The Essence08 – Digitale Kunst

Annual exhibition of the University of Applied Arts Vienna. MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts, Weiskirchnerstraße 3, 1010 Vienna, duration of the exhibition: 27. June to 13. July 2008, opening times: daily 10:00 to 18:00, Tuesday 10:00 to 24:00, closed on Monday.

In Place of a Title
No motto is comprehensive enough to cover all the works of "digital art" that I was able to select for THE ESSENCE 08:
What heading could convey both the deceleration of old video games (Matthias Kassmannhuber: Mode x) and the reinvention of the invention of moving pictures (Ile Cvetkoski: MOBIPRAXINOSCOPE)?
Into what single category do Stephan Wiesinger, who has us reassemble pixels in Analog vs. Digital, Friedrich Zorn, who shows what a blind man cannot see in Vienna in walking, and Peter Tilg and Nicholas Wormus, whose work BREAKING NEWS at last proves that there is nothing on television, fit?
Nina Kataeva visualises the fear factor at the stock exchange using airbags (C[R]ASH). Florian  Waldner’s tweeters, that hang from the ceiling and cast audible waves around the room, and the sound-producing plants in Nina Tommasi’s biogenous instrumentation are acoustically related.
In SWAPPING PLACES, Ruth Brozek triggers sex changes by means of asynchronicity. In Günter Seyfried’s Mutants from Innerspace, image data is stored in living organisms as genetic code where it mutates into new images under the influence of the environment.
Sophie Wagner uses GPS to survey an uninhabited island and composes images and sounds along its medial borders (Brzina hodanja).
Gottfried Haider approaches the same island from above, scanning it from a balloon (Nebelmeer über Plocica). Finally, as if rounding off the diversity and openness of the 13 works presented, Jan Perschy drifts off into the cosmos with his model of a system for creating a model of the cosmos.
Prof. Virgil Widrich, June 2008

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