About Art Meets Radical Openness

AMRO - Art Meets Radical Openness

Festival dedicated to Art, Hacktivism and Open Culture

AMRO, Art Meets Radical Openness, is a festival, a platform and a community for art, hacktivism and open cultures, organized since 2008 by servus.at in cooperation with the Linz University of Art, Department of Time-Based Media.

“Art Meets Radical Openness” brings together local and international artists, activists, developers, researchers and hacktivists involved with the culture of sharing and communal production. They are catalysts that spark new discourses and open up new directions of thinking. Free Open Source Software, open tools in general and the use of free licenses are the precondition and basis for the digital practice of a community like this, which impels social transformation. This tangible transformation goes beyond a digital practice and also changes our real life.

AMRO has its roots in the successful Free Software movement of the early 2000s. In conjunction with the Austrian-wide initiative Linux Weeks, servus.at was a co-organizer from the beginning with an event in Linz (LiWoLi – “Linux Weeks Linz”). The cultural, artistic and socio-political focus of the association, which is still marked by the spirit of the Free Software movement, has been systematically expanded with a new cooperation partner. The University of Arts Linz with the Department of Time-based Media supports the successful event since 2008. Social, societal and political aspects arising from the pervasion of technology in everyday life were shifted into the foreground.

The principles of openness and freedom - applied to art and culture - led to the new title for the event: Art Meets Radical Openness. When art meets radical openness, this suggests a paradox. For what is generally considered contemporary art is rarely "radically open" in the sense that their authors consciously use sources, processes and content to further processing, as is the case with F/LOSS projects (Free/libre Open Source software) is common. What can be successful in the development of free software, however, represents a challenge for us in dealing with information. Which information is meaningful and should be made available to whom in what form?

Since 2014, AMRO has been held successfully on a biennial basis.

The festival

AMRO hosts on a biennial basis a 4-days festival organized at afo-architekturforum oberösterreich, Kunstuniversität Linz, Stadtwerkstatt and other locations, dedicated to current aspects of the connected society.

Titles such as "Autonomy (im)possible?", "Waste(d)!", "Unmapping Infrastructures", "Of Whirlpools and Tornadoes", and "Debug" offer year per year lenses to observe and react to the continuous changes of technological development and industrial interests, which the AMRO community challenges with artistic research and provocations. Visit the archive↗ of the past editions.

The research labs

In-between the festival editions, AMRO becomes a platform for artistic research, organized in series of laboratories deepening punctual topics of current networked times.

Past research labs dealt with several topics: the emergence of social bots as tools to manipulate opinions; the very low tech processes behind the smart world; the environmental impact of digital technologies; conversational AIs and experimental programming languages; labor and exploitation in platforms and servers; permacomputing; fluidics; big tech and the politics of isolation.

Visit the archive of the research labs↗

person giving a lecture four people sitting on the floor with computers, partially covered with green fabric four people sitting on a stage on chairs talking. behind their back, projection with the video from the fifth participant person looking at an exhibition of printed materials on the wall.

Even more context? better read: Artists Running Data Centers

In 2024 we begun a wider process of documentation on the practices and the community around servus.at and AMRO.

We conducted a series of interviews with AMRO community members, founders and long-term participants Ushi Reiter, Aileen Derieg, Christoph Nebel, Thomas Warwaris, Manu Luksch, irational.org, Aymeric Mansoux, bleu255, LURK, Joak, but also many other individuals and individuals from the servus context.

The interviews have been published in a magazine entitled Artists Running Data Centers: https://core.servus.at/en/projekt/2024/ardc0-artists-running-data-centers (PDF: https://publications.servus.at/2024-Artists-Running-Data-Centers/)