Ars Electronica Center celebrates 30 years of technological futures

The Ars Electronica Center in Linz has marked 30 years since its opening as Austria’s “Museum of the Future,” ORF reported. The building opened on September 2, 1996, for Austria’s millennium celebrations on the head of the Nibelungen Bridge in Linz-Urfahr. It cost 180 million schillings and provided 2,000 square metres of exhibition space.

Across five levels, the centre presented new technologies in multimedia, telemedia and cybermedia. The building had 169 computers, ranging from basic PCs to Austria’s largest graphics computer, as well as 50 kilometres of electrical wiring.

At the time, WLAN, cloud computing, smartphones, social media, streaming and chatbots did not exist. “No one had ever googled anything,” the centre’s website says 30 years later.

Projects that once appeared to be science fiction have since become reality. Among them was the Telegarden, created by US artist Ken Goldberg and the centre’s Futurelab. From 1996 to 2004, people around the world could tend the garden around the clock using an internet-controlled robotic arm. The participants also met in person for meetings in Linz.

Another popular attraction was the Humphrey flight simulator, which recreated the experience of flying. Visitors wore a type of suit equipped with a head-mounted display, assumed flying positions and navigated a virtual reality environment through their body movements.

In 1996, the Futurelab presented the world’s first publicly accessible Cave, or Cave Automatic Virtual Environment. The immersive virtual reality installation projected three-dimensional images onto three sides and the floor of a three-metre-wide cube. Its successor, Deep Space, opened in 2009 and was developed into Deep Space 8K in 2015.

For Linz’s 2009 European Capital of Culture year, the city expanded the centre at a cost of 30 million euros. The building’s glass exterior was fitted with 40,000 light-emitting diodes that illuminate it in different colours at night.

The centre now covers 6,500 square metres and houses interactive exhibitions, test rooms, a media archive and the Futurelab development laboratory. Its team has grown to more than 200 people.

According to Stocker, who has led the centre since its opening, its central mission is to ensure that technological progress also contributes to social progress. “We must continually ask and answer fundamental questions in new ways,” Stocker said.