you