Ars Electronica 2025: Ghūl · غول

In Ghūl this folkloric archetype provides an expansive and playful framework for exploring how the systems we build—technological, cultural, economic, ecological—hunt, haunt, and hypnotize us. How do we see ourselves and our values reflected in these systems and the traps they set?

Framing systems not as neutral tools but as active agents of transformation, the exhibition moves through themes of algorithmic control, environmental degradation, mediated identity, and speculative interaction. The works include biodegradable materials crafted from food waste, a performative AI cult that critiques water extraction, immersive XR narratives drawn from immigrant memory, and interactive installations that turn users into data, summon digital apparitions, or manipulate illusion through motion.

Together, these projects reflect the urgency of rethinking the systems that condition everyday life. Through poetic, critical, and playful engagements, they invite viewers to navigate the visible and invisible forces shaping the present—and to imagine alternatives beyond them.

September 3-7, 2025

Projects

Apparitions

Ryan Browning, Sarah Khankan, Ameena Darwish

Apparitions is an artwork in which participants observe and interact with the environment of a virtual cave, using a sculptural keyboard to summon swirling “apparitions.” Through playful interactive feedback, Apparitions explores how embodied interactions shape experience in chaotic digital spaces.

HydroGAN™

Fariha Ahmed, Fatima Nazir, Alice Aslem, Selma Fejzullaj, Jood Elbeshti, Shawky Abdalla

HydroGAN™ is a satirical installation posing as a launch for AI-generated water, revealing how tech commodifies belief, identity, and nature. It critiques our blind trust in systems that extract, optimize, and resell even life’s most essential resource—water.

Food Waste Renaissance

Yasamin Shaikhi

Food Waste Renaissance transforms food byproducts into sustainable design. By reimagining waste as material potential, it challenges systems that disguise harm as progress—offering quiet resistance through biodegradable lamps made from rice and date remnants.

Roto-Riso

Varvara Guljajeva

Roto-Riso is a kinetic installation of spinning, RISO-printed discs that explore optical illusion, cultural pattern, and motion. Created by first-year students, the work invites playful interaction and reimagines Op Art through contemporary media and participatory design.

Self-Reflexive Worlds: Ideal Home / Text Textures

ShanMu Sun, Sirena Pearl

In adaptive virtual environments, users become both subject and object, cause and effect. Self-Reflexive Worlds explores this through Ideal Home, where AI mirrors the emotional journey of immigrants, and Text Textures, a game that transforms physical presence into a shifting digital landscape.