Since 2023, I have been co-curating the Ars Electronica Animation Festival, the annual showcase of New Animation Art within the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz. Embedded in the framework of the Prix Ars Electronica, the yearly showcase is drawn from the annual submissions to the competition—typically around 1,000 entries each year—and profiles animation as a critical and experimental artistic practice. My curatorial work involves developing the annual thematic framework, shaping the program structure, and inviting artists to participate in public talks, presentations, and Q&A sessions.

Across the editions I have co-curated (2023–2025), the selection foregrounded new forms of animation art, including AI-generated and synthetic imagery, speculative and documentary storytelling, cinematic deepfakes, scientific and data visualizations, real-time graphics, and CGI powered by game engines. Each edition also responded to the overarching Ars Electronica Festival theme while contributing to a longer-term curatorial inquiry into how animated images produce meaning, negotiate truth, and imagine possible futures.

Across the editions, I moderated artist talks and Q&A sessions with Timothy Thomasson, Nicolas Gourault, Rachel Maclean, Jeremy Kamal, Miwa Matreyek, Akiko Nakayama, Rebecca Merlic a.o.

In addition to the festival presentations in Linz, I am also involved in shaping the Animation Festival on Tour program, an international traveling showcase organized in collaboration with the Austrian Federal Ministry for European and International Affairs. The program brings highlights of the Ars Electronica Animation Festival to international audiences through Austrian embassies, cultural forums, cinemas, galleries, and partner festivals. Each year, selected works from the program are presented in at least 25 venues worldwide, extending the festival’s curatorial framework into diverse cultural and geopolitical contexts.

2023 AI & HUMAN / DATA BODIES SPACE

The 2023 edition positioned animation as a critical tool to examine power, control, and agency in contemporary digital culture. Through posthuman scenarios and more-than-human ecologies, selected works explored how technological systems may reshape future forms of coexistence and planetary relations.

A parallel curatorial thread addressed the ethics and politics of artificial intelligence, engaging with issues such as data ownership, data harvesting, authorship, and image credibility. The selection foregrounded artistic strategies that exposed the fragility of visual truth. By working with deepfakes, machine learning, and human–AI co-creation, the program invited audiences to question how images shape belief, trust, and authority in an increasingly mediated world.

2024 H-O-P-E

HOPE was the overarching theme of the Ars Electronica Festival 2024, which we approached from a deliberately unexpected angle. The starting point was the observation that hope is a powerful yet far too ambiguous concept. In a world marked by accelerating climate change, societal disruption, and growing uncertainty about our ability to influence the future, hope can easily appear naïve or delusional, despite its necessity. Rather than treating hope as a solution, we framed it as the underlying emotion that translates into various actions and tendencies shaping the future. H-O-P-E became the springboard for four interconnected concepts: Healing, Otherness, Paradox, and Entanglement. The program was structured around these four strands, with several animation selected works belonging to each concept.

2025 PANIC

The 2025 edition addressed states of panic as a defining condition of the present — ecological, technological, psychological, and political. The selection featured a mix of synthetic, AI-generated visions of catastrophe combined with more poetic and introspective CGI works and game engine aesthetics. The selected works carry echoes of social collapse, ecological decline, and existential dread. works reflected a heightened sense of urgency and disorientation. Animation became a space to articulate unease while critically engaging with the aesthetics of catastrophe, continually reasserting the sense of PANIC that defines our contemporary condition.