IC @ Ars Electronica 2026

Listening to Calcified

Volkan Dinçer (TR)

This project focuses on perception and memory of matter, using media-archaeological techniques that release captured information as sound waves from the scratches. It questions the subjectivity of matter based on information theory, with the
understanding that all entities are uniquely informed by their relations within their environment.
Ausstellungsort: Main Exhibtion Domgasse 1, Audimax

Phobos

Hassan Wakaf (SY/BR)

Phobos is an interactive installation that mimics inner dialogues, raising questions that challenge certainties and invite reflection. Named after the Greek personification of fear, Phobos stems from the roots of contemporary fears, uncertainties and anxieties born of conflict and war. It is built as a reflective conversational layer on top of an inverted version of the knowledge-generating combinatorial system ‘Ars Magna Generalis Ultima’, created by Ramon Llull in the 13th century.
Ausstellungsort: Main Exhibtion Domgasse 1, Audimax

Phantom Limbs - The Architecture of a Meeting Point

Bilge Nefise Yardimci (TR)

You are invited to leave the singular human perspective behind. You are stepping into a shared reality where the edges of your own body seem to dissolve. The installation does not tell you what to see or how to feel. Instead, it offers a threshold. It is a place where the gap between species and machine is finally bridged, if only for a short time. The goal is for you to carry the memory of that hybrid state with you.
Ausstellungsort: Main Exhibtion Domgasse 1, Audimax

in/affection

Sound, Mold, and Human Behavior

Yutong Zhang (CN) & Simon Shimizu (JP)
in/affection is a performance and interactive sound installation that translates the bioelectrical activity of living moulds into sound. Different species are cultivated under varying conditions and connected to a self-developed synthesiser. Fluctuations in electrical resistance are transformed in real time into evolving sonic structures. The audience interacts physically by touching cables, thereby becoming participants in a shared sonic ecosystem. How does coexistence sound when non-human life is given a voice?
Ausstellungsort: Main Exhibtion Domgasse 1, Audimax
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Spectral Roots

Gustiele Fistaról (BR)

Spectral Roots is an interactive installation linking 19th-century and contemporary extraction. A projected tree morphs into cables and mineral crystals, referencing Palaquium gutta, a nearly extinct tree extracted under colonial rule to insulate the first submarine telegraph cables, and the rare minerals in today’s devices. The piece is traversed by wireless signals from devices in the space, which reshape transitions and reveal that the invisible is anchored to matter extracted from the earth.
Ausstellungsort: Hauptplatz ATTAC Containers

BioCore

A Soft Echo of Living Heat

Rene Preuer (AT) & Ingrid Graz (AT)
BioCore is a kinetic sculpture that bridges the living and the machine. This soft, robotic sculpture features an artificial core wrapped in living vegetation, blending nature with technology. Instead of relying on cold data, it is brought to life by the visitor’s body heat, thereby accelerating its biological decay. By highlighting the fragility of both biological and artificial existence, it serves as a reflection on the temporal nature of life and the short-lived cycle of our technology.
Ausstellungsort: Main Exhibtion Domgasse 1, Audimax

Mío##

Economies of Movement, Procedures for Displacing a Body

Patrick Ortiz (BO) & Marta Salinas (AR)
Mío## is a live stream re-imagined as a video game, where the playable character is replaced by a real person wandering through the city. Their movement is triggered by participants acting as players who control the route through payments that authorise each segment. The project proposes a choreographic framework in which the performer’s transit operates as a metaphor for migration, a journey that is conditioned, fragmented, and governed by external forces.
Performers: Alireza Khosroabadi, Patrick Ortiz, Maque Pereyra
Ausstellungsort: Main Exhibtion Domgasse 1, Audimax

SovereigntyMeter

Who owns the internet, and who will own it next?

Ahmad Aiub (EG)

SovereigntyMeter scans any domain to visualise the political and physical geography of its infrastructure: server location, corporate ownership, routing, and undersea cable dependencies. Each scan generates a Digital Sovereignty Score measuring reliance on dominant technological powers. Grounded in data colonialism theory, scans contribute to an open-source archive documenting how internet infrastructure shifts over time—asking who owns the internet now and who will own it in ten years.
Ausstellungsort: Main Exhibtion Domgasse 1, Audimax

veronica

spilt out of the line

Ling-Hsuan Hsu (TW)
Through the cables that carry our voices, information swells into an ocean of letters. What might you receive from it? Place your hand on the silk. Touch it. The light at your fingertip gathers. A fragment surfaces - in Chinese, in English, in German. Lift your hand. It dissolves. But for a moment, someone’s private second was yours.
Ausstellungsort: Main Exhibtion Domgasse 1, Audimax

Collective Instrument of Maintenance

inspired by worm ecologies

Christine Haupt (DE)

Collective Instrument of Maintenance is an interactive sound sculpture in public space inspired by worm ecologies and the invisible labour that sustains ecological and social systems. A persistent soundscape can only be harmonised through collective action: participants adjust tension lines together, transforming noise into resonance. Referencing the hidden work of earthworms, the installation makes maintenance, care, and cooperation physically and audibly perceptible.
Ausstellungsort: Hauptplatz 6, Courtyard

Withdraw

AR Brand Blocker

Carmen Daniela Córdoba Martínez (CO)

What if the consumer could decide which brand deserves their gaze? In La Calera, Colombia, Coca-Cola has been accused of building concrete structures over springs. They manipulate the resource while the community experiences water rationing. This project was born as a consumer’s answer to this situation. It speculates on controlled reality: using augmented reality glasses and a visual recognition system to detect and blocklist a brand from the wearer’s field of vision.
Ausstellungsort: Main Exhibtion Domgasse 1, Audimax

Vocal Duets

Alireza Khosroabadi (IR) & Sara Karimi (IR)

Vocal Duets is shaped around contemporary conflicts between languages and countries, conflicts that take the form of war. With a rhythm that can be observed in hindsight, one side attacks and the other retaliates. While language is generally assumed to be a means of closeness, intimacy, and communication, these duets use the irony of the situation to revive the lost intimacy and peace between the neighbouring alphabets of Russian–Ukrainian, Hebrew–Farsi, and Hebrew–Arabic.
Ausstellungsort: Hauptplatz ATTAC Containers

Cycle of Emotions: Composition

Joann Lee (KR)

‘Composition’ continues the ‘Cycle of Emotions’ series (G.MAP Gwangju, South Korea, 2026). The user chooses an emotion and its colour on a tablet; facial expression recognition (FER) reads the face. These inputs converge into three layers of colour: the user’s choice, colours chosen by previous users in this exhibition, and traces from Gwangju users. Here, emotion data becomes abstract painting rather than information, and one user’s colour becomes part of the next viewer’s composition.
Ausstellungsort: Main Exhibtion Domgasse 1, Audimax

At Least I’m Making Money

How financial systems profit from war

Carolina Sofia Bischof (AT) & Carmen Daniela Córdoba Martínez (CO)

At Least I’m Making Money is an interactive 
installation about how money, power and the arms industry uphold modern war. War is usually framed as a conflict between nations like the USA vs. Iran, Russia vs. Ukraine, or Israel vs. Palestine, but this hides another dimension. War is also a financial event. These layers are so abstract that we forget how they sustain it. As systems collapse, the cost is counted in numbers, never in the people paying for it.
Technical support: Joshua Mattson (CA)
Ausstellungsort: Hauptplatz ATTAC Containers

Into the air

m22 (Vlada Oleinik & Nail Gainulla) (AT)

Into the air is a technological and sound installation by m22. Infrasound and seismic waves generated by military explosions disrupt avian magnetoreception, causing birds to abandon their habitat. The object consists of three antenna-like structures connected by steel cables, reminiscent of real-life objects birds use to perch. Each cable is fitted with transducers that translate seismic and infrasound data from monitoring stations in Ukraine into audible and visible vibrations.
Ausstellungsort: Hauptplatz ATTAC Containers

Shared Act

Saumil Bhandari (IN)

A participatory kinetic sculpture driven by global conflict data. As violence escalates, structural support is continuously withdrawn, causing the sculpture to collapse. Only the physical intervention of passing strangers can restore and sustain it. The work proposes shared maintenance over automated mediation, suggesting that a common world is sustained through the continuous collective care of strangers.
Ausstellungsort: Hauptplatz ATTAC Containers

By the Time We Looked

Patricia Soto Molina (ES)

Archival installation and live audiovisual performance developed through research into the Standard Model, the Higgs boson and reconstruction methodologies at CERN. The piece approaches reconstruction as a condition through which we access reality. In particle physics, collisions are never directly observed but are reconstructed from traces and delayed signals, providing access to both the event and the underlying structures that describe microscopic interactions.
Ausstellungsort: Main Exhibtion Domgasse 1, Audimax