Plurilogue: Attempting to describe the project

WIR SIND HIER is an artistic experiment that will open this year’s Ars Electronica Festival in Linz (Austria) on September 5. The project consists of an online portion here on our website as well as a live performance which will open the festival. User participation is its lifeblood.

Through actions and discussions here on the website, anyone can have their say, set their tone, and be an active part of the live performance. Our call to action is this: Don’t let yourselves be seduced. Make your mark against the fascistic tendencies of our times. We believe that a diverse multitude of voices speaking, thinking and negotiating is the only valid strategy to understand what kind of world we are living in, who we are and what kind of a “we” we should be.

We are striving to create a current, collective examination of the totalitarian mechanisms of the past in order to warn of their effects in the present. For most people, history is nothing but an abstract concept. The dictatorships in Europe seem to be a distant memory, buried in the textbooks and the stories of a dying generation. However, amid current advances in technology, the mechanisms and suggestive powers of political totalitarianism have once again become part of everyday life.

We are confronted with censorship, surveillance and state use of authority against its own population with never-before-seen frequency. Our basic rights are systematically being carved away by our own governments, who justify these fundamental attacks with the label of purported democratic security.

The vision of WIR SIND HIER is to capture the here and now, process it, and use artistic methods to look for a future beyond the scope of military, economic and state control.