Walk the city by morning, edit through the night, and hold the printed copy the next morning.
“Turn an entire city into a published magazine in just 24 hours.”
Hearing this, most people would imagine a reckless, grueling ordeal. In the morning, our editorial team scatters across Linz to observe the streets. By early afternoon, we reconvene to debate and synthesize the collected photos and data alongside AI. By nightfall, everything is laid out into a 16-page publication. We send the files to print at midnight, and by next morning, freshly printed paper ZINEs arrive at our door. Later that day, we hand them out directly on the streets, gather reactions from passersby, and head right back out for the next morning’s walk.
What we are attempting at Ars Electronica 2026 is neither a handy city guide for tourists nor a mere demonstration of AI-generated text. It is a deeply physical, improvisational experiment in urban editing: treating the city itself as raw editorial material to surface a new way of reading urban space within a tight 24-hour cycle.
Why Impose a Relentless 24-Hour Deadline?
The world has no shortage of polished guidebooks and culture magazines crafted over months of meticulous reporting. Yet such publications often converge on a safe, homogenized version of a city packaged for tourism.
An intense 24-hour deadline forces an uncompromising process of curation. Comprehensiveness is out of the question. Because we cannot capture everything, we are forced to zero in on what matters: What is happening on the streets of Linz today, right now? What is the meaning behind this subtle friction, this trace, this atmosphere that caught our eye?
Through sheer improvisation, we shatter pre-packaged narratives, scooping up the raw, fleeting expressions of a city that exist only on that specific day, in that exact moment.
Returning to the Streets, Moving to the Next Edition
The finished ZINE is not complete the moment ink hits paper.
Handing copies to creators and researchers from around the world on the street and engaging in dialogue with them shakes up our reading of the city once again: “I actually visited the spot featured on this page,” or “As a local, this place used to look entirely different.”
The energy, memories, and spontaneous feedback gathered on the spot are carried directly into the next morning’s editorial room, flowing back in as fresh perspectives for the upcoming issue.
Scan the streets ➔ Read context with AI ➔ Edit with human intent ➔ Print on paper ➔ Hand over in public ➔ Feed dialogue back into the next morning’s walk.
Running this living, unbroken feedback loop from scratch every single day across five consecutive days: we believe that by unearthing the city against the relentless pressure of a 24-hour deadline, we will reveal a side of Linz that no one has ever seen before.
