In the first blog, I wrote about how art can translate uncertainty into something we can feel, question, and discuss. This second blog moves from that idea into the lived experience of the festival: its setting, its dialogues, and the encounters that stayed with me.
As I spent more time at Ars Electronica Festival 2025, I began to feel that it was much bigger than the artworks themselves. The city, the venue, and the people around me all became part of the experience.
5. The Larger Setting
Ars Electronica is called a center, not a museum, and that distinction felt meaningful to me. A museum often suggests something stable or permanent. The Ars Electronica Center, by contrast, felt like a central focal point where different streams of art intersect. The exhibitions rotate, there is no permanent collection in the usual sense, and the emphasis is less on preservation than on exchange, experimentation, and reconfiguration. That already says something about the spirit of the place.
The scale of the festival also surprised me. It takes place every year around the beginning of September for about five days, and for a city the size of Linz, it felt astonishingly large — the city was packed. I had booked two months in advance and still could not find a place near the city center for a reasonable price. That, in itself, gave me a very immediate sense of how much the festival transforms the whole city. A strong sense of self-expression could be felt in Linz more broadly, not only inside the festival venues but also in the city itself, especially around the Ars Electronica Center.
In 2025, the festival theme was PANIC yes/no. It traced the roots of fear and collective panic in a time shaped by AI, deepfakes, war, and global political conflict, while also asking how we might imagine alternatives in the middle of all these rapid changes in daily life. That atmosphere was intensified by the fact that 2025 was the last year the festival was held in POSTCITY, the massive former postal logistics center next to the main train station. Its raw, industrial, temporary character made a big difference. It did not feel neutral or polished. It felt provisional, unfinished, and charged — exactly the kind of place where the festival’s questions could become more tangible.
6. Dialogue as the Festival’s Real Medium
What made Ars Electronica feel especially unique to me was not only the artworks themselves, but the conversations happening around them. The more time I spent there, the more I felt that its real medium was not limited to installation, image, sound, or performance, but extended into dialogue. Again and again, individual experiences with an artwork opened into exchanges with other people — sometimes planned, sometimes spontaneous, but often equally meaningful either way.
This became especially clear in the workshops. I participated in several, and one of the most memorable formats was a kind of improvisational “speed-dating” fire talk, where around twenty people sat in two circles: The inner circle stayed fixed, while the outer circle rotated every minute. A theme question appeared on the screen and that became the starting point for each one-minute exchange. It was so overwhelming as an experience that I forgot to take a picture. But that intensity was exactly what made it stay with me. There were always things to do throughout the whole day, often so many happening in parallel that I wished I could split myself into many versions just to participate in all of them.
I also became more aware of how the physical form of a space shaped the kind of dialogue that happened in it. There were open, drop-in spaces where anyone could join and leave freely, and there were also more intimate settings where physical closeness translated into a kind of personal intimacy and eagerness to share. The more I moved between these spaces, the more I felt that dialogue at the festival was not simply about exchanging information. It was about creating a temporary space where people could meet through curiosity, uncertainty, and shared attention.
This is where the importance of dialogue (対話 – taiwa) became especially clear to me. What makes Ars Electronica special is its ability to bring everyone together: artists, facilitators, and the audience. And these “artists” are not limited to the traditional sense of drawing or sculpting, but also include engineers, scientists, and people working across many different fields. In that sense, dialogue was not an extra part of the festival. It was one of the main ways the festival actually worked.
7. Interdisciplinarity in Practice
This was also what made the festival feel truly interdisciplinary to me. Ars Electronica was not simply presenting “art and technology” side by side. It was creating situations in which different disciplines, perspectives, and methods had to meet each other, respond to each other, and sometimes even clash with each other. What made it special was not just the presence of artists, scientists, engineers, facilitators, and audiences in the same place, but the fact that they were all part of the same conversation.
One example that stayed with me was the connection between origami, folding problems, and robotics. Learning about Dr. Matthew Gardiner and the field of “oribotics” made a strong impression on me. The combination of aesthetic, biomechanical, and morphological thinking across nature, origami, and robotics captured exactly the kind of transdisciplinary practice that makes Ars Electronica so distinctive. People with those kinds of backgrounds — those who do not stay inside one discipline — are what make the festival special.
By the way, did you know… (click here for a trivia)
that the use of drones for entertainment (shows) started here at Futurelab, Ars Electronica? Amid the ominous military use of drones, researchers and artists here explored a different possibility: using drones for art and entertainment. Over the past several years, astonishing performances have taken place around the world, most famously in Shanghai, China, and Yokohama, Japan.
I felt this even more strongly during the Prix Ars Electronica Exhibition Guided Tour. Having time to discuss the artworks directly with the artists themselves made the experience much richer than simply viewing the works in silence. Listening to their process, their stories, and their own interpretations opened a very different layer of understanding. The artists came from the Netherlands, Poland, Norway, Belgium, Argentina, the United Kingdom, Japan, Romania, France, Iran, and Canada, and that range of backgrounds made the conversations feel even more layered.
One question kept returning throughout the festival: What happens when people working on the same project want different things? What if the artists want to pull one way, but the scientists want to go in another? What if the designer and engineer each imagine a different final product? How do we find common ground? That question made interdisciplinarity feel very real to me — not as a smooth fusion, but as a process of negotiation.
This also connects to one of the highlights that stayed with me: the contrast between art thinking and design thinking, especially through the ideas shared by Hideaki Ogawa-san from Ars Electronica Futurelab. Design often moves toward solving, structuring, and improving. Art, by contrast, can stay longer with ambiguity, contradiction, and open-ended questions. That felt like an important distinction. Ars Electronica was not only about producing innovation, but about creating the conditions in which new ways of seeing, thinking, and relating could emerge.
And that is why the festival felt to me like something broader than “media art” in the narrow sense. It was not just about artworks using technology. It was about interdisciplinarity, societal impact, and the ways art can open debates about technology and society.
8. Personal Transformation
All of this changed the way I moved through the festival myself. At the beginning, I was shy and afraid to open up conversations with people, especially people from different countries, ages, and academic or professional backgrounds. I often felt I was not good enough to strike up a captivating conversation at a first encounter. Those first steps of getting to know someone new felt awkward and difficult for me.
But the structure of the festival kept placing me in those moments again and again. Through workshops, fire talks, casual conversations, and later the guided tour, I gradually began to feel more natural simply talking with people — about an artwork, about the festival, about a shared reaction in the moment. I started letting go of some of the “scripts” I usually rely on, and instead tried to be more present with the person in front of me. That shift helped me especially in the last tour I did on the final day of the festival.
That tour made this transformation very real to me. One of the most difficult parts was engaging an audience made up of people from different countries, different age groups, and very different backgrounds — engineers, researchers, musicians, business professionals, exhibition facilitators, hobbyists — all bringing different attitudes toward robots, AI, media art, and activism. In that situation, I realized that the audience was not just there to receive information from us as guides. Their knowledge and perspectives were what made the tour unique. Asking questions became more important than simply explaining.
These experiences really shook me to my core and changed how I think about breaking down the “invisible wall” between people. I realized I genuinely love talking with people, and that I learn so much from those conversations — things I could not learn without such personal encounters. In that sense, Ars Electronica did not only deepen my thinking about translation. It changed how I think about connection, dialogue, and the human side of learning itself.
9. Closing Reflection and Acknowledgments
Looking back, Ars Electronica Festival was more than just somewhere I visited; it became a place that quietly changed how I think, feel, and relate to others through art. What has stayed with me most is not only the artworks themselves, but the way they made uncertainty tangible, opened space for dialogue, and brought different people, disciplines, and perspectives into contact. It made my interest in translation feel less like an abstract research theme and more like something lived.
The experience also stayed with me personally. It unsettled many of my usual ways of observing, interpreting, and engaging, and that was precisely what made it meaningful. It reminded me that understanding does not always begin with clarity; sometimes it begins by staying with what feels unfamiliar, unresolved, or difficult to name, and allowing that space to open into encounter.
I feel very grateful to have had the chance to take part in Ars Electronica Festival 2025, and to everyone who made that possible. It was a real privilege to receive guidance from Emiko-san during this experience. Through our conversations and her guidance, I found myself seeing and approaching the festival from perspectives I might not have reached on my own.
I am also deeply thankful for the discussions I shared with my three senpais from Nohara-Zhu Lab, Yuzhe Zhou, Liu Yuxuan (Uken), and Nano Kojima, whose reflections added so much to how I experienced and thought through the festival.
I would also like to sincerely thank Professor Kayoko Nohara, Professor Xinru Zhu, and Professor Giorgio Salani for their guidance, support, and for making this opportunity possible.
I am equally grateful to the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) for its financial support. This experience was made possible through KAKENHI funding administered by these three professors, and I deeply appreciate the support that allowed me to be part of it.
☆Blog 1 “Art as Translator: Turning Estrangement into Conversation” is available from here.
