Featuring crowdsourced dreamscapes, a synthetic choir managed by an A.I. persona, and a collaborative musical mashup machine among a slate of nearly 500 total events this year, Ars Electronica 2024 showcased more than ever before the mind-bending ways that artists worldwide are adapting and incorporating A.I. into their projects.

This year, a record-breaking 112,000 people attended the city-wide celebration across 18 venues in the festival’s home city of 45 years, Linz, Austria. Almost 1,300 artists, scientists, developers, entrepreneurs and activists from 67 countries brought new and creative nuance to this year’s festival theme of “HOPE: Who Will Turn The Tide.” over the five-day event from September 4-8. 

The festival’s Co-CEO and Artistic Director, Gerfried Stocker, joined episode 11 of Creativity Squared before Ars Electronica 2023 to discuss the festival and its unique approach to exploring the intersection of art and technology, as well as reflect on GenAI’s developing impact on truth. 

One year later, we’ll see how the relationship between art and A.I. has evolved by looking at the most creative and compelling A.I. projects from Ars Electronica 2024.

Calculating Empires

by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler

Opening the S+T+ARTS exhibition this year, “Calculating Empires” is a visual “genealogy” of technological and social structures over the past five centuries, adapted for an in-person or web browser experience. It explores how technology, from algorithms to architecture, has been used for control and power since 1500, often perpetuating colonial and capitalist systems. The installation visualizes these forces, emphasizing the importance of understanding technology’s historical context to imagine alternative futures.

ReVerie

By Keon Ju Lee and Pinyao Liu

“ReVerie” is an immersive art installation that allows participants to interact with an A.I. system to recreate their dreams. The installation, developed in collaboration with dream scientists, generates visual representations of dream objects using A.I., encouraging participants to reflect on the connection between their dreams and waking life.

Maria CHOIR

By Maria Arnal  

“Maria CHOIR” is an interactive A.I.-driven musical installation where participants collaborate with an evolving A.I. -generated persona to create a virtual choir. The A.I. adapts based on user input, blurring the line between human and machine in a collective musical performance.

La Machine à Tubes

By Bastien Bron

This A.I.-based music project merges pop music with technology. The installation generates songs influenced by audience interaction, reflecting on how algorithms shape our tastes and perceptions of artistic identity. The project playfully critiques the role of A.I. in music creation and explores its potential for entertainment.

Ars Electronica Animation Festival

Out of 900 submissions, just 40 of the best A.I.-assisted short films made it into this year’s animated film festival. The films represent a wide variety of genres and production techniques, including A.I.-generated images, cinematic deepfakes, documentary storytelling, scientific and data visualizations, real-time graphics or CGI powered by game engines.

This year’s notable films winners included trhe first ever A.I.-generated music video and the winners of the “Prix Ars Electronica Best – Of” awards:

Washed Out “The Hardest Part”

By Paul Trillo

Renowned animator and A.I.-assisted film creator, Paul Trillo says he “leaned in” to A.I. hallucinations while making his latest project on OpenAI’s Sora video generator. 

“The music video for The Hardest Part by Washed Out is a groundbreaking project, being the first full generative video made with OpenAI’s SORA text-to-video model. The song is about moving on from a lost love, and I wanted to honor this theme while putting a unique spin on it. The video spans several decades, starting in the early 80s, and follows a young couple meeting in school, falling in love and going through the twists and turns of life.”

Smoke and Mirrors 

By Beatie Wolfe

Winner of Prix Ars Electronica’s top Golden Nica Award, Wolfe’s film “uses art to communicate 6 decades of climate data, specifically rising methane levels (Smoke), set alongside the verbatim advertising slogans deployed by the Big Oil industry to deny, doubt, and delay (Mirrors) climate awareness through the decades, starting from 1970 until present day.”

This visualization based on NASA’s Blue Marble photograph and produced in collaboration with Parliament is set to “Oh My Heart”, which was released as the world’s first bioplastic record by Beatie Wolfe, Michael Stipe and Brian Eno’s EarthPercent.

I’m Feeling Lucky

By Timothy Thomasson

Winning an Award of Distinction at Prix Ars Electronica, Thomasson’s “real-time, computer-generated installation,” questions “relationships to image, geography, virtual space, historical media technology, and mass data collection systems,” by randomly training an A.I. to blend elements of countless Google Street View images into eerie, uncanny, and fantastical generated landscapes. He populates these amalgam vistas with random people plucked from all over Google Earth, many of whom clearly had no idea they were recorded, nevermind being reproduced in a digital land of visual limbo. Thomasson’s system blurs faces and process human subject into digital obscurities of their true likeness. 

GPT-1400: The AI Apothecary

By Nathan Cornish

This whimsical installation imagines how medieval healers might have used artificial intelligence. It draws a parallel between pre-scientific medical practices and A.I.’s often mystifying outputs, exploring how both systems generate solutions from large but opaque knowledge bases. The project humorously critiques A.I.’s limitations in producing meaningful or accurate results.