Big Tech monoculture promotes consumerism while obfuscating its social and ecological impact. What does that mean for artists working with digital media ?

The contributors of the magazine convoke Indigenous perspectives from lands that have been exploited for the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

For five days, Linz once again became a meeting place for art, technology, and society—and POSTCITY served as a stage for encounters, experiments, and visions one last time.

Democracy thrives on resistance and participation. At the Ars Electronica Festival 2025, artistic projects will show how protest opens up new spaces, strengthens communities, and creates visions for a shared future.

Theater has always been an art form that combines different media—today, this includes digital technologies. The Ars Electronica Festival 2025 showcases some of the most exciting examples.

“Organism and Excitable Chaos” combines sound sculpture, instrument, and kinetic experiment. The work explores how organic forms, unstable pipes, and a chaotic pendulum open up new possibilities for the interplay between material, sound, and audience.

At the Ars Electronica Festival 2025, artistic works will question the power of global tech corporations, shed light on “surveillance capitalism,” and show how we can reclaim our role in an AI-driven world.

In response to the climate crisis and pressing societal challenges, the Ars Electronica Festival 2025 invites radical reimagining and cultivates spaces where visionary creativity and sustainable lifestyles can thrive.

Manuela Naveau, curator of the Kunstuni Campus at the Ars Electronica Festival and university professor of Critical Data / Interface Cultures, talks about noisy sliding doors on Linz’s main square—and what this installation has to do with Einstürzende Neubauten, Beyoncé, and Hannah Arendt.

Launched in 1979 as a daring experiment, Ars Electronica has developed over 46 years into a global ecosystem—characterized by continuous change, collaborative thinking, and the ambition to actively shape the future.

Art transforms uncertainty into creative energy and opens up new perspectives on society and the future. The Ars Electronica Festival 2025 shows how artistic works reflect technological, social, and ecological upheavals.

Meet the cohort making up NEW INC's 2025-26 Art & Code track, a collaboration between Rhizome and NEW INC, now in its sixth year! 

NEW INC is the first museum-led cultural incubator, which supports a diverse range of creative practitioners with a values-driven program and safe space for gathering and developing creative projects and businesses. 

The Art & Code track is a space for artists, designers, researchers, and technologists to redefine the artistic landscape through internet-based practice.

Learn about the cohort below!

Anna Zhang is an artist and creative technologist working across new media, speculative fiction, and games. Her practice explores the invisible labor, power dynamics, and unspoken rules embedded within technological systems. Through images, code, text, and interactive media, she examines how these systems shape lived experience while creating space for reinterpretation, resistance, and reimagination.

Her work has been featured in The Royal Photographic Journal, Real Life, New Media Caucus, and Forbes, and exhibited at the National Museum of American History.

Aurora Mititelu is an artist based in Los Angeles, working with computer images, AI, and physical installations to examine how computational media constructs perception, identity, and autonomy. Informed by her experience growing up in post-socialist Romania amid the influx of Western digital culture, her practice reflects a critical interest in how media technologies shape social imaginaries.

She is a Fulbright grantee and the coordinator of Social Software, a research lab at UCLA focused on critical approaches to software and society. She also teaches at and directs the AI, Code & Art Summer Institute at UCLA. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including a commission from Google DeepMind and exhibitions at House of Arts Brno (Czech Republic) and Plexus Projects (New York).

¡wénrán zhào! is an artist, programmer, and designer working with data, language, and fiber. She crafts software tools, data visualizations, and digital publications, examining the political and cultural implications of technological advancement and globalization.

She divides her time equally between two crafts: writing code and making textiles. Her textile works are often augmented with bespoke software, through projection, electronics or otherwise.

Her work has been published at ISEA 2024, Electronic Literature Organization Conference, Taper, and The New River. She was a recipient of NMC Judson-Morrissey Excellence in New Media Award in 2024.

Lita (DJ Lita) is a first-generation Ecuadorian-American interdisciplinary artist, DJ, and creative technologist whose practice bridges sound, code, and design to build accessible, justice-centered systems of expression. Working at the intersection of decolonial frameworks, open-source technology, and collective memory, she creates immersive sonic experiences, custom-built musical instruments, and participatory installations. Her ongoing project, Sonic Liberation Devices, explores how hardware and sound can function as tools for protest, pedagogy, and communal storytelling. Through performances, workshops, and collaborative platforms, Lita invites communities to engage with music technology in tactile, inclusive, and transformative ways. Her work foregrounds accessibility, care, and creative resistance as central frameworks for reimagining who gets to build, listen, and be heard.

Marissa Sean Cruz is a digital multimedia and video performance artist from Kjipuktuk (so-called Halifax). Cruz’s topics of interest are related to labour, power and surveillance as seen through digital platforms and pop culture. Their experimental videos comprise found footage, 3D modelling, sound design and costumed performances to look at value systems with critical sensibility. These satirical works aim to capture a fast-paced contemporary present and envision possible, liberatory futures.

Mattaniah Aytenfsu is a new media artist, designer, and engineer based in Brooklyn, NY. Her interdisciplinary practice explores the interplay of computation, consciousness, and expression.

Using code as her primary medium, Mattaniah creates generative artifacts and experiences that demystify technology and reveal its humanistic potential. Her work seeks to externalize the internal, empowering individuals to reflect on their inner worlds, their communities, and the ecosystems they inhabit.

Her work has been presented at Sundance Film Festival and Gray Area, and featured in publications such as Forbes and Refinery29.

Morry Kolman (WTTDOTM) is an award-winning independent multimedia artist and developer born and raised in NYC. His work - which includes Traffic Cam Photobooth, First Light, Are You The Asshole, Mr. Beast Saying Increasingly Large Amounts of Money, and more - has been featured internationally in GQ, The Guardian, Vice, Fast Company, The Verge, and elsewhere. He creates interactive and entertaining ways to demystify, make legible, or upend the technological and cultural forces that affect us everyday. With a background in visual theory and science and technology studies, he is especially interested in the differences of perception and processing that separate humans from machines, and the potentials for expression, meaning, or subversion come out of that gap. He currently lives in Brooklyn with a very cluttered desk and his two cats.

Nicci Yin (she/her) is a designer, researcher, and artist based between the US and Taiwan. She creates playful, embodied, and collaborative approaches to technology, exploring computing as both object and medium. Her practice investigates the metaphors embedded in interfaces and how screen-based rituals—like clicking, swiping, or linking—can be reimagined in material space. With a background in UX for digital platforms, wearables, and AI systems, she is also focused on interactions that are expressive, relational, or purposefully useless. Her recent work treats design as a generative, social process and code as choreography for shared, situated experiences.

Her work has been presented internationally, including at Ars Electronica and MAAT (Portugal). She has also contributed as a mentor and guest critic at the University of Washington and ArtCenter College of Design.

Romi Ron Morrison is an interdisciplinary artist, scholar, and writer. Using maps, data, sound, performance, and video, their installations center Black diasporic technologies that challenge the demands of an increasingly quantified world—reducing land into property, people into digits, and knowledge into data. Their current projects explore theories of Black Computational Thought, entropy, and forms of kinship that thrive in the face of uncertainty and unpredictability.

Romi has exhibited work and given talks at numerous exhibitions, conferences, and workshops around the world including Transmediale (Berlin), The Kitchen (New York), ALT_CPH Biennial (Copenhagen), the American Institute of Architects (New York), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Queens Museum (New York), and the Walker Museum of Art.

They are currently an Assistant Professor in the Design Media Arts program at UCLA in Los Angeles and a 2024-2026 Just Tech Fellow.

Shakti Mb is designer, artist, and filmmaker from south India currently living in New York City. She runs Two Shiny Coins, an NYC-based experimental studio — part design, part film. Her work often spans video, software, and the web. For the past decade, she has been working as a software designer.

Tara Kelton is an Indian-American artist living in Bangalore, India. Tara’s work explores the evolving relationship between humans and machines, interrogating how individuals exercise control, decision-making and influence within digital systems and networks. Digital labour is at the centre of her practice—she immerses herself in the workings of digital services and platforms, from co-creating with image production studios in India, to collaborative experiments with gig workers, to reimagining the functionalities of search engines.

Tara’s work has been featured and supported by Hyundai Artlab, ZKM Karlsruhe, ArtForum, distant.gallery, Institute of Network Cultures, ICA Singapore, The Centre for Internet and Society, and the Kochi Muziris Biennale.

Tara is co-editor of Silicon Plateau, a publishing series that explores the intersection of technology, culture and society in the Indian IT city Bangalore.

Viola He is a Shanghai-born, NYC-brew educator, performer, interdisciplinary artist, and culture organizer. They work with DIY electronics, computer programming, dance/movements, and various time-based media, exploring pathways towards alternative structures, systems and interfaces across digital and physical mediums.

They create immersive experiences, installations, XR theatre, and improvisational performances using algorithmic approaches to enhance, alternate, and obfuscate audio-visual assets, investigating new sonic and visual aesthetics across digital and physical mediums. Viola is an Assistant Professor of Interactive Media Art at NYU Shanghai, as well as an organizing artist of leaderless collective Livecode.NYC, where they organize, perform, and wield their love/hate relationship with technology to challenge the rigid infrastructures around them.

X. A. Li is a Chinese-American artist and computer scientist living in Chicago. Using video, sound, text, and code, she creates site-responsive installations and performances that reclaim human meaning from complex economic and technological systems. Drawing from a formal background in artificial intelligence research, her work challenges dominant frameworks of utility, prediction, and optimization that collapse entropic reality into finite data. In uncanny environments unfurling over time and space, she induces state-of-the-art methods towards self-revelation at their illogical horizons, surfacing immediate tensions from inaccessible power structures and inviting active choice beyond what is known. She performs as half of Post Consumer Material and co-directs Leisure, a space for artistic experimentation in Chicago.

Learn about the 2024-2025 Year 11 cohort members. 

Learn about the 2023-2024 Year 10 cohort members.

Learn about the 2022-2023 Year 10 cohort members.

Learn about the 2021-2022 Year 10 cohort members.

Publié le 31 août 2025 par Ewen Chardronnet

Le travail de l'artiste slovène Maja Smrekar a été détourné lors d'une campagne d'extrême droite. Comment résister ? Interview.

Democracy thrives on resistance and participation. At the Ars Electronica Festival 2025, artistic projects will show how protest opens up new spaces, strengthens communities, and creates visions for a shared future.

Theater has always been an art form that combines different media—today, this includes digital technologies. The Ars Electronica Festival 2025 showcases some of the most exciting examples.

“Organism and Excitable Chaos” combines sound sculpture, instrument, and kinetic experiment. The work explores how organic forms, unstable pipes, and a chaotic pendulum open up new possibilities for the interplay between material, sound, and audience.

At the Ars Electronica Festival 2025, artistic works will question the power of global tech corporations, shed light on “surveillance capitalism,” and show how we can reclaim our role in an AI-driven world.

In response to the climate crisis and pressing societal challenges, the Ars Electronica Festival 2025 invites radical reimagining and cultivates spaces where visionary creativity and sustainable lifestyles can thrive.

Manuela Naveau, curator of the Kunstuni Campus at the Ars Electronica Festival and university professor of Critical Data / Interface Cultures, talks about noisy sliding doors on Linz’s main square—and what this installation has to do with Einstürzende Neubauten, Beyoncé, and Hannah Arendt.

Launched in 1979 as a daring experiment, Ars Electronica has developed over 46 years into a global ecosystem—characterized by continuous change, collaborative thinking, and the ambition to actively shape the future.

Art transforms uncertainty into creative energy and opens up new perspectives on society and the future. The Ars Electronica Festival 2025 shows how artistic works reflect technological, social, and ecological upheavals.

In a new issue, Michaela Wimplinger presents a project that shows how fragile self-determination has become in a world controlled by technology.

In response to the climate crisis and pressing societal challenges, the Ars Electronica Festival 2025 invites radical reimagining and cultivates spaces where visionary creativity and sustainable lifestyles can thrive.

Manuela Naveau, curator of the Kunstuni Campus at the Ars Electronica Festival and university professor of Critical Data / Interface Cultures, talks about noisy sliding doors on Linz’s main square—and what this installation has to do with Einstürzende Neubauten, Beyoncé, and Hannah Arendt.

In a new issue, Michaela Wimplinger presents a project that shows how fragile self-determination has become in a world controlled by technology.

Dream of Walnut Palaces weaves history, Daoist philosophy, and AI imagery into a transformative space where alternative forms of knowledge emerge.

The 13th edition of Expanded focuses on scientific contributions from the fields of animation and interactive art. The emphasis is on innovative audiovisual forms of expression at the interface between art and technology.

Amid global crises and radical upheavals, the Ars Electronica Festival asks what role art can play—as a catalyst for new perspectives, as a space for reflection, and as a driving force for a collectively shaped future.

In “Run Motherfucker Run,” the body becomes the controller: those who run experience virtual immersion—those who stop fall. A powerful critique of passive consumption in digital worlds.

Guanaquerx by Paula Gaetano Adi, winner in the Artificial Life & Intelligence category 2025, reclaims the Andes as a site of resistance and reimagines robotics as a tool for planetary liberation.

Requiem for an Exit by Frode Oldereid and Thomas Kvam, winner of a 2025 Golden Nica, explores memory, violence, rhetoric, and the unsettling voice of a machine.

Manuela Naveau, curator of the Kunstuni Campus at the Ars Electronica Festival and university professor of Critical Data / Interface Cultures, talks about noisy sliding doors on Linz’s main square—and what this installation has to do with Einstürzende Neubauten, Beyoncé, and Hannah Arendt.

In a new issue, Michaela Wimplinger presents a project that shows how fragile self-determination has become in a world controlled by technology.

Dream of Walnut Palaces weaves history, Daoist philosophy, and AI imagery into a transformative space where alternative forms of knowledge emerge.

The 13th edition of Expanded focuses on scientific contributions from the fields of animation and interactive art. The emphasis is on innovative audiovisual forms of expression at the interface between art and technology.

Amid global crises and radical upheavals, the Ars Electronica Festival asks what role art can play—as a catalyst for new perspectives, as a space for reflection, and as a driving force for a collectively shaped future.

In “Run Motherfucker Run,” the body becomes the controller: those who run experience virtual immersion—those who stop fall. A powerful critique of passive consumption in digital worlds.

Guanaquerx by Paula Gaetano Adi, winner in the Artificial Life & Intelligence category 2025, reclaims the Andes as a site of resistance and reimagines robotics as a tool for planetary liberation.

Requiem for an Exit by Frode Oldereid and Thomas Kvam, winner of a 2025 Golden Nica, explores memory, violence, rhetoric, and the unsettling voice of a machine.

This year’s Golden Nica in the category “Digital Musics & Sound Art” goes to media artist Navid Navab and Garnet Willis for their project “Organism.”