Ars Electronica 2017

Ars Electronica Linz GmbH is an Austrian cultural, educational and scientific institute active in the field of new media art, founded in 1979. It is based at the Ars Electronica Center, which houses the Museum of the Future, in the city of Linz. Ars Electronica’s activities focus on the interlinkages between art, technology and society. It runs an annual festival, and manages a multidisciplinary media arts R&D facility known as the Futurelab. It also confers the Prix Ars Electronica awards.I exhibited my artwork "Hatred Apparatus" at Ars Electronica Festival 2017: The Hatred Apparatus is an apparatus that, once connected over the Internet, automatically captures the comments of news websites’ users. Those comments, stored over a database, are automatically posted on facebook and twitter in a randomised fashion. Every 1 hour a new commentary is shown by the apparatus. This play reveals that the large majority of commentaries done over in those websites are messages that contain, in different levels, traces of pure hatred. Hence, the play discusses the question of anonymity in these largely vile comments since, we believe, its vile nature would not be publically shown if it was not for anonymity itself. These captured and exhibited comments demonstrate the widespread intolerance and hatred usually condemned in the moral discourse of contemporary societies. We consequentially locate that these same vile comments, then, find a safe heaven in the public forums of the Internet. The intention of our play is not to condemn the commentaries themselves but, instead, to demonstrate these to the public in a setting detached from its original and usual context - the daily stories posted by those websites