An Open Urban Laboratory: Witnessing the Moment a City Is Edited at Hp23
During Ars Electronica 2026, our pop-up editorial room opens its doors at Hp23, a historic building overlooking Linz’s central Hauptplatz.
This space is not an exhibition booth for passively showing off finished products or cutting-edge tech. It is an open laboratory where passersby, visiting artists, researchers from around the globe, and local Linz residents can drop in freely to witness firsthand how the city is deciphered and rewoven into a magazine.
An Open Editorial Room with No Black Boxes
Step through the doors of Hp23, and you enter an editorial process actively wrestling with fragments of the city.
Lining the walls are freshly printed proofs, street photographs, and historical contextual data extracted by AI. Why did this odd detail in a back alley catch our eye? Out of the mountain of facts surfaced by AI, what sparked the human editor’s curiosity, and what was left on the cutting room floor?
By laying bare the entire trial-and-error process typically hidden behind closed editorial doors, visitors can experience in real time the dynamic sensation of an entire city being reconstructed through fresh eyes.
A Real-Time Dashboard Functioning as a “Map of Perspectives”
The monitors inside the editorial space are not built to track vanity metrics like page views or social media engagement. Instead, they serve as a real-time “map of perspectives,” visualizing which areas of the city are being observed today and what context has been unearthed.
The dashboard displays live observation logs that shift minute by minute as our team and local citizens walk the streets:
Traces of Observation and Discovery: Which districts yielded new viewpoints, and how they connect with data on local history and urban structure
Shifts in Urban Perception: How familiar, everyday scenes are being reframed into unexpected new contexts
Peering into these screens, visitors naturally react.
“I pass that church every single day—I had no idea it held that kind of hidden story or historical crossroad.”
“A corner we take for granted is being framed from such an unexpected angle.”
Rather than flaunting data, the dashboard functions as an instrument to jolt perception and update how people see the city around them.
The Hub Connecting Urban Fieldwork to the Street
Hp23 serves as a vital junction within our continuous operational loop.
Curiosities and anomalies brought back from the streets are given form as a magazine in this very room, then flow back out to Hauptplatz and beyond as freshly printed ZINEs. The dialogues sparked and insights gathered when handing them to readers on the street are brought right back into Hp23, rewriting the pages of the following day's issue.
Unraveling the unseen threads between the city and its people to co-discover new ways of reading Linz: Hp23 is the live, open site of that experiment.
