Cutting-edge festival brings together digital art, technology, and virtual experience
The world’s largest media arts festival is coming to Aotearoa New Zealand, co-hosted by the University of Auckland and Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, an event that showcases installations at the nexus of art, technology, and society.
The
two universities are co-hosting Garden Aotearoa
as part of the international festival, a 3D cyber exhibition
which can be accessed from anywhere in the world via
computer screens, mobile devices or virtual reality
headsets.
In the Mozilla Hubs cyber gallery, visitors
will be able to interact not only with other virtual
visitors but also some of the installations. The festival
also includes a livestreamed digital concert night
and other events featuring speakers, performances and
demonstrations.
“Ars Electronica Garden Aotearoa
explores how the digital world connects with the physical
world,” said Associate Professor Uwe Rieger, director of
the University of Auckland’s arc/sec Lab for
Cyber-Physical Architecture and Interactive Systems and one
of the key organisers of Garden Aotearoa.
“It is for
anyone interested in digital media, whether they’re ten
years old or 100. Visitors can explore digital information
in ways that will delight their senses, entertain them and
make them think.”
Ars
Electronica was founded in 1979 in Linz, Austria. For
more than four decades, the festival has been at the
forefront of the digital revolution, involving a
transdisciplinary range of artists, scientists and
technologists gathering for symposia, exhibitions and
performances scrutinising potential futures.
It is is one
of the most influential festivals in the electronic arts and
media world, adds Professor Marc Aurel Schnabel, Dean of Te
Wāhanga Waihanga-Hoahoa-Wellington Faculty of Architecture
and Design Innovation. “And it’s incredibly special to
host a part of this event for New Zealanders to explore,
experience and enjoy.”
The arc/sec Lab of the
University of Auckland began participating in Linz in 2017
with large-scale interactive installations. In 2020,
however, the Covid-19 pandemic meant festival partners all
over the world presented their exhibits in online
“gardens” and both universities co-hosted their first
cyber exhibition then. This year, as in 2020, the pandemic
prevented a planned physical exhibition from going ahead in
New Zealand, but all 20 of the groups or individuals
exhibiting have been able to adapt their work to the virtual
format.
Highlights include LightSense, presented by the
arc/sec Lab at the School of Architecture and Planning in
collaboration with the Augmented Human Lab and Empathic
Computing Lab at the Auckland Bioengineering
Institute.
LightSense is an immersive installation that
augments physical constructions with holographic, digital
animations. Artificial intelligence allows the system to
initiate and sustain conversations with audience members,
whether on-site or as virtual visitors.
The
‘structure’ was trained to respond to verbal input with
the use of artificial intelligence and 60,000 poems. It also
changes shape in response to what audience members say to
it. It demonstrates a new form of reactive architecture that
responds to the emotional tenor of the conversation with
audience members.
Another installation, Tumour Evolution
in Extended Reality (XR) is the result of a collaboration
between the School of Architecture and Planning, the Faculty
of Medical and Health Sciences and the Centre for eResearch
at the University.
It represents a world first to bring
together multimodal cancer patient data – donated by a
real patient - in an interactive extended reality setting,
allowing multiple users to interact with the digital 3D
model simultaneously.
The prototype extended reality (XR)
application facilitates generation and exploration of
different hypotheses of how cancer evolves, by combining
detailed genomic, pathological, spatial and temporal data.
It allow for the immersion of viewers/visitors from a range
of backgrounds (clinical, biological, and technical) deeply
in the data.
“Ars Electronica Garden Aotearoa allows
researchers, technologists, artists and thinkers to not only
present ideas to local and international audiences but also
trigger public discussion of digital issues,” said Dr
Rieger.
“The information age presents challenges such
as the security of data and its potential misuse. On the
other hand, data can become a new building material for
creation that doesn’t require huge resources or physical
proximity. This offers huge opportunities for New
Zealand.”
In addition to the two universities, Ars
Electronica Garden Aotearoa is co-promoted by UniServices,
a wholly owned company of the University of Auckland
focusing on knowledge mobilisation and research
commercialisation, arc/sec Lab and Te Herenga
Waka—Victoria University of Wellington-based Digital
Architecture Research Alliance (DARA).
Ars Electronica
can be visited online 8-12 September, and all events are
free, though some aspects of the Ars Electronica festival
originating in other countries carry modest charges. A full
programme of New Zealand events is available at ars.nz.