Out of the Box - Ars Electronica Festival 2019

Today starts this year's Ars Electronica Festival. The event, which has established as a fixture in the international art and technology scene, has been a starting point for the cultural autumn season in Upper Austria for many years. As in the years before, we support the Ars Electronica Festival again this year with our POS systems (hardware and software). In return, all employees of NTS Retail can visit the festival for free.

This year, Ars Electronica is celebrating its 40th birthday and is once again looking to the future, to the implications of the digital reality, its prospects and the associated options for action.

This year's theme is "Out of the Box - The Midlife Crisis of the Digital Revolution". This means, on the one hand, ready-to-use products and, on the other hand, thinking about leaving existing paths and breaking with existing conventions. In any case, „out of the box“, for all of us, means to get out of the comfort zone.

So far, the digital transformation has mostly been a digitization of industrial processes. We are now starting to shift the process of thinking and making decisions into the digital space. The 5-day program consists of conferences, workshops, exhibitions, interventions and performances. It aims to rewrite questions about the future and critically question what we want to do with new technological possibilities. At NTS Retail, we also want to take this festival as an inspiration to reflect on the emerging opportunities and implications of digital transformation - not just in the retail industry but for our environment as a whole.

Details about the theme as well as the entire festival program can be found here.

The festival will take place from today on until September 9th. The hotspot will once again be the Postcity, the former postal and parcel distribution center at Linz Central Station. In addition, the festival also spans across the entire inner city: in the Linz Mariendom, in the OK at the OÖ Kulturquartier, in the Art University Linz, in the LENTOS Art Museum, at the Donaupark, in the Stadtwerkstatt, in the newly designed Ars Electronica Center and in the Anton Bruckner Private University. In addition to the main venue Postcity and the inner city, there will be the new European Festival for AI & Music in the monastery of St. Florian, exclusively on Saturday September 7th.