Ars Electronica’s A New Digital Deal 2021 Festival brought together Thoughtworks Arts director Ellen Pearlman, CounterPulse director Julie Phelps, and Zero1 director Shamsher Virk for Co-creation Containers - a dynamic round-table discussion on building community by digital infrastructure.

Ars Electronica is the largest and most time-honored new media arts festival in the world, going back more than thirty years. It was designed to take the Digital Revolution’s emergence as an opportunity to examine potential futures and to focus investigations at the intersection of art, technology, and society.

Our new residents, h0t Club & Dilate Ensemble presented their work September 15th online as part of the annual CounterPulse Festival, based in San Francisco.

The two collaborative collectives will participate in Thoughtworks Arts 16-week residency with our partner CounterPulse, including the greater Bay area creative community.

We are pleased to announce that the Improvising the Net(Work) Residency has been jointly awarded to two creative collectives, h0t club and Dilate Ensemble.

The two collectives will be in residence at Thoughtworks San Francisco and CounterPulse, a leading performing arts incubator. Both venues are based in downtown San Francisco.

Thoughtworks Arts has joined with Leonardo/ISAST to participate in the CripTech Incubator, a new art-and-technology program that fosters disability innovation.

CripTech Incubator is sponsored by the Innovations + Intersections $500K Grant Award from the California Arts Council.

Former robotics resident Adrianne Wortzel was a recent guest on the twice-monthly podcast “Poptarts” (aka Girl Zone) hosted by BUST magazine editors Emily Rems and Callie Watts - celebrating women in pop culture.

Adrianne discussed her fascination with sentience when juxtaposed against machines and her pull to explore humanity through robotics. This passion carried over into her Thoughtworks Arts residency project, The Sentient Thespian, a film exploring attributions of sentience to robots, by humans, as a feature of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

ClimateAction.tech has been awarded the Prix Ars Electronica Award for Digital Humanity for creating the Branch online magazine.

The magazine was spearheaded by Michelle Thorne, Chris Adams, Laurence Bascle, Carrie Hou, Tom Jarrett, Jack Lenox, Hannah Smith and others as part of an international community effort. ClimateAction.tech was co-founded by Thoughtworks Arts Director Andrew McWilliams.

Rashin Fahandej has been awarded the Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction in Digital Music and Sound Art for A Father’s Lullaby. The project was incubated as part of Rashin’s residency at Thoughtworks Arts.

The Prix Ars Electronica is the world’s most time-honored award in electronic and interactive art, with prize ceremonies going back more than 30 years, alongside showcases at the famed Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria.