Prof. Peter Weibel

Chairman of the ZKM Center for Art & Media Technology, Karlsruhe (D); Professor for Media Art & Media Theory Vienna, Germany

Peter Weibel 2000

Peter Weibel 2000

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Abstract

Peter Weibel, * 5. März 1944 in Odessa, Ukraine, is an artist, curator and theoretician. He is artistic director and CEO of the ZKM Center for Art and Media Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany.

Homepage

» http://www.peter-weibel.at/

Institution

Biography

Peter Weibel (* March 5 1944 in Odessa, USSR) is an artist, curator and theoretician. Raised in Upper Austria he started to study French and cinematography in Paris. In 1964 he began to study medicine in Vienna, but changed soon to mathematics, with an emphasis on logic.
Studies of Literature, Philosophy, Medicine, Logic and Film in Paris (F) and Vienna (A); since 1966 conceptual photo-literature as well as audio pieces, - texts, -objects and -actions; end of the 1960s, he worked in the field of Expanded Cinema, action art, performances and film together with his partner Valie Export; his interdisciplinary activities comprise scientific, artistic as well as literary, photographic, graphic, plastic, and digital works. As theoretician and curator he was a.o. curator of the Neue Galerie, Graz (A), and Professur at the Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna (A), as well as the commissioner for the Austrian pavillon of the Venice Biennale; 1989–94 director of the Institut für Neue Medien, Frankfurt/M. (D); since 1999 chairman of the ZKM Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe (D); lives and works in Karlsruhe.

Works / Projects

Peter Weibel’s oeuvre can be described in the following categories: Concept Art, Performance, Experimental Film, Video Art, Computer Art and Media art.

Beginning with work in the tradition of visual poetry, Weibel produced «media-based literature» in the form of paper, photographic and object poems, body texts and material poetry, text objects and video texts. Conceptual works and actions followed, together with media analyses employing the media under scrutiny, initial TV experiments on Austria's ORF, and later numerous installations deploying film and video. The publication of candid sexual representations in a black book on Viennese Actionism led to a lawsuit against its publishers Valie Export and Peter Weibel in 1970. Both artists continued to support each other's projects into the late 1970s, with Weibel writing the screenplays for Export's films «Unsichtbare Gegner» («Invisible Opponents»), 1977, and «Menschenfrauen» («Humanwomen»), 1979. His subjects are less body-oriented, however, and deliver from a media-specific and semiological viewpoint socially critical analyses of systems and machines like film, television, and the visual arts. Weibel was an early and eloquent champion of a theory of media and communication, which he repeatedly applied in investigating the inherent laws and mechanisms of the various media.

Exhibitions / Presentations

Starting from semiotic and linguistic reflections (Austin, Jakobson, Peirce, Wittgenstein, ...) as from 1965 Peter Weibel developed an artistic language, which led him from experimental literature to performance. In his performative actions he explores not only the "media" language and body, but also film, video, audiotape and interactive electronic environments. Critically he analyzes their function for the construction of reality. Besides taking part in happenings with members of the Vienna Actionism he develops as from 1967 (together with Valie Export, Ernst Schmidt jr. and Hans Scheugl) an "expanded cinema". It is inspired by the American Expanded Cinema and reflects the ideological and technological conditions of cinematic representation. Peter Weibel elaborates these reflections as from 1969 in his video tapes and installations. With his television action "tv und vt works", which is broadcast by the Austrian Television (ORF) in 1972 he transcends the borders of the gallery space and queries video technology in its application as a mass medium.

Peter Weibel follows his artistic aims using a large variety of materials, forms and techniques: text, sculpture, installation, film and video. In 1978 he turns to music. Together with Loys Egg he founds the band "Hotel Morphila Orchester". In the mid 1980s he explores the possibilities of computer aided video processing. Beginning of the 1990s he realizes interactive computer-based installations. Here again he addresses the relation between media and the construction of reality.

In his lectures and articles Weibel comments on contemporary art, media history, media theory, film, Video art and philosophy. As theoretician and curator he pleads for a form of art and art history that includes history of technology and history of science. In his function as a university professor and director of institutions like the Ars Electronica, Linz, the Institute for New Media in Frankfurt and the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe he influenced the European Scene of the so called Computer art through conferences, exhibitions and publications.
http://www.peter-weibel.at/

Publications

Publications a.o.:
Die neuen Bilder. Peter Weibel und Hubert Burda im Gespräch. In: Betzler, Judith (Hrsg.): Hubert Burda. Kunst und Medien. München 2000. (Hrsg. mit Rainer Burkhard; Wolfgang Maas): Zur Kunst des formalen Denkens, (Passagen Kunst. Perspektiven einer Wissenschaftskultur in Österreich). Wien 2000. (Eds. with Timothy Druckrey): net_condition. art and global media.Cambridge, MA 2000. (Eds. with Franz Kaltenbeck): Trauma und Erinnerung. Trauma and Memory: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Wien 2000. (Eds. with Olafur Eliasson): Olafur Eliasson: Surroundings Surrounded. Essays on space and science. Karlsruhe 2001. (Ed.): Vom Tafelbild zum globalen Datenraum: Neue Möglichkeiten der Bildproduktion und bildgebender Verfahren. Ostfildern-Ruit 2001. (Ed.): Im Buchstabenfeld: die Zukunft der Literatur. Graz 2001. (Eds. with Günther Eisenhut): Moderne in dunkler Zeit. Widerstand, Verfolgung und Exil steirischer Künstlerinnen und Künstler 1933-1948. Graz 2001. (Eds. with Ursula Frohne and Thomas Y. Levin): CTRL [Space]: rhetorics of surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother. Cambridge, MA 2002. Lebenssehnsucht und Sucht. Berlin 2002. (Hrsg.): Erwin Wurm. Fat Survival. Handlungsformen der Skulptur. Ostfildern-Ruit 2002. (Eds. with Bruno Latour): Iconoclash. Beyond the image wars in science, religion, and art. Cambridge, MA 2002.

http://www.peter-weibel.at/

WEIBEL, Peter: Interview: „Es geht um Dinge von öffentlichem Interesse“. In: FLEISCHMANN; Monika, REINHARD, Ulrike (Hrsg.): Medienkunst als Schnittstelle von Kunst, Wissenschaft, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Heidelberg: Whois Verlags- und Vertriebsgesellschaft, 2004.
http://netzspannung.org/media-art/publications/digital-transformations/?lang=en

Keywords

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