Institutions are an ambiguous subject. Some despise them for abuse of power or dominance over free will and choice, others rely on them to save us from corporate harm or social demise. In the worlds of art I got to know, the relations between artists and institutions are just as varied. I’ve seen short affairs or serious engagements, refusal by principle and embrace of the moment. In the few hours we have together, let us talk about the relationships we want and don’t want, should and should not, can and cannot have with institutions, and how we can work with, for or around them to create the things we would like to live among. 

Franz Xaver Baier
Manfred Bergauer
Gabriele Edlbauer
Alice Gorman
Nikolaus Fuchs
Philipp Haupt
Katrin Hornek
Krassimira Kruschkova
Paul Petritsch
Karin Raith
Claudia Slanar

Das Seminar bietet die Möglichkeit, ein hochaktuelles Verständnis von Raum kennenzulernen und experimentell anzuwenden. Im Unterschied zu vielen Arten des Räumlichen geht es beim existenziellen Raum um den Raum, der man selbst ist und mit dem man es permanent zu tun hat. Da alles eine räumliche Wirkung hat ist dieser Raum auf vielfache Weise beeinflussbar. Daraus ergeben sich für die Kunst viele Möglichkeiten.

This course will be a journey through the material culture of outer space, from the surface of the Earth to the limits of the solar system. Space age artefacts include components of massive technological systems, such as satellites in Earth orbit and the terrestrial antennas which receive their signals, blast-corroded surfaces at launch pads and on the moon, and disposable cable ties which are manufactured and discarded in their millions.

An Observation on CERN.

Researchers at CERN use the world’s largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to reproduce the primordial soup that made up the universe a few billionth of a seconds after the Big Bang. After our excursion last December to the socio-technical machine CERN, where more than 100.000 researchers from over 100 nations are trying to find the building blocks of our universe, we have become pixel-recorders by ourselves.

This field trip is having the focus/center „Vienna“. We are walking.

The course deals with the phenomenon landscape and, most importantly, with the forces behind the visual appearance of individual landscapes. What exactly is “landscape”? How do landscapes evolve? What are the reasons why cultural landscapes exhibit certain characteristics – or in other words – why do they look like they look? Which are the natural conditions they are based on? Which economic, social and political circumstances and developments have shaped them?

Die LV setzt sich mit Choreografie- und Performancekonzepten auseinander. Fokussiert werden zeitgenössische Arbeitsweisen, die kritische Denkräume entwerfen und mit aktuellen ästhetischen und politischen Diskussionen korrespondieren.

Mold making for gourmets and beginners

The class is an introduction to mold making and casting with diverse materials (silicone, plaster, alginate, acrylic resin, concrete etc) for building both lost and re-usable molds. 

The aim of this class is twofold as the library of site-specificity does not only contain books about the topic, but at the same time is a reflection of its own concept. Designed for a special purpose and a specific location, will it be destroyed when removed (paraphrasing Richard Serra’s statement about the removal of his site-specific sculpture "Tilted Arc"  in 1981)? Isn’t a library, "this universe" (Jorge Luis Borges), always site-specific?

Künstlerische Herangehensweisen an das digitale Arbeiten:

The course continues to mimic a Digital Arts Minor Programme in a nutshell. It tries to convey audio/video/computer competencies through practical training as well as knowledge of various analog-digital conversion processes. The noble goal of this undertaking is nothing less than „understanding media“. 

New York-based writer and director Frances Bodomo will screen and talk about her film "Afronauts" (USA, 2014, 13 min).
It's July 16, 1969: America is preparing to launch Apollo 11. Thousands of miles away, the Zambia Space Academy hopes to beat America to the moon in this film inspired by true events.

Students put up their projects for discussion, which they have developed at Praterstern, at Wurstelprater and at Prater-Park. Starting materials are field recordings, interviews and soundscapes.

My work begins with the search for a place. Once we‘ve found each other, we‘ll share time with one another, again and again. Until we begin to talk about all that surrounds us. In Sunday Afternoon this place is the Wien Hauptbahnhof railway station. A place that guides me, not physically but emotionally.

Marion Porten will present selected works, among them her work in process; an encounter with a nameless, dusty plaster bust of a woman*, in the Glyptothek of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. This sets the starting point for a filmic investigation into emancipative concepts of white queer women* in the context of colonial and racist tyranny…

What will happen if we let a group of budding artists roam the perimeters of the world’s most advanced particle physics research facility? After a 4-day-longtrip to CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, a clear-cut answer remains to be seen.

An Answer to Sculptures – the work of Margaret Honda

Tenzing Barshee will talk about two recent exhibition projects titled "Sculptures" at Triangle France in Marseille (2015) and "An Answer to 'Sculptures'" at Künstlerhaus Bremen (2016). Both exhibitions were monographic retrospective projects on the work of Margaret Honda who lives and works in Los Angeles. 

We built a Dome in the house. We built a part of the legendary structure which is used everywhere today to embrace our Round Table Propulsion: On Changing Futures. The event was dedicated to the Future, unknown but appealing. After putting aside scissors, staplers and rafters we are happy to invite you to ​explore the contemporary meaning of the Dome and to take part in our handcraft exercise. History, construction process, place&space transformation, discussion...

After last year’s first Round Table "Humans Make Nature" about ideas of landscape in the Anthropocene, the department’s Round Table 2016 adresses past and possible new futures.
The transdisciplinary lectures’ and discussions’ pivotal point of reference will be outer space: a key driver of the 20th century’s perspectives on future that today has gained new momentum through various developments. 

The “Invasion” of Chaos Theory and Science Fiction in Space Law

​The influence of science-fiction literature can be detected in the advancements of space law during the first space race of the 1950s and ’60s. Space law was inherently science fictional in that it legislated practices in advance of their technical feasibility.

Picturing the Universe: On Scale, Calculation, and Composites

The universe has always been mediated; it has always been an image, a virtual universe. The composite images of Charles and Ray Eames’s film Powers of Ten (1977), like current images of the universe, depict space without time. While Powers of Ten is informed by photography, today’s images of the universe require the pixels of digital sensors and high computer performance. 

The Department of Site-Specific Art of the University of Applied Arts Vienna invited experts from different disciplines to the Round Table Humans Make Nature. Landscapes of the Anthropocene. The reader presents essays by Heather Davis, Matt Edgeworth, Gabriele Mackert, Gloria Meynen, Christian Schwägerl as well as artists’ pages by Claudia Märzendorfer, Christian Mayer, and Hermann Painitz.

Haunted Houses at Hypervelocity:
Orbital Futures

In the early twentieth century, rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky imagined that life in microgravity would create an idyllic, egalitarian society where people would bask in orbiting greenhouses, drinking in the limitless energy of the sun. Instead, today the wreckage of rockets and satellites orbits Earth, splintering into ever-smaller fragments that mirror the plastic granules proliferating in the oceans.

Giant Envelopes and the Total Interior

In the 1960s and ’70s, advanced architecture was in thrall to the idea that industrialized urban society could be reconciled with the natural world through high technology. The spatial figure that most caught the imagination at this time was the dome. Inspired by space capsules, new structural technologies, and new forms of environmental control, the dome promised that the natural world could be brought inside, controlled, made regular.

E.T.E. — Extra-Terrestrial Ecologies, the Undergrowth

On September 26, 1991, eight crewmembers began their mission inside the closed ecosystem Biosphere 2 near Oracle, Arizona. Their goals: exploring global ecological relations and testing future life in space. An illustrated story about ecology and space celebrating the experiment’s twenty-fifth anniversary.

Image:
NASA-Illustration by Rick Guidice, 1975

James Benning
Nikolaus Fuchs
Philipp Haupt
Krassimira Kruschkova
Gabriele Mackert
Ralo Mayer
Johanna Tinzl

The course continues to convey basic audio/video/computer skills through practical training and theoretical examination. With its goal to encourage and support individual projects and ideas by using and understanding digital media, the focus will be on hands-on production, aesthetic articulation, critical thinking and experimentation.

A course on art as a project rooted in the seminal work of Group Material and Hollis Frampton’s Magellan Cycle and its influence on Benning's own project work: Two Cabins, 31 Friends, and Untitled Fragments.

Image: James Benning

How does the night sound in Prater? Does Praterstern trigger urban legends? Who is heard if you would stay approximately three hours at the same place? What is medially boosted? How do the marginalized interact? Who is an archive at Praterstern? How do you not get into a provocation at no point in time?

Bild: Nikolaus Fuchs

Within the course, we will discuss ways of artistic storytelling between fact and fiction - in and across various languages and media.
As an introduction and primer to speculations past and present, participants are kindly asked to attend the Round Table „Propulsion: On Changing Futures“ at the Dept. of Site-Specific Art (Oct. 20th-22nd).

The focus of our program is to understand a site and its context as a driving force, a material to work with, as a place of activity, and a field for action. The students concentrate on approaches that make a site the point of departure for the artistic process.

Items are understood as impulses for memories within the work. The installation explores their symbolic and anecdotal features. The installation explores the subject-object relationship – via the interaction between subject and object in the installations’ setting, dialogs occur, the boarder between active and passive positions are dissolved.

Starting with the summer term 2016, the Department of Site-Specific Art is situated at a new location. A former dairy factory in Vienna's 3rd district will accommodate our new studio and workspace. To further the transdisciplinary exchange we will share space for exhibitions, seminars, lectures, wood and metal workshops, and for recreation with the department Sculpture and Space.

The search for characteristics, secrets, connections and relations of constructed, urban spaces. The collection of qualities, the photography of shapes, the imagination of structures and in turn the investigation of all this.

In her artistic work, Isa Rosenberger is particularly interested in political upheaval and both its social as well as economic consequences.

Hannes Zebedin´s practice explores political consciousness through the language of conceptual art and embraces a broad range of media including objects, installations, text works, performance and interventions often in relation to national monuments, as well as the acts of civil society and grass roots protest movements.