The art of rediscovery: Ars Electronica Berlin celebrates seven years

Ars Electronica has focused on technological developments and their impact on art and society for nearly 40 years. The Volkswagen Group and the Austrian art festival started working together in 2010.

In seven exhibitions curated exclusively especially for DRIVE. Volkswagen Group Forum, Volkswagen and Ars Electronica have continuously reinvented their collaboration, responded to social developments, and addressed contemporary topics. Since 2010, nearly two million visitors have taken the opportunity at Ars Electronica in Berlin to participate in social debates focusing on today’s most urgent issues

Over the years, Ars Electronica in Berlin has presented pioneering new trends. As a driving force of change, artificial intelligence was featured in the latest edition of Ars Electronica. Among other things, the exhibition “ERROR – The Art of Imperfection” showed how people react when they encounter artificial intelligence (AI) and challenged visitors to address the question of what we expect from AI and how much trust we want to place in it.

In 2013, Ars Electronica focused on reality and digital social spaces that exist in an autonomous world. “Like a Second Nature”, the fourth Ars Electronica exhibition in DRIVE, featured a variety of issues: What is real? Where are the boundaries between reality and virtual space? Which interfaces exist?

Ars Electronica always serves as a mirror. The exhibition in 2011, “What Machines Dream About”, featured objects that visualized the dream world of machines. Visitors who were drawn into this idea inevitably imagined pictures and stories that reflected their own fantasies, dreams and fears.

Over the years of collaboration, Volkswagen and Ars Electronica continuously explored the interfaces between technology, society and the future. They focused on the issue of how to reconcile the needs of technology with those of society. What demands will tomorrow’s society place on technology and mobility? What might future-proof solutions look like? Ars Electronica and Volkswagen continue to address new forms of human encounters, mobility, and the related challenges in their own unique way.

ERROR – The Art of Imperfection: The seventh Ars Electronica exhibition presented in DRIVE showed that failures and errors are often the source of great inventions.

• 2018 ERROR – The Art of Imperfection
• 2017 Begegnung/Encounters
• 2016 HUMAN FACTOR – Endless Prototyping
• 2013 Wie eine zweite Natur
• 2012 Impuls + Bewegung
• 2011 Wovon Maschinen träumen
• 2010 Poesie der Bewegung