On a global scale, carnage, border violations and social upheavals are clearly and distinctly recognizable. On our own doorstep, in the park at home, in the nearby neighborhood, in our own city or neighborhood, they blur beyond recognition.

Poverty traps, lack of opportunity, neglect, exclusion and inequality are creeping into statistics and the freezing cold homes of 1.5 million Austrians. Winter is coming again!

That’s how many people live at risk of poverty. That’s one in five. Children are hit the hardest – 368,000 are affected. That’s more than Favoriten has inhabitants – that would be 207,000. Linz, my new home, has 206,000.

Let’s imagine a city like Linz with only children as residents, living in damp and sometimes moldy rooms, going hungry and having fewer opportunities for a healthy life – a carefree life full of opportunities.

In order to see this veiled city of shame with its anonymous arms, it must first be made visible. This is where art’s innate instinct – a detector of poverty – helps.

Culture and art sense and explore the unconscious, the unseen, the unheard and the untouched. The material for images, films, photographs, games, texts, assemblages, exhibitions, productions, interventions, sculptures, sculptures, installations, dances, theater and music pieces is nothing less than the incomprehensible. Culture and Art explores border crossers and strolls with them through Michel Foucault’s realm of heterotopias.

The answer of art remains the question.

In Cape10’s understanding, it is therefore inevitable, imperative and logical to engage in discussions about art, to hope for art and to offer creative artists a permanent, permanently open haven.

Cape10, the house of social innovation and the future, is a place of rescue for humane disasters, a beacon for those stranded in society and art is a shining Saint Elmo’s fire. A light that is able to illuminate the concerns, work and development of this house in every pore of the city, caused by grueling electrical charges in our social midst.

None SCHEINwerfer, Cape10 has a SEINwerfer and shows what the situation is, how it should or should not be. For example, that the risk of poverty in Austria – with all its ugly side effects – increased by another 18,000 children last year alone. They start out with a shortened life expectancy of 10 years. 10 years less being.

Glück Auf!

As an entrepreneur, developer of future industries and scion of a mining dynasty, I can say that rare earths are still among the most sought-after raw materials in the world, but soon the promotion of creativity and the extraction of innovations will determine the success or failure of entire societies. About war and peace, prosperity and prosperity.

The mine gold of the future consists of social raw materials that are essential for the constant renewal of civilization and peace. Treasures that are traded as knowledge, utopias or visions and are not fossil.

Values that are created through art, culture, research or education and multiply through support. We therefore need places, like Cape10, and people, like you, who promote creativity, stimulate the imagination, understand research as a raw material and create new networks. This is how prototypes are created – social, technological, political and societal. This is how magical places are created in which the future is envisioned and decided. Places that become eternal and never are.

Future just behind the present.

Cape10 and Tabakfabrik Linz are also about sustainability, but more about sustainability. Spaces are needed that need to be filled like a bulging pantry with radical goods, perspectives, questions, fragments and prototypes. A storage and showroom for junk, art and collaboration that feeds us when society needs it, in order to make use of the open window of opportunity and necessity.

Dear all present,

The protagonists of this new creative class go wandering, traveling or typing and thus also create new intellectual infrastructures – with their own language and their own signs. A process that we are familiar with from some art and craft guilds in history, but which we now classify as digital nomads.

Innovation networks do not come about by chance, they have to be established and nurtured. This is why we at Tabakfabrik Linz, together with Cape10, have started to develop hubs with different focal points along the Westbahn route, which run like a pulsating ribbon through Austria with the power of art and the creative industries. From Innsbruck via Linz to Vienna. Connected to Salzburg, Attnang-Puchheim, Wels, St. Pölten and Tullnerfeld and can be combined with three airports.

The ticket is booked, the connection and the prize are fixed: Tabakfabrik Linz is awarding 3 x 1 studio space for artists to use free of charge until the end of the year in this year’s Cape10 Art Contest. And this in the newly created ART magazine of the fabulous factory. We may not have a Saint Elmo’s fire, but our slogan “Light my fire” is also sacred to us.

In the meantime, 3000 people from the creative industries are working on brilliant ideas instead of smoking cigarettes, thus fueling Tabakfabrik Linz’s productivity. In 3 years we will be 5000 creative people. Tabakfabrik has a knowledge and production system consisting of art, research, science, philosophy, ethics, creative industries, crafts, education and discourse. Via partners such as Cape10 and, as a liquid connection, Digital Humanism.

Art is of great importance here – at ART MAGAZIN it can now be experienced in all its forms. That’s why we will be setting up a permanent Cape10 studio here, giving you a permanent and warm welcome.

The perfect wave.

According to Soviet economist Nikolai Kondratiev’s ‘theory of long waves’, the cycle of computers, IT and communication technology is followed by a long wave in which health and the associated markets and people take center stage. Both Tabakfabrik and its tenants will benefit from the connection to CAPE 10, which as a house of social innovation has a focus on health, through exchange and networking, as will those for whom this house was built.

It is essential that socially relevant aid is also digitally equipped.

Prof. Meryn and his team have also taken a holistic approach here, incorporating the concerns of digital humanism and applying technologies in a human-centered way. On blogs, forums and in internet bubbles, destitute people, dissenters and strangers are burned, chopped up, raped, hanged, drowned, threatened, ridiculed and attacked. The Cape10 team also cares for these wounded people. The literature and art in this house also tells of these oppressed and aggressive people, of those bullied and victimized.

Friends of creative power,

Apps, algorithms and programs are like hammers, chisels, paintbrushes, cameras, chisels or squares and compasses – only invisible, programmed, artificially intelligent and automated. But the question of how and for what purpose we use these tools is an ancient and crucial one.

At any rate, there are currently diametrically opposed ideas that we associate with all-encompassing digitalization. The former, the euphoric vision, is mainly spread by US tech companies and promises a future in which all we have to do is sit back and let intelligent systems decide for us.

On the other hand, the apocalyptic vision conjures up a digital dictatorship in which people lose all privacy and self-determination under the control of corporations and computers and machines assume omnipotence.

What both views have in common is the passivity of humans and the feeling of being at the mercy of fate with promises and threats. It is clear that the more the boundaries between humans and machines become blurred, the louder the call for digital enlightenment and digital values will become.

Digitalization serves as a tool and lubricant for an epochal change. It is a technological revolution that is fundamentally changing the way we live, work and interact with each other. In its scale, scope and complexity, this transformation will be an unprecedented experience.

We do not yet know exactly how it will unfold, but one thing is clear: the response is all-encompassing and concerted, involving all stakeholders in the global community, from the public and private sectors to academia and civil society. And the invisible sector of the displaced will also be increasingly affected.

It is also a fact that the companies from Silicon Valley are already more powerful than the Roman, Mongolian and Habsburg empires combined.

The contours of this empire are virtual, but its power is real. They rule over a nation that currently numbers 5 billion people with internet access and is constantly growing. They already have the power to interpret the truth. Armies of trolls are already fighting on many fronts, influencing democratic elections, destroying livelihoods and careers through deep fakes.

Broken things that Cape10 wants and needs to be prepared for. CAPE 10 – the house of the future and social innovation – was also created in order to be able to implement these efforts permanently, sustainably and in a specific location.

Dear sponsoring partners,

Cape10 is a lighthouse made of reinforced concrete, wood, love, passion and daring. A social sculpture in the spirit of Joseph Beuys, to reveal a sign to the drinkers and drowning in our society and to come to the aid of those with torn bodies and wounded souls, with missing limbs and lost hope, the fragmented and fragile, those on the brink, the sinking and staggering.

I ask them, what colors do we want to paint the future in? Do we fall for the apostles of the apocalypse who predict the dictatorship of machines and the third world war, the eco-pessimists who tell us that everything is already too late, or do we listen to Prof. Meryn’s call: to stand up for those who are ignored, ignored, forgotten!

Dear listeners,

Personally, I think it’s too late to be a pessimist. Even my ancestors underground knew: diamonds are born under pressure!

Utopian thinking has often been buried. The obituaries have always been premature. As long as there are people who believe that a society without violence, injustice, labor and the destruction of nature is possible and who are outraged by the discrepancy between the real and the possible, they will continue to imagine and realize utopias.

So, realize ideals like Cape10, the house of the future and social innovation and its mission of a society free from want and fear!