From Ars Electronica:

Art, technology, society. Since 1979, Ars Electronica has sought out interlinkages and congruities, causes and effects. The ideas circulating here are innovative, radical, eccentric in the best sense of that term. They influence our everyday life—our lifestyle, our way of life, every single day.

The Festival as proving ground, the Prix as competition honoring excellence, the Center as a year-‘round setting for presentation & interaction, and the Futurelab and Ars Electronica Solutions as as in-house R&D facility extend their feelers throughout the realms of science and research, art and technology. Ars Electronica’s divisions inspire one another and put futuristic visions to the test in a unique, creative feedback loop. It’s an integrated organism continuously reinventing itself.

From Wikipedia:

Ars Electronica Linz GmbH is an Austrian cultural, educational and scientific institute active in the field of new media art, founded in Linz in 1979. It is based at the Ars Electronica Center, which houses the Museum of the Future, in the city of Linz. Ars Electronica’s activities focus on the interlinkages between art, technology and society. It runs an annual festival, and manages a multidisciplinary media arts R&D facility known as the Futurelab. It also confers the Prix Ars Electronica awards.

The UCLA Department of Design Media Arts (DMA) offers a comprehensive, multidisciplinary approach to media creation that fosters individual exploration and innovative thinking. Our internationally renowned faculty provides each student with a creative and intellectual foundation for constructing a unique contribution to culture. DMA is committed to educating conscientious creators by emphasizing production within the context of history and theory. The core curriculum is augmented by series of vital lectures, workshops, and other events, and we actively encourage our students to pursue additional interests within the university.[1]

Within the context of the department, design is a process and way of thinking, and media arts foreground experimental media creation. We synthesize practice, history, and theory and hybridize technologies, discourses, and audiences. The results emerge in and on books, galleries, game consoles, installations, films, magazines, performances, public spaces, televisions, and websites. We strive to create socially and culturally relevant objects, experiences, and spaces.[1]

Benjamin Fry (born 1975) is an American expert in data visualization. He is a principal of Fathom, a design and software consultancy in Boston, Massachusetts. He is also a co-developer of Processing, an open-source programming language and integrated development environment (IDE) built for the electronic arts and visual design communities with the purpose of teaching the basics of computer programming in a visual context. The Processing design environment developed together with Casey Reas won a Golden Nica from the Prix Ars Electronica in 2005.[1]