ARS ELECTRONICA ANIMATION FESTIVAL
Since 2023, I have been co-curating the Ars Electronica Animation Festival, the annual showcase of New Animation Art within the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz. Embedded in the framework of the Prix Ars Electronica, the festival is shaped through an open international call and reflects animation as a critical, experimental, and research-based practice. My curatorial focus lies in developing the thematic framework, shaping the program structure, and contextualizing animation as a medium that responds to technological, social, and epistemic shifts.
The festival understands animation not as a fixed genre but as a flexible artistic methodology. Across all editions, the curation foregrounds hybrid visual cultures, post-cinematic aesthetics, AI-generated and synthetic imagery, and speculative forms of storytelling. Each year responds to the overarching Ars Electronica Festival theme while contributing to a longer-term curatorial inquiry into how animated images produce meaning, negotiate truth, and imagine possible futures.
2023 — AI & HUMAN
The 2023 edition positioned animation within debates around truth, authorship, and visual evidence in the context of AI, data politics, and algorithmic perception. The curated programs explored how animated images construct, manipulate, or destabilize realities, addressing deepfakes, synthetic bodies, and data-driven worldviews. Animation was framed as a critical lens through which systems of knowledge, power, and representation become visible.
Rather than focusing on technological novelty alone, the selection emphasized artistic strategies that expose the fragility of visual truth. Through speculative narratives and experimental aesthetics, the program invited audiences to question how images shape belief, trust, and authority in an increasingly mediated world. Animation emerged as a space of inquiry where uncertainty and ambiguity are not resolved, but actively examined.
2024 — HOPE
Hope is a powerful yet deeply ambiguous concept. In a world marked by accelerating climate change, societal disruption, and growing uncertainty about our ability to influence the future, hope remains essential — yet insufficient on its own. The 2024 edition approached hope not as a solution, but as an underlying emotional force that can translate into action, reflection, and responsibility rather than passive optimism.
Curatorially, hope functioned as a springboard for four interconnected concepts: Healing, Otherness, Paradox, and Entanglement. The selected works explored processes of repair across biological, technological, and computational systems; encounters with non-human and unfamiliar perspectives; the contradictions inherent in technological progress; and the deep interdependencies between humans, machines, and ecosystems. Animation was presented as a medium capable of holding uncertainty while imagining fragile, partial, yet necessary futures.
2025 — PANIC
The 2025 edition addressed states of panic as a defining condition of the present — ecological, technological, psychological, and political. The curated programs examined how animation visualizes instability, collapse, and systemic overload, often oscillating between dystopian scenarios, speculative futures, and dark humor. Panic was understood not only as an emotional response, but as a structural condition shaped by contemporary systems.
Through AI-generated imagery, post-human landscapes, and fragmented narrative forms, the works reflected a heightened sense of urgency and disorientation. At the same time, the selection foregrounded emerging artistic positions and localized perspectives, situating global crises within specific cultural contexts. Animation became a space to articulate unease while critically engaging with the aesthetics of catastrophe.
