infrastructure: Ars Electronica

A sensational, internationally unique experience awaits visitors to the Ars Electronica Center since August 2015. A 16 by 9 meters wall and 16 by 9 meters floor projection, laser tracking and 3D animations were the specialities of the Deep Space since 2009. An all-out upgrade of the venue’s technical infrastructure of the Deep Space now enable audiences to enjoy projections at 8K resolution and thus worlds of imagery at a never-before-achieved level of quality.

As for content, Deep Space is unlimited. It can take visitors to any conceivable place, on Earth and beyond. You can watch a thrilling downhill run on Austria’s world-famous Streif from a ski racer’s perspective—don your 3D glasses and off you go! Gigapixel images give you an ultra-close-up look at art treasures from the world’s great churches and museums—from the Kefermarkt Winged Altar to Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. On Deep Space’s jumbo projection surfaces, works of media art such as prizewinning animated films singled out for recognition by the Prix Ars Electronica can impart their consummate visual fascination and transport spectators into futuristic, abstract, fairy-tale domains. Ever since time-lapse photography was first used in the late 19th century, viewers have been enthralled by this filmmaking technique and the amazing way its highly accelerated tempo sheds new light on things that occur in our world.

Cameras that can be set to take shots at intervals ranging from a few minutes to several days capture visual phenomena played out far beyond our conventional time horizon. Combining these highly detailed, fast-forward motion pictures with the extraordinarily high degree of resolution in Deep Space 8K opens our eyes to everyday events that we’ve never seen in this form before. The Deep Space is the place where high-resolution gigapixel images, also arranged as time-lapse videos, and breathtaking panorama images can be experienced best.

With its jumbo-format wall & floor projections and built-in laser tracking system, Deep Space 8K presents challenging infrastructure to media artists. As they go about adapting existing works and, above all, designing installations custom-made for this space, they’re entering artistic terra incognita. The position of visitors amidst the projection surface and participation by them call for a well-thought-out aesthetic composition and concepts for the resulting dynamics. The Deep Space is also the ideal platform when it comes to current media art: Here you can watch excellent animation of the international media art competition Prix Ars Electronica.