From September 8 to 12, Ars Electronica 2021, the festival for art, technology and society, will take place not only in Linz (Austria) and 86 other Ars Electronica Gardens around the globe, but also online. As part of this year’s programme entitled New Digital Deal, Ars Electronica is again working with numerous partner organisations from around the world, who will open the gardens to showcase their programme.
As part of konS ≡ Garden for Contemporary Investigative Art and Tactical Media we present an initiative that has brought together nine partners from five Slovenian cities. In these cities, the project konS≡Platform has made it possible to establish a network of contemporary investigative art laboratories that feature programmes for informal education where participants develop their theoretical and practical knowledge of how to use new technologies in a creative and critical way, and it also encourages ambitious artistic investigation and creation by which it supports the efforts to bring new, different and ethical ideations into the innovation processes for a better tomorrow.
Establishing collaborative programme all over the country is a challenge through which we wish to establish systemic conditions for education and development aimed at audiences and future co-workers that will co-create in the inspiring environment of the fully developed Platform. This is why we are setting up a series of well-equipped laboratories where artist collaborate with scientists and engineers to explore and create artworks, develop workshops and prototype demonstration projects. Five laboratory units are scattered throughout the country in partner cities and help to create a larger critical mass of people, spaces and equipment. By doing so, konS≡Platform is becoming a network of intermedia creators that is of strategic importance in the project of culturalisation of technologies, and is thereby developing into an institution that is an important catalyst for social change.