I came to Ars Electronica Festival 2025 thinking about translation as a research problem: How ideas move across languages, cultures, and disciplines. I left with a more visceral understanding: Art does not simply explain the unknown; it gives uncertainty a form people can feel, question, and talk through together.
1. Why I Was There
I came to Ars Electronica Festival 2025 through the lens of my research in translation studies. My interest in translation is not limited to language in the conventional sense, but extends to the movement of ideas across disciplines, cultures, and ways of knowing. In that sense, translation is not only about words, but also about how meaning travels, shifts, and becomes understandable between people who do not always speak the same “language,” even when they use the same words.
City of Linz (Austria) through the pictures
2. The Question I Carried
At Nohara Lab, working within a translation studies framework and with ethnographic methodologies, we explore how artistic perspectives interact with and contribute to science. This question stayed with me throughout the festival: What can art make visible, sensible, or discussable that science alone cannot yet fully express? The more time I spent there, the more I felt that we speak many different languages — not only English, Japanese, or German, but also the languages of engineering, art, research, design, and lived experience. Translation, then, becomes indispensable in allowing these worlds to meet.
3. A First Encounter
That question stopped being abstract the moment I entered the Ars Electronica Festival. I was immediately struck by the scale of it all — the exhibitions, the parallel programs, the constant feeling that there was always something happening somewhere, and that I could never fully catch up with everything at once. Even from the start of the day, when I arrived around 10:30, the festival already felt intense, almost demanding, as if it was asking me to respond before I had time to settle into a comfortable way of observing.
Very quickly, I realized I was not simply there to “look at art.” I was entering a space that felt overwhelming, strange, and at times difficult to process, but also deeply stimulating. That first encounter mattered because it moved me out of a distant, analytical mode and into a much more immediate experience of curiosity, hesitation, and emotional response. My research question — how artistic perspectives interact with and contribute to science — no longer felt like something I had brought with me from outside. It had already started unfolding around me.
4. What the Festival Revealed
This was where art began to feel especially powerful to me at Ars Electronica Festival — not only as a form of expression, but as something that can translate uncertainty into artistic language. It sparks interest, starts conversations, evokes emotion, and poses questions in abstract and intuitive ways that science may not yet have the tools to express explicitly. That was one of the strongest things I felt throughout the festival: Art can make something visible and sensible before it becomes fully explainable.
I am not sure whether the pictures can fully convey the feelings of discomfort, overwhelm, and estrangement that I was constantly feeling throughout the festival. It was overwhelming, but stimulating. And the more I stayed with that feeling, the more I began to understand that creating this kind of estrangement is also one of the primary purposes of art. It begs questions. It sparks curiosity. It challenges the status quo that we have become habituated to. It interrupts what feels normal.
(Left)The lost limbo: Sister Lin-Tou / MeimageDance (Taiwan); (Center) Chemical Calls of Care II / New Art Foundation (Spain) / Yolanda Uriz (Spain); (Right) Breaking News: Wolpertinger sighted in Linz! (A project developed by a team of researchers from Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria)
To me, this also connects directly back to science and technology. These abstract feelings are not separate from innovation; they can be what creates the conditions for disruptive change. That is exactly what I wanted to pay attention to at the festival: How such abstract concepts and emotional responses take shape, and how they can eventually be translated into scientific and technological progress. In that sense, art is not simply reacting to uncertainty — it is giving uncertainty a form, and sometimes that form becomes the beginning of radical change.
Highlights from the festival (all six pictures above). The last two pictures are the front and the back of a device that has more than 100 old speakers attached to it, creating a sense of estrangement that is disturbing and uncomfortable.
If science often works by verifying and explaining what is, art can make room for asking “what if?” That question stayed with me again and again throughout the festival. And I want to pause here, before moving too quickly into “what happened next.” Because once what if? became the thread I followed, everything else started to rearrange itself: The city of Linz outside the venues, the raw intensity of POSTCITY, the theme PANIC yes/no showing up not only in artworks but in the mood of the space, and, most importantly, the way workshops, guided tours, and conversations turned the festival into something more like a living social experiment than an exhibition.
In the next blog, I will trace how what if? moved from a question inside the artworks into a question between people: How dialogue (対話- taiwa) became the festival’s real medium, how interdisciplinarity was practiced rather than advertised, and how that changed the way I related to strangers, and to myself, over five days in Linz.
– We’ll cover this in detail in the next blog post, “From ‘What if?’ to Dialogue: Ars Electronica as a Space of Encounters” – stay tuned!
