Keynotes

Biography

Dr. Juergen Hagler is Professor of Animation and Media Studies and Head of the Bachelor's and Master's programmes in Digital Arts at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria. His artistic and academic research explores the intersections of animation, immersive media, generative artificial intelligence, and cultural heritage, with a particular focus on artistic reinterpretations of historical artworks and archives.

Since 2017, he has served as Director of the Ars Electronica Animation Festival and has played a leading role in the Prix Ars Electronica's New Animation Art category. He is the initiator of Expanded – Conference on Animation and Interactive Art, organized in cooperation with ACM, and actively contributes to international academic and cultural networks, including SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH Asia, ISEA, and VINCI.

His work connects artistic practice, research, and education, exploring how emerging technologies enable new forms of artistic expression and critical engagement with cultural memory.

Abstract

The future of cultural heritage is not only about preserving the past, but about creating new ways to experience, reinterpret, and critically engage with it.

This keynote explores how media art transforms cultural heritage and archives into spaces for artistic experimentation, participation, and critical reflection. Tracing three decades of Ars Electronica's engagement with immersive technologies—from pioneering CAVE applications in 1996 to Deep Space 8K and the recent Living Archives initiative—it examines the evolving relationship between digital preservation, artistic reinterpretation, and cultural memory.

Building on Gerfried Stocker's reflections on theater as a living archive, the keynote develops three interconnected perspectives: From Preservation to Activation, From Documentation and Digitization to Reinterpretation, and From Generative AI to Contextualized Cultural Memory. It argues that digitization provides essential foundations for preservation and accessibility, but that meaningful cultural engagement emerges through interpretation, interaction, and critical contextualization.

These perspectives are explored through artistic research projects, including The Virtual House of Medusa and a series of interconnected works dedicated to Austrian artist Klemens Brosch: Brosch AI – Distorted Dreams, Unfinished Decay, and Interactive Brosch. Together, they trace a research trajectory from AI-assisted animation and the reinterpretation of historical artworks to immersive, interactive experiences.

Further examples, including The Theater Machine and The Fadinger Automat, examine how generative AI can enable participatory encounters with history while questioning authenticity, representation, and the construction of cultural memory.

Ultimately, the keynote proposes Living Archives as dynamic spaces where preservation, artistic activation, and critical contextualization intersect.

Biography

Feng Tian is Deputy Director and Professor at the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISCAS). He serves as Director of the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Technical Committee of the China Computer Federation (CCF) and Director of the HCI Technical Committee of the Chinese Society of Image and Graphics (CSIG).

Prof. Tian serves as Editor of Computer Human Interaction and Intelligence (CHII) and Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TiiS). He has been a member of the program committees of top international conferences, including ACM CHI and WWW. He has published more than 100 academic papers in major international journals and conferences, including CHI, UIST, and IJHCS, and co-authored two academic books.

As the first principal recipient, Prof. Tian received the Second Prize of the 2018 National Science and Technology Progress Award and the First Prize of the 2015 Beijing Science and Technology Award. He has also received the Best Paper Award at ACM CHI and has been nominated for the ACM CHI and UIST Best Paper Awards (Honorable Mention Award) on five occasions.

Abstract

Human-computer interaction (HCI) is an important information technology that affects human life and drives economic development. Based on the evolution and current state of human-computer interaction, this report focuses on introducing explorations conducted by the presenter's team in novel natural human-computer interaction techniques in input, understanding, and output aspects, as well as their applications in healthcare fields.