This year’s collaboration with the Ars Electronica Festival is stronger than ever, with 30+ international universities coming together in the center of Linz in a bid to express and inspire. In the very center of it all comes a public structure with many faces, a welcoming architecture that hosts art and people, a safe space for all to speak up and listen to the voices of the few and many. In this public intervention, activist collaborations are to be looked out for, with performing partners such as ATTAC Austria, FIFTITU%, and Ars Electronica’s Flood the Zone with Courage. Inside the art university’s buildings, 80+ artworks by students and emerging artists await the public, spanning a diverse array of themes. This year’s festival theme suggests a future is coming, but at the University of Arts Linz and the Kunstuni Campus, we boldly ask: At what cost?

Isaac Asimov’s 1956 science fiction piece, The Last Question, is underlined by this precise question: What does the future hold for us? Can humans exist forever? And at what cost? His story explores humanity’s reliance on a galactic supercomputer, similar to that of an AI assistant today, to escape entropy: the inevitable end and the future of the universe. For trillions of years, humans have asked how to stop it, and the machine gives the same repeated response: “INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER.” This standoff continues until the end of the dying universe, when the last of the advanced humans merge consciousness with the computer. The omni-being is then left alone in the void, existing purely to calculate the answer humanity always sought—at the cost of humanity itself. As the people in Asimov’s story, in times of need, we turn to technology, seeking solutions. Currently, people are outsourcing their creativity to Generative AI; hands-on learning has been replaced by instant gratification, and exploring moral dilemmas has been reduced to simple automated outputs. Will AI find out the answers for our future? Or should we listen to the voices of the current? Instead of relying on machines for answers, the students, partners of the Kunstuni, and the public take to Linz’s main square to raise their voices in an active demonstration of community and artistic expression. 

Algorithmic models may promise a uniform future, but the physical reality of our present is defined by disputes over world politics, power, history, and culture. True progress will not materialize through the tidy promises of AI or the grim scenarios of science fiction. In contrast to Asimov’s story, where humanity achieves immortality by converging itself into a powerful machine, the artists and activists at Kunstuni remember that the future is built on human messiness, friction, and diversity.

This year’s exhibition serves as a counterpoint to tech-solutionism; it speaks to the future potential that lies not in cutting-edge solutions but in the collaborations of cultural voices. Supporting this amalgam of voices and ideas, a public structure in the main square accommodates that very solidarity. Bringing together dozens of nationalities, feminist perspectives via FIFTITU%, anti-war stances, and resistance with ATTAC Austria, Ars Electronica invites the public to step away from neat algorithms and to “Flood the Zone with Courage.” Acting upon a cultural problem is messy, but diversity is what makes us beautiful. True beauty and answers are found in our collective willingness to speak, listen, and act together in the present and locally, with our neighbors. 

Constant change, as small and insignificant as it may seem, like tiny particles that vibrate, together becomes a conglomerate of bouldering movement. While the world presses on toward what the future may bring, it still undergoes disputes rooted in century-old fights over land and sea, resources and consumption, nature and pollution, diversity and division. Disputes so ugly that we would rather look away, pretend they are too far from us, pretend that time will take care of them, pretend that they are someone else’s responsibility. Yet, much like the ocean’s garbage patches that have formed their own synthetic ecosystems, these societal issues not only persist but constantly evolve. We must not see them as relics of the past, but as part of us: driving forces for the future, material we carry with us, and defining factors of our culture. Once forgotten, they return again and again, like plastic waste thrown away, only to reappear as microplastics. Just as material is recycled, we must continually revisit these unresolved cultural disputes. True activism operates like constant recycling: a necessary, messy patchwork of collaboration where every individual voice counts. These friction-filled matters are the very material we must carry with us to actively shape our future. 

This active reclamation of our present is incorporated in the very design language of the Kunstuni Campus exhibition. A raw, democratic landscape built not on algorithmic perfection, but on a beautiful, complicated mess. True collaboration is rarely easy; it requires us to navigate the friction of differing perspectives to construct a shared space. This year’s Ars Electronica Festival theme reminds us of our agency in the present. “Future Begins”, written in the present tense, suggests the future begins now, and not a destination we passively wait for. It is the continuous, conscious act of change itself. As Asimov’s tale ends (and restarts), “Step by step, it must be done.”

Curatorial text by Hess Jeon