Ars Electronica has run out of one building. The festival’s 2026 edition, running September 9–13 in Linz, Austria, replaces its long-standing single-campus layout with a city-wide spread — turning Linz’s downtown into what the organizers are calling both a stage and a forum, distributed across multiple hubs rather than concentrated in one venue.
Watch: Ars Electronica Festival — It’s a Wrap! (YouTube)
What’s actually structurally new
Two hubs anchor the redesign. The OK QUARTER becomes the festival’s central point — ticketing, guided tours, and the main thematic exhibition all route through it. The MED CAMPUS, new this year, is dedicated specifically to the intersection of art and science: interactive stations, competitions, and exhibitions built around a “create your world” format aimed at getting visitors of all ages actually building and tinkering rather than just walking through. A series of additional venues around the city fill in the rest of the program.
This year’s theme, “Future Begins,” carries the subtitle “Negotiating Humanity” — organizers describe it as a status check on what being human means right now, rather than a forecast of what technology does next. For a festival that’s spent four decades pairing art with emerging technology, that’s a notably inward-facing frame.
Meanwhile, a very different kind of public installation is already running
While Ars Electronica is a five-day event, ART on THE MART in Chicago is a case study in the opposite model: a permanent, building-scale canvas that runs nearly year-round. The projections cover 2.5 acres of the Merchandise Mart’s façade along the Chicago River, making it one of the largest permanent digital art displays anywhere. The 2026 season opened in April with Spanish artist Luis Urculo’s work, moved into “Synthesis” — a commissioned program built by School of the Art Institute of Chicago students exploring how projection and sound merge — and in May premiered a new piece by artist Colleen Plumb with an original score by Teerath Majumder, produced in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Photography.
Two very different models for what “public interactive art” can mean: a festival that rebuilds its own city footprint every year, and a fixed surface that just keeps getting reprogrammed.
Why this is worth tracking either way
If you make installation or projection-based work, both are useful references for how larger institutions are currently thinking about scale and access — Ars Electronica by spreading a festival across a city rather than gatekeeping it behind one campus, ART on THE MART by treating a building façade as permanent public infrastructure for new commissions rather than a one-off spectacle. If you’re planning a submission cycle for next year, Ars Electronica’s various open calls typically follow within a few months of the current festival wrapping — worth watching their site if this year’s program is at all in your wheelhouse.