“The rules and the laws for the future are being written right now,” said Gerfried Stocker, the artistic director of Ars Electronica, a cultural, educational and scientific institute based in Linz, Austria. “I believe this is exciting because this also involves the second major human quality again. One is curiosity and the other is, so to speak, care.” All around Stocker, at this year’s technology innovation fair in September, the robot-filled surroundings were inspiring plenty of the former.
But one creation in particular in particular drew gawking crowds: the beautiful and strange F 015 Luxury in Motion vehicle, which Ars Electronica’s Futurelab program has been making for over two years in collaboration with Mercedes-Benz, and which was unveiled this spring. Christopher Lindinger, key researcher and co-director of Ars Electronica Futurelab, believes the vehicle is a major step in reimagining how we commute. “The world will simply work in a different way to how it now functions with normal vehicles. Mobility itself is specific time spent living which I can actually gain back,” Lindinger said. “I can work in the vehicle, I can do things in the vehicle, I simply have quality of life which I get from being in the vehicle.”