Ars Electronica Campus Exhibition: Systems of Unrest

The Forever ElephantThe Forever Elephant

The Forever Elephant (象像) is a hybrid animation and interactive installation exploring how images live, die, and are reborn in the algorithmic age. The project includes an experimental screensaver-style animation and a digital puppetry game, combining AI-generated visuals with 3D-scanned antique toys. Visitors will encounter an elephant undergoing a ritual of reincarnation, set within a surreal, liminal landscape. Drawing on new materialism, image ontology, and Eastern philosophy, the work examines the blurred boundaries between image and imagery, physical and digital, memory and transformation. It invites viewers into a meditative, visual experience that is both playful and philosophical—a funeral rite for future images, and a gentle question: What does it mean for an image to truly exist?

The Systems of Unrest exhibition explores how bodies assert agency in the face of unstable technological systems. Across five interactive installations—ranging from motion capture to VR, kinetic sculpture, AI surveillance, and speculative interfaces—artists from the Estonian Academy of Arts and Aalto University examine the fine line between control and collapse.

Visitors will encounter a border control booth that judges their digital presence, a marionette trapped in an endless fall, a VR quest requiring collaboration to restore balance, a kinetic doll mourning through motion-captured gestures, and a grotesque candy-colored landscape where desire turns to disorder. Each piece uses technology not as a tool, but as a force to be negotiated.

Set against the backdrop of gaming culture, algorithmic logic, digital surveillance, and folklore, the works speak to broader anxieties around identity, authority, and bodily autonomy. The project invites audiences to navigate systems that may delight, reject, or distort them—testing whether presence alone can be a form of resistance.

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