Ars Electronica 1995
"However, what I could gather from publications about previous meetings together with what I was able to experience for myself at Ars Electronica, has strengthened my conviction that what we are confronted with here is a central issue of the present time."
Vilém Flusser
Ars Electronica is a festival for art, technology and society. For fifteen years it has maintained a consistently forward-looking approach and dedicated itself to the creative use of the new electronic media. In accordance with this self definition, so to speak the history of the festival is one of continual change from the foundations up.
Ars Electronica does not burden itself with any limitations regarding target audience or technical distinctions; the creative element, dedicated to further development in the future, has always remained the primary concern: so on the one hand Ars Electronica hosts a high-powered, specialist symposium with international experts; on the other it attracts up to 150.000 visitors to the Danube Park in Linz (Sound Cloud). Ars Electronica has presented computer art in the form of picture exhibitions, soundspaces, complex space installations, and even as artistic interventions in public spaces. Time and again the festival has presented new ways of arranging colours, shapes and sounds, allowing festival events to consistently transcend the limits of categorisation as well as the limitss of expectations: Art has penetrated even further, even more appropriately, into new social contexts, as a force to be reckoned with.
Postmodern society is composed of very complex, dynamic, social systems where the idea of information plays a vital role. The exchange of data via networks of information machines supports social software in business as well as in our free time, in medicine as well as in tourism. Information theory has developed into a pilot science. Mass-media distribution of information can, however, also become part of oppressing and optimizing strategies of power. Data exchange can develop into data war. Ars electronica 95 asks critical questions about the dogmas and myths of postmodern information society.