From the November 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
On 17 September 1979, officials from the Austrian city of Linz, including its mayor, congregated at the local airport. A red carpet had been rolled out in honour of a ‘special guest’ arriving from New Jersey to speak at the launch of Ars Electronica Festival the following day. His name was SPA-12, a robot with an orb-like head and rigid, rotating arms extending from a conical body. By today’s standards, he was something of a sci-fi puppet, remote-controlled and ventriloquised by a human operator in the wings. SPA-12 nonetheless proved a sensation with Linzers, who greeted him on the city’s main shopping street and via local radio. It was a stunt that established the spirit of Ars Electronica, a festival dedicated to art, technology and society that presents creative explorations of emerging tech, in large part to interest and excite the wider public.
When I visited Ars Electronica’s 45th edition last month, as a speaker in its conference programme, the sheer scale of the operation was astonishing. It was held across 18 locations, of which the principal is PostCity, an 80,000sqm complex once used by the Austrian postal service. It still contains towering spiral chutes for processing mail en masse. In 1979, just 20 artists and scientists participated in the festival, including its co-founder Herbet W. Franke, widely regarded as one of the earliest practitioners of computer art. This year, some 1,260 participants travelled from 67 countries, and over the course of five days there were 112,000 recorded visitors. The event may not be a household name but, among those in the know, Ars Electronica has quietly asserted itself as the premier international destination for art of the digital realm.
The atmosphere at PostCity was reminiscent of that of a science museum, and this year’s theme of ‘hope’ suggested an upbeat sincerity that would feel out of place in most art world settings. Over at the Lentos Kunstmuseum, the ‘Prix Ars Electronica’ exhibition featured several leaders in the application of tech in art, such as Sasha Stiles from New York, whose REPETAE uses AI to remix a spoken word performance so that it is layered over with repeated fragments, enhancing its poeticism. Another highlight was the tongue-in-cheek Conversations Beyond the Ordinary by Jan Zuiderveld from Amsterdam, which uses AI to breathe new life into ordinary appliances such as a coffee machine or printer, emphasising how far we’ve come since these gadgets were invented. A grumpy microwave that can identify and respond to any object placed inside it particularly enjoyed goading gallery-goers. ‘You flock to the art but miss the depth, your pursuit of seamless tech designed to free [you] shackles you instead,’ it sneered.
Hermann Giesler presenting Adolf Hitler with a model of planned new buildings for Linz in 1944. Photo: ullstein bild via Getty Images
That Linz should have become a haven for futurists was not always on the cards. Adolf Hitler once planned for his home city to become the cultural capital of the Third Reich, supplanting Vienna. In February 1945, he was presented with a model for the rebuilt city by the architect Hermann Giesler. Though Hitler must by then have known that none of his plans would come to fruition, he apparently contemplated the model for hours. It was crowned by a large complex named the Führermuseum, which had been a driving force behind the Nazis’ systematic looting of Jewish-owned art. The so-called Linz Special Commission was led by two influential German museum directors, Hans Posse (until his death in 1942) and, later, Hermann Voss. Both were on board with Hitler’s plans for a revival of traditional 19th-century painting, venerating artists such as Carl Spitzweg and Franz von Defregger.
I was lucky enough to catch the final day of ‘The Journey of Paintings’, a temporary exhibition at the Lentos detailing some of this history. It paired largely unremarkable paintings with lengthy wall texts recounting how both Nazi-looted art and various Austrian and German museum collections were hidden in depots across the country, away from bombing raids. The salt mines of the Salzkammergut were particularly favoured for their stable atmospheric conditions and, in 1944, Hitler’s collection amassed for the Linz Special Commission was deposited at Altaussee, a 13-month undertaking that ended just a month before V.E. Day. Tens of thousands more looted objects were stored there, including the Ghent Altarpiece, out of reach of the advancing Allies. After the war, the ‘Monuments Men’, a unit of arts professionals charged with protecting cultural property, discovered the vast repository, which included 5,350 Old Master paintings and 237 cases of books destined for Linz. The unit would play a key role in repatriating the majority of these works. Those for which no home was found by 1949 were placed with Germany’s federal government, which is investigating their origins to this day.
Johanna Amalie, Countess Senfft von Plisach with her son Henry (1784), Anton Graff. Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Hessen Kassel Heritage
One of Hermann Voss’s close associates was the Berlin dealer Wolfgang Gurlitt, who sold his collection to the City of Linz in 1953. The Lentos has been researching the provenance of these works in accordance with Austria’s Art Restitution Act (1998) and, so far, 13 paintings have been restituted to the heirs of their original owners. To be upfront about this legacy, the museum has installed a display at the entrance to its historical collection. One wall bears sketched outlines of now absent works by Egon Schiele, Emil Nolde and Lovis Corinth, beneath which are listed, unnecessarily, the prices for which they sold at auction shortly after their return. Nearby hangs a restituted Anton Romako painting on permanent loan, intended perhaps as a hint to newly identified heirs.
However much enthusiasm one might personally feel for the intersection of art and technology, the success of Ars Electronica is a triumph in light of Hitler’s hopes for Linz. In the Austrian legislative elections in late September, the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ), came in first place with 29 per cent of the vote, a jump of 13 per cent since 2019. In Linz, the FPÖ drew level with the centre-left SPÖ, with a 9 per cent increase in its vote share. The city may have its sights set on the future, but it mustn’t forget its past.
From the November 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.