The 2024 Prix Ars Electronica showcases its role as a central hub in the global network of media art with 2,950 submissions from 95 nations. The prize winners of the “Golden Nicas,” which have been selected by an international jury annually since 1987, received 10,000 euros and were featured at the Ars Electronica Festival (4-8 September).

Conversations Beyond the Ordinary is a work that reimagines the mundane, transforming everyday appliances into platforms for deep, interactive engagement. Each part of the work, a coffee machine, a microwave and a copy machine is endowed with artificial intelligence, enabling them to interact with participants in unexpected ways that challenge our conventional understanding of human-machine interaction and autonomy.

Jury statement:

Conversations Beyond the Ordinary deals with the increasing anthropomorphisation of our machines in a humorous way. Instead of cute robots, the installation introduces us to mundane appliances with their very own personalities, tics and idiosyncrasies. It thereby gives us an insight into our immediate future, which will be characterized neither by the extinction nor by the redemption of humans by technology. Rather we will have to argue with AI-empowered machines and hope for their cooperation. A coffee machine won‘t make you a coffee before you show some courtesy, and the microwave keeps a watchful eye on the things you are about to put into it. It is this future, a mundane future that shows our everyday interaction with machines, which is characterized by empathy, misunderstanding, and awkwardness—just as any other conversation is.