They have no name and no leader. But you could call them “techno-hippies”. Somewhere between the cheerful profiteering of Silicon Valley and the libertarianism of online hackers, this loose collection of artists and entrepreneurs is using the profusion of new devices and digital networks to challenge mainstream ideas about capitalism, consumption and the relationship between humans and nature.
Last month, they descended on Linz, a pretty city perched on the banks of the Austrian Danube that hosts the annual Ars Electronica festival, a digital media event that has become a magnet for counter-cultural technologists from around the world.
Colonising Linz’s shopping malls, schools and even the local bishop’s residence, this year’s installations ranged from a cathedral being played with lasers like a giant musical instrument, to hermit crabs scuttling around under the burden of miniature 3D-printed cityscapes, to a display of “agriculturally printed” farmland in which algorithms had calculated the optimum planting pattern and ratio of crops to bug-resistant grasses.