topic

Showcase

News from AIL’ s radar

Presentation of selected projects, subjects and fields of research from the University of Applied Arts Vienna

TOPIC CONTENT:

Web Tentacles in the Outdoors / An Erratic Concept for AIL by Valerie Prinz

Showcase: Rundumadrum by Wagner Felipe Dos Santos

Showcase: Anna Vasof on her project Non Stop Stop Motion

Showcase: Sustainable and open exhibition system

Showcase: Ebru Kurbak on her project The Museum of Lost Technology

Showcase: Cordula Daus on her project Outer Woman

So much to see, so much to discover: under the title showcase we collect and present projects which crossed AIL’s radar. All projects emerge from the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

Work in progress.

news

Web Tentacles in the Outdoors / An Erratic Concept for AIL by Valerie Prinz

AIL realized a special series of 4 posters which are currently out and about, inviting Vienna to come explore AIL universe online and offline

Find out more about the concept behind it and meet artist and writer Valerie Prinz

www.valerieprinz.at

Talk data to me.

Cyborgs have sex to the sound of nature.

Am Ende der Welt ein sänitärer Pool.

The microbiome drifts between 1 and 0.

These are the four statements, artist and writer Valerie Prinz created for a special series of posters for AIL, which are currently out and about, inviting Vienna to come explore AIL universe online and offline.

With the new space (hello Postsparkasse!), new name (from Innovation to Interdisciplinary Lab) and the over all feeling of a fresh start (hopefully!) our aim with this poster campaign is to make our complex but vivid program visible, invite new and old audiences in and after what feels like two years of hibernation, followed by an overcompensating amount of events, input and trara to poke yet again your curiosity.

Following our open call Valerie Prinz created / extracted a collection of sentences putting the variety of subjects at AIL to the forefront, and in AIL manner thereby including some twists, charme and humour.

So we asked Valerie to give us insights into her concept and to introduce herself.

Special thanks to the Institute of Sprachkunst – especially Gerhild Steinbuch – for opening up to this cooperation.

AIL’s tentacles are reaching out: into different subjects, into the Angewandte and for a moment into the space of the city of Vienna too!

And: AIL is now extended by Café Exchange, which is even more awaiting you with open arms.

Screenshot of photo of Valerie Prinz in front of drawing by Lana Ilay Schwingshandl | Image by © Photo © Valerie Prinz, drawing © Lena Ilay Schwingshandl

[0]

AIL stretches out its tentacles in all directions: interdisciplinarity, interconnections, absurdities, theories, discursiveness, future (sound), noise, nonsense, research, love, sex & robots. We count posthumanism, postmodernism, postfeminism, post_____,… Postsparkasse.

Within each sentence, the content and program of the AIL, which combine research, art and theory, are situated in relation to each other.

Does it make sense? Possibly. Does it need to be thought through? Definitely. What's in it for us? tbh. – potentials.

[1]

I’ve always found it difficult to locate my own artistic work anywhere within the arts. Always had the feeling for it to be a neither-nor what could have been read as a but-also.

Concepts: Big fan! Research: Love, love, love.

Science is grotesquely beautiful and creating connections between art and theory is exactly what defines the AIL and, ultimately, my own work. We are multi-limbed octopuses. Hybrids and creatures of social reality, of fiction.*

While working on the concept what came as no surprise was that our data is deeply biased and filthy. It’s filled with a western-centered world view and framed by a humming machinery’s sound of automated capitalism. Still it’s being used to feed our greedy AI’s and stomachs. Hence the word dirty and data could almost be used synonymously (fun when you’re a bit nerdy and into sexting).

But what stroke me most was to draw connections between the seemingly different topics presented in the arts as well as in research and to quickly understand that they’re actually not that different. If you zoom in, you’ll see that most content is based on the presence of an almost dystopian atmosphere and that, indeed, everything is connected.

[0,5]

‘And sometimes it is necessary to allow a quote severed from its original body to flourish in its new one. A grafting of another’s ideas. Trans-planting from one space to another.’**

two posters hanging in Vienna | Image by ©

[2]

Valerie Prinz is an artist and writer. She studied media science as well as gestaltung and is currently at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Institute for Language Arts. Her works position themselves within a socio-political context and are primarily research-based, shaping her artistic practice through the interweaving of text and media, + pop-culture phenomena.

She writes for magazines and artistic projects and is part of the collective rau – Kollektiv für vorpolitische Praxis.

Most recently: Wiener Festwochen (AT), Kunstraum53 (GER), Antwerp Art Week (BE), Das Wetter. Her works have been exhibited & published.

*vgl. Harraway, Donna: „A Manifesto for Cyborgs. Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,“ in: Simians, Cyborgs and Women. The Reinvention of Nature, New York; Routledge, 1991, S. 149.

**Fusco, Evan: „WE EACH GO THROUGH SO MANY BODIES IN EACH OTHER“, in: Other Forms (Hg.): Counter-Signals #4. Identity is the Crisis, Chicago 2021, S. 160.

Poster hanging in Vienna, with "Talk Data to me" written on it | Image by ©

Series of 4 Posters for AIL, 2022

Text & Concept: Valerie Prinz

Design: Studio Dreibholz

Art Direction: Eva Weber (AIL)

Institut für Sprachkunst

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Showcase: Rundumadrum by Wagner Felipe Dos Santos

Performance at Café Exchange as part of Wienmodern 2021

klick.klingt.org

With his current work ‘Rundumadrum’ Felipe dos Santos presents an electromechanical drum set – developed by himself — that uses the principle of electromagnetism in an unusual way.

In conventional electric instruments, such as electric guitars, electric basses or Fender Rhodes pianos, sounds are obtained through movement. You strike a side or key and alternating current is generated, which becomes audible as an electrical vibration. With Felipe’s drums, the exact opposite happens: Alternating current causes motion, which in turn is used to strike something that sounds acoustic. So it’s a musical instrument that needs alternating current to be activated. This is the jackpot of the whole apparatus. Because in our modern everyday life, alternating current is a dime a dozen. All you have to do is tap into it. The possibilities of activating this instrument, i.e. how it could be played, are thus almost infinite. This kind of control opens up a whole new approach to playing and composing music and revolutionizes the creation of instrumental acoustic sounds.

Wagner Felipe dos Santos is a musician and media artist. He studied at the University of Campinas, São Paulo, and at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. His work includes interactive videos and sound installations, electroacoustic and instrumental compositions as well as chansons and radio plays. In 2019 he exhibited Space as a field of tension’ an interactive video – the viewer is in a virtual relationship to the art object – at ‘Vienna Biennale for Change / Human by Machine’ at the MAK – Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna and at ‘Designgalerie SATELIT’ – Slovak Design Center – Bratislava. His current work ‘Rund um a drum’ (in Austrian dialect it means around a drum kit) is a semi-automatic drum set, that can be played by artificial intelligence and people, was presented in 2020 and 2021 at the music festival Wienmodern. One of his best-known works is the swing bicycle ‘Swing & Roll’, which is presented at the Venice Biennale this year. His last works examines how far the artificial behavior can still perceived as ‘like human’ behavior, although some of these artificial behavior could not occur by humans. One might ask, how far can artificial humanity transcend us?

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Showcase: Anna Vasof on her project Non Stop Stop Motion

ZFF – Zentrum Fokus Forschung (University of Applied Arts Vienna)

Each month, AIL presents a selected artistic research project realised at the ZFF, the department for postgraduate research projects in the field of art and science. Anna Vasof’s “Non Stop Stop Motion”, an investigation of cinematic illusion in everyday life, is the third project in this series.

Zentrum Fokus Forschung
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About the project

Non Stop Stop Motion is a series of experiments that took place from 2014 till 2020 and investigate where we can find the essence of cinematic illusion when we look at everyday life and what happens when we use everyday situations, objects, actions and spaces as cinematographic mechanisms. The film follows the attempts and the failures of an artist to understand the mechanics of motion and cinematography and her desires to find new ways of storytelling.

Anna Vasof: Non Stop Stop Motion, Still | Image by ©Anna Vasof Filmstill from Anna Vasof: Non Stop Stop Motion, © Anna Vasof

Anna, how do you transform understanding?


When I use the words understanding and transformation I start immediately feeling pretentious that's why I would like to take the opportunity to talk about research through artistic practice, an area where these words are circulating a lot. Great artists did always research, but what changes now, is that we start establishing educational and funding programs for research through art practice. Through this change, research through art practice can be an opportunity for artists to start communicating research questions, failures and processes that can have serious impact to many other fields and disciplines, but it can also be used as an excuse for excuses. In order to start transforming our narrow and problematic world we need less professional art researchers who jump from one topic to the other finding connections and more deeply curious people who are willing to risk their position and question systems.

Filmstill from Anna Vasof: Non Stop Stop Motion | Image by © Filmstill from Anna Vasof: Non Stop Stop Motion, © Anna Vasof

Anna Vasof is an architect and media artist. Born in 1985, she studied architecture at the University of Thessaly (2010) in Greece and Transmedia Art (2014) at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Since 2004 her videos and short movies have been presented in several festivals, some of them winning distinctions. At 2020 she finished her Ph.D. thesis about a cinematographic technique that she developed with the title Non Stop Stop Motion. She is now working on designing and building mechanisms for producing critical and narrative videos, actions and installations.

annavasof.net



More from the online series Showcase ZFF

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Showcase: Sustainable and open exhibition system

Work in progress of N.Nest & Re.use. The sustainable and open exhibition and furniture system. A project by Chien-hua Huang, alumni of the architecture master program

Showcase presents selected projects, topics and fields of research from die Angewandte

Website

The project is an open exhibition and furniture system that radically embraces and integrates waste materials, especially recycled plastic PETG which has beneficial structural and chemical durability.

Image by ©

Through structural optimization algorithms (via Karamba) and machine learning-based topological optimization (via Ameba), the new furniture system not only can assemble waste materials for different kinds different display types of furniture but also allows participatory activities for future reuse. Instead of downcycling, the project intends to augment the potential of reuse and introduce intricate aesthetics in the intelligent system.

One System

The proposal aims to achieve multiple tasks through one sustainable modular-based system. The joint transit in between surface as program and line as a structural component.

The line becomes a structural component that extends the exhibition system and forms the space. While the surface is the functional area for board/pedestal/seats.

Image by ©

Universal Joint

Via universal joints, the system can connect in multiple directions and open system to connect with different elements. Thus it results in various setup potentials.

Image by ©

Sustainable Tectonic

The joint is composed of recycled plastic, reused metal pipe, and timber that is easily reconfigured, reused, recycled, and supported by local material /waste management.

Image by ©
Image by ©
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Showcase: Ebru Kurbak on her project The Museum of Lost Technology

A project from ZFF – Zentrum Fokus Forschung (University of Applied Arts Vienna)

Each month, AIL presents a selected research project realised at the ZFF, the department for postgraduate research projects in the field of art and science. Ebru Kurbak‘s “The Museum of Lost Technology” seeks new and original positions for “women’s work” in technology-engaged art frameworks.

Zentrum Fokus Forschung
The Museum of Lost Technology

A hand holding 3D-glasses in front of a cardboard with nails and some craft work. | Image by ©© Ebru Kurbak The Museum of Lost Technology. An FWF Elise Richter PEEK project by Ebru Kurbak, © Ebru Kurbak

About the project

The Museum of Lost Technology seeks new and original positions for ‘women’s work’ in technology-engaged art frameworks. With this artistic research project, Ebru Kurbak explores textiles in the art and technology context with a historical perspective on the gender politics of matter, materials and making. Through practice-led research, the artist aims to challenge expectations brought up by media arts and tech-arts to discover and expose systemic biases rooted in history.

An experimental set-up of colors, thread, needles and a hand showing some results in fron of grey background. | Image by ©© Ebru Kurbak The Museum of Lost Technology. An FWF Elise Richter PEEK project by Ebru Kurbak, © Ebru Kurbak

The project departs from the idea that inventions are products of not only the intellectual capacity of the inventors but also their practical knowledge and skills. In the West, not only women but also their particular knowledge had been excluded from official sites of research for centuries. Over the course of the 4-year-project, Kurbak will carry out experiments at the intersections of textiles and scientific subjects to excavate ‘lost possibilities’ unimaginable in the past due to the gendered social and spatial segregation of knowledge. Directed towards a speculative museum of technology, the studio inquiry searches for an imaginative collection of information, techniques and technologies that could have been conceived – but never were. The experimentation process is supported by conversations with experts from different scientific fields as well as art theoretical research, museum surveys, comparative histories and creative writing.

Ebru, how do you transform understanding?

My approach to transforming understanding prioritizes an open-ended and open-minded material investigation. The challenge here always is finding ways to precisely frame the research but at the same time avoid the limits of any predefined output. In my current project, I will be looking at two particular sites as a method to do this. Both ‘the lab’ and ‘the museum’, in scope of the project, are understood as significant sites where truth is produced through the sorting of materials, objects, knowledge and practices. By moving my initial focus from the object, the thing, to the setting of the site, I intend to give myself the space to acknowledge the agency of materials and material processes, and trigger transformation.

Artistic researcher Ebru Kurbak, portrait | Image by ©© Ebru Kurbak The Museum of Lost Technology. An FWF Elise Richter PEEK project by Ebru Kurbak, © Ebru Kurbak

Ebru Kurbak is an artist driven by her interest in the hidden political nature of everyday spaces, technologies, and practices. Her works have been exhibited at the MAK, Ars Electronica Festival, ZKM, Siggraph, LABoral, EYEBEAM, and Istanbul Design Biennial, among other international venues. Kurbak was awarded the Art + Technology Grant by the Los Angeles County Museum of Arts in 2019, and currently is Elise Richter PEEK Fellow and Visiting Professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

ZFF (Zentrum Fokus Forscht) is the department for postgraduate research projects in the field of art and science at die Angewandte.

The Museum of Lost Technology is funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): V-795 in the Elise Richter PEEK Program.

For more information about the project and project activities, please visit https://losttechnology.museum/

CURRENT EXHIBITION BY EBRU KURBAK

11 June–2 July 2021
Chronolace Studies: The Standstill Crochet
by Ebru Kurbak
Curated by Başak Şenova

FABRIKRAUM
Johnstraße 25-27
1150 Wien
Visits by appointment: hello@fabrikraum.org

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Showcase: Cordula Daus on her project Outer Woman

A project from ZFF – Zentrum Fokus Forschung (University of Applied Arts Vienna)

Showcase presents selected projects, topics and fields of research from die Angewandte

Zentrum Fokus Forschung

About the Project

We’re all of women born. What if this fundamental biological fact was put into question? The artistic research project Outer Woman examines the concept of a creation and birth through an artificial womb.

In the course of her investigation, the writer-artist Cordula Daus will create a script for an artificial uterus. She will inquire about the state of the art in the biological sciences, and develop alternate scenarios of gestation beyond the mother. The outer woman and her world will not be created by one writer alone but in mutual exchange with bioscientists, midwives, philosophers, bioethicists, as well as other researchers, performers, and artists. They will not only provide materials for a narration but collaborate in the development of new methods of feminist thinking, of artistic research and writing.

Cordula, how do you transform understanding?

How does understanding form you?
Does understanding transform your how?
How do you understand ‘under-standing’?

Cordula Daus is a writer-artist working across theory, fiction and performance. Her books, lecture performances and live audio plays have been presented at Research Pavilion #3 (Venice), Wiener Festwochen, Centre d'Art Santa Mònica (Barcelona), Conceptual Poetics Day/Akademie der Künste (Berlin), among others. Daus is the co-founder of the Special Interest Group on Language-based Artistic Research (SAR) and an Elise Richter PEEK research fellow (FWF).

ZFF (Zentrum Fokus Forscht) is the department for postgraduate research projects in the field of art and science at die Angewandte.

Learn more
Language-based Artistic Research Group
Toponymisches Heft, a journal by Cordula Daus (available in English and German)