China Academy of Art Hangzhou (CN), Bauhaus-Universität Weimar (DE), Nanyang Technological University Singapore (SG)

In response to Ars Electronica 2025’s theme PANIC – yes/no, this exhibition explores a quieter, ambient panic—one that builds silently across infrastructures, skylines, and ecosystems. Beyond the Screens, the third edition of the City Digital Skin Art Festival (CDSA), presents digital works originally created for monumental urban displays across Asia and Europe. Across five countries, nine cities, and eleven iconic screens, these media facades become not just surfaces, but reflective spaces that echo back environmental unease and systemic tension.
At a time when change accelerates and certainties dissolve, these works do not attempt to fix or soothe. Instead, they pause the world just long enough for us to feel it—its fragility, its momentum, its unspoken questions. Panic is a signal: a subtle, flickering alert from within the digital skin of our cities. These images, projected onto architectural surfaces, offer no easy answers—but insist we pay attention.
The works are deeply immersive—monumental in form, restrained in rhythm, urgent in message. If panic is the body’s response to what can no longer be ignored, then this is not alarm—it is recognition. A counter-panic that invites reflection over our reaction.
Featuring award-winning works from CDSA 2024, their relevance has only grown. If Ars Electronica asks PANIC – yes/no?, these artists answer: we are already in it. What now?

🗓 September 3–7, 2025
📍 POSTCITY Linz, Austria

Featured Artists:
Ayça Tugran, Kevin Blackistone, Lee Chaewon Nicole, Sreeshna Sowmya, MUMA Island (Zhao Boxiong, Gao Jialuo, Ma Linlin), and Spinor 空介 (Wu Jianbin, Zhang Yi, Tang Huisan, Jiang Jiaying, Jiang Kaixin).

Curatorial Team:
Yuelai Ruan (CDSA, CAA), Susa Pop (Public Art Lab / Connecting Cities / Bauhaus Weimar), Ina Conradi (ADM NTU), with Maria Grazia Mattei (MEET) and Dominique Moulon.

Partner Academic Institutions:
Nanyang Technological University Singapore (NTU), Public Art Lab, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, China Academy of Art, Department of Public Space Art (CAA), Media City R&D Center (CAA), MEET Digital Culture Center, Milan, LIMPIDART, Fiber Media Lab, MANA Platform, D-arts Platform

Venues:
Ten Square Singapore, NTU Singapore Media Art Nexus, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Prevision Culture Hangzhou, Dayang Media Hangzhou, Milano Centrale, Tour First Paris

Ars Electronica. “Beyond the Screens: City Digital Skin Art Festival (CDSA).” Ars Electronica Festival.
https://ars.electronica.art/panic/en/view/beyond-the-screens-city-digital-skin-art-festival-cdsa-20038ddb450c8121b4e9e78f2f1bf4b7/.

Ars Electronica Campus Exhibition

Ars Electronica.“Ars Electronica Campus Exhibition.” Ars Electronica Festival. Accessed December 30, 2025. https://ars.electronica.art/panic/en/view/ars-electronica-campus-exhibition-1e338ddb450c801bad23eadf33f81fcc/.

What does it mean to prepare for the future when the future itself becomes unpredictable? When institutions falter, when technologies increasingly dominate, and, though designed to provide stability, themselves begin to tremble, then education finds itself at a turning point. In response to this year’s festival theme, PANIC – yes/no, the Campus Exhibition 2025 brings together 37 universities from across the globe and contributions from 14 departments of the University of Arts Linz. Spanning multiple locations, from POSTCITY to the University of Arts’ two main buildings, the Salzamt to splace, the exhibition examines the evolving role of creative education in a time defined by instability and transformation.

The Campus format has long served as a platform to explore how emerging artists are shaped not only by technological developments, but by teaching environments—by the ways they are taught to think, to question, and to act. This year, many of the featured projects shift focus from offering answers to cultivating the capacity to navigate uncertainty. Art, in this context, becomes a form of adaptive intelligence—a rehearsal space for futures as yet unknown.

More than a showcase of student work, the Campus Exhibition is a living laboratory for artistic research, experimentation, and cultural reflection. Artists from around the world engage with a reality marked by crisis, yet not devoid of possibility. The question is no longer whether to panic, but how to respond—with curiosity, resilience, and collective imagination.
The University of Arts Linz, as the co-host and academic partner of Ars Electronica Campus Exhibition, stages its theme both spatially and conceptually. Their intervention Alles.Immer.Offen. transforms sliding doors on Linz’s Main Square into sonic, sensor-driven thresholds that speak to the absurdities of automation and the tensions between transparency and control in public space. By turning a familiar form of technology into a choreography of access and refusal, the project invites reflection on what it means to be open—physically, politically, and psychologically—in a time of crisis.

Also central to this year’s Campus program is the National Academy of Art in Sofia, presented at splace on the Linz’s Main Square. Their exhibition /decisions/make/art reframes artistic creation as a logic of choice, response, and system-thinking. Through interactive installations, generative systems, and machine learning experiments, students explore how aesthetic expression becomes an ethical negotiation—a dynamic interplay between human intention and algorithmic environments. The Expanded Play exhibition—a collaborative effort between the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Masaryk University, and the Film Academy Baden-Württemberg—is located at the Salzamt.
Beyond these anchor institutions, dozens of universities contribute perspectives. Their approaches are diverse—from immersive environments and critical interface design to speculative world-building and performative research—yet they share a common urgency: How can education cultivate not only skills, but resilience? What kinds of learning environments foster experimentation over conformity? And how can pedagogy remain a space of possibility in a world defined by volatility?

In a moment when traditional structures offer little clarity, the Campus Exhibition positions art schools as laboratories for living-with-uncertainty. Rather than answering panic with panic, the participating institutions engage it—as a force to be metabolized, questioned, and, ultimately, transformed. As part of this commitment to emerging voices, Ars Electronica will for the second time present the Campus Award, honoring the most outstanding student project in the exhibition and the institutions that nurture such excellence.

The award ceremony will take place on Saturday, September 6, in POSTCITY.

About the Ars Electronica Campus Exhibition
The Campus Exhibition is a central part of the Ars Electronica Festival, dedicated to showcasing the work of emerging artists, designers, and researchers from leading academic institutions. Each year, the exhibition reflects urgent themes in technology, culture, and society through new media, installation, and experimental formats.

In 2025, our joint participation—representing Singapore (Nanyang Technological University), China (China Academy of Art), and Germany (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar)—marks our collaborative debut under the City Digital Skin Art (CDSA) initiative. Our presentation explores AI, ecological entanglement, and cross-cultural storytelling across urban screens, responding to this year’s theme, “Panic,” which invites reflection on systemic fragility and transformative responses.

About Ars Electronica
Founded in 1979, Ars Electronica is one of the world’s most influential platforms for art, technology, and society. The annual festival attracts thousands of participants—from artists and researchers to technologists and activists—who gather for exhibitions, symposia, performances, and labs that redefine the boundaries between science and the humanities.