paraflows is a Vienna-based festival and platform for digital art and culture, founded in 2006. Its programme has included exhibitions, symposia, film screenings and concerts addressing media art, net culture and the effects of digital technologies on society. The festival's publications include exhibition catalogues, edited volumes and essays published on its website. A recurring part of its programme is the contemporary-music series RE_COMPOSED.
paraflows was founded in Vienna in 2006 in connection with netznetz, an initiative using a participatory model for cultural funding. A contemporary report by the Austria Press Agency described the festival as an annual convention associated with the initiative. The inaugural edition, paraflows 06, focused on "Netze hinter dem Netz" (networks behind the network), as documented by the art magazine springerin.
The 2007 edition, Un_Space, explored invisible, inaccessible and immaterial spaces through 36 positions in media and net art at the MAK Gegenwartskunstdepot in the Arenbergpark flak tower. The programme also included a symposium and other events. The festival returned to the venue in 2008 with Utopia, which Die Presse described as a "progressive kleine Ideenbaustelle" situated between Ars Electronica and steirischer herbst. The exhibition's curatorial approach was subsequently discussed by Judith Fegerl in an interview with KUNSTFORUM International.
With Urban Hacking in 2009, paraflows moved its main exhibition site from the Arenbergpark flak tower to a temporary container complex at Karlsplatz. The edition focused on artistic interventions in urban public space, combining an exhibition with a symposium, installations and performances. The following year's Mind and Matter edition, held at the Künstlerhaus Wien, explored the relationship between humans and computers, including questions about the separation of hardware and software.
The 2012 edition, Reverse Engineering, brought together an exhibition, symposium, film programme and concerts. In 2013, Open Culture focused on access to technology, culture and information, with its exhibition hosted by the Kunstverein das weisse haus.
The 2014 edition, Intimacy, examined privacy and personal relationships in digitally networked environments through an exhibition at the Künstlerhaus Wien. The following year's Digital Migration explored migration in both social and technological contexts. Among its 14 artistic positions at the Künstlerhaus was Ting-Ting Cheng's The School of Accents, an installation using a fictional language course to examine accent and identity. In 2016, Identity presented works by 17 international artists at the Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien, addressing social and digital identity through installations and other media.
The 2021 edition, Protestformen, addressed political resistance as artistic practice through an exhibition, artist statements, walks, radio work and a symposium. The festival has also continued the RE_COMPOSED concert series.
Günther Friesinger serves as festival director, while Judith Fegerl is responsible for exhibition direction.
The festival's programmes have combined exhibitions with symposia, film screenings, performances and concerts. Subjects have included net culture, public space, privacy, information politics and access to digital technologies. The 2012 Reverse Engineering symposium, for example, was organised around the phases "Open", "Dissect" and "Rebuild".
A recurring component of the programme is RE_COMPOSED, a concert series presenting contemporary music that engages with composition in a digital environment.
Several editions of paraflows have been accompanied by exhibition catalogues and edited volumes on digital culture, media art and cultural politics. These include paraflows 07: UN SPACE (2007), edited by Günther Friesinger, as well as the festival-related publications Urban Hacking (2009), Open Culture, Intimacy and Identity. The 2009 Urban Hacking symposium also formed the basis for Urban Hacking: Cultural Jamming Strategies in the Risky Spaces of Modernity (2010), edited by Friesinger, Johannes Grenzfurthner and Thomas Ballhausen and published by transcript Verlag.
Another transcript volume, The Art of Reverse Engineering: Open – Dissect – Rebuild (2014), was edited by Friesinger and Jana Herwig. The 2023 collection Protestformen: Widerstand als kulturelle Praxis, published by edition mono / monochrom, is listed by the University of Vienna's research portal as a peer-reviewed edited volume.
The paraflows website also publishes essays on digital and visual culture, including texts published in 2026 examining Kero Fichter's work in the context of queer media archaeology and questions surrounding AI-generated imagery in cinema.
Critical reception of paraflows has focused on its curatorial approach and the relationship between individual artworks and exhibition themes. In 2007, Ursula Hentschläger of artmagazine praised the use of the Arenbergpark flak tower for media art installations and Judith Fegerl's selection of emerging and established artists. Reviewing Urban Hacking in 2009, Nina Schedlmayer noted the festival's increasing professionalisation but questioned the inclusion of some established artists' works, finding younger artists' interventions more closely connected to the exhibition's engagement with public space. Margareta Sandhofer's 2014 review of Intimacy similarly distinguished between more personal artistic approaches to privacy and works she considered overly illustrative.
Reviews in Der Standard examined the festival's subsequent engagement with migration and identity. Roman Gerold's account of Digital Migration (2015) discussed works addressing human displacement alongside installations dealing with language, cultural identity and information transfer. Katharina Stöger's review of Identity (2016) explored fictional online personas, social media profiles and the physical traces of digital communication.