Archaeological ways of seeing

Archaeologists have a distinctive way of seeing landscapes and cityscapes. The ground is more than just surface appearance. It has both actual and ontological depth to it.

1. „What to do with emotions?“ would be an alternative title to this seminar pointing to a problem in writing and talking about works of art: How to express or deal with an artwork that immediately affects us with a specific feeling, be it joy, anger, sadness or confusion? How can this affect be described without playing off the academic against the lyrical?

Performances
Projections, Installations
Concert, Sound
Pinboard Bar, Ice Bar

The work relocation/ a formation is about space and its order. It consists of contradictions which create a tension in between. The inside and the outside, the space and the void, the subject and the observer become entangled.

The installation deals with the analog parts in the digital world. Water. For the digital Cloud, a network of servers, water is needed to guarantee fast streaming times cooling the data center’s servers.

square dancing

If you use the search term “Guang Chang Wu” (Chinese for “square dancing”) on Baidu (China’s version of Google), you will get about 184 million items of news, 4,665 hits in music, 777 dancing groups, and of course numerous comments either supporting or disapproving. Guang Chang Wu is a collective public dance, which has been estimated to have 100 million participants in China. It has become a social phenomenon and cultural focus in China since years.

In August 2014 I: project space, one of the first off-spaces in Beijing, was founded by the German curators Anna-Viktoria Eschbach and Antonie Angerer.

The second edition of the art and research project Dark Ecology takes place from 26 to 30 November 2015. The Dark Ecology Journey begins in Kirkenes in Norway’s northern extremes and travels via Nikel and Zapolyarny (Russia) to Murmansk, the largest Russian city above the polar circle.

The debate on climate change is highly complex and goes far beyond our imagination, even though we continually invent new words, images, figures and graphs to grasp its complexity. But how do these images and metaphors work? And what imagery lingers?

Körpererfahrung

In contrast to the church, the theater and the cinema, the art exhibition provides a format for individualized viewers who decide themselves how they move around, what they spend time on and when they leave.

Excursion from Nov. 2nd - 6th
Visiting the Biennale di Venezia, Val Canale, architecture by Carlo Scarpa, Trieste, Ilirska Bistrica, Ljubljana, Vitanje

Ideas of Landscape and Film

Landscape is a notoriously vague term but architect Carl Sauer’s description of the material landscape as „an iconographic index of the mind“ seems a good starting point in many respects: It defines landscape as an expression of ideas, ideologies, cultural values and actions inscribed in a place.

Der Weltraum als reale und spekulative Landschaft

The course will explore space (as in "outer") in relation to the exploration of its physcial reality, its impact on the public's imagination in popular culture and visual art, as well as rather earthly political, social and economic implications.

BU-CON was founded in 2004 by artists in Detroit, MI, USA in an effort to inhabit the form of an infrastructure development company and effect an authorial position with respect to the troubling situation between technology and life systems in the world.

Oh, you are so full of references!

Through the lense of landscape and place we will explore various theoretic, essayistic and poetic texts  (among them Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze/Félix Guattari, Chris Kraus, Anna Mitgutsch, George Perec, Robert Smithson, Rebecca Solnit, etc. ...) and how they approach these contested topics.

Some places on earth obviously don't offer comfortable milieus to live in: the pole regions, deserts, windswept high plateaus and mountains, swamps etc. Nevertheless mankind has developed a large variety of strategies to cope even with the most unpleasant environments. 

As part of the Session „Contemporary Arts Practice and Outer Space: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach“ Ralo Mayer presented his paper „Space and Ecology“ at the 66th International Astronautical Congress in Jerusalem.

Barbara Schröder is a publisher and editor at Dancing Foxes Press, founded in 2012 in New York. She will be talking about her practice of developing books with artists.

Courses by

Christian Falsnaes
Phillip Furtenbach
Krassimira Kruschkova
Gabriele Mackert
Ralo Mayer
Barbara Pichler
Karin Raith
Claudia Slanar

Konzept: Hanna Burkart, Ursula Gaisbauer, Christina Gruber, Marlies Gruber, Nora Gutwenger, Katharina Körner, Arvydas Umbrasas, mit Unterstützung von: Francesca Aldegani, Friedrich J. Engl, Elisabeth Falkinger, Natalia Gurova, Nadine Hirschauer, und Roland Plachy; Foto: Natascha Unkart

In this work I concentrate on the relationship between human and object and how this two consort and communicate during interacting. After repeated efforts, how, where and in what I see landscape, it was the equipment I was drawn to. The equipment which is forming and structuring landscape, it is my fetish in the broad field of visual perception of landscape.

A portrait of an ephemeral place.

The artists' book analyses ephemeral urban spaces that are unused and located at an intermediate stage and questions their role in an otherwise functional and use-oriented urban fabric.

Biolumonescence (Greek. Bios for life and lat. Lumens for light) is the ability of living organisms to produce visible light alone or with the help of symbiontic organisms by converting biochemical energy into light. The best known cases of biolumonescence are probably fireflies (Lympyris noctiluca), various fungi such as Armillaria and diverse marine organisms in deep sea.

Ursula Hansbauer, Wolfgang Konrad und Clemens Stachel reden über ihren Dokumentarfilm "Goldene Gene", der sich produktionsmäßig in der Zielgeraden befindet.

Vom Lift aus begangen liegt alles im Parterre. 2015

Eine Geschichte von horizontalen und vertikalen 1:1 Verhältnissen.

Eröffnungsfest am Schwendermarkt:
Samstag 6. Juni, 14:00-20:00 Uhr

Im Rahmen seiner Lehrveranstaltung „Land´s Gape: Öffentliches, angedacht im Kino“ zeigt Drehli Robnik am Montag, 1.6. das folgende Programm im Österreichischen Filmmuseum. Eintritt frei!

Painitz’ Planierung der Alpen (1968-1971) questions the relation of culture and nature and suggests the pouring of concrete and the leveling of the alps in order to emphasize the artificial and the human-made against the naturally grown. His interest in logic and systematic image shaping processes led to this clear demand that nature should not have any impact anymore, as art and nature are contraries and furthermore, nature, especially mountains, is preventing from movement and flexibility.

Landscapes of the Anthropocene
Humans make Nature

The thesis of the anthropocene — which argues that we have changed our planet and its ecosystem so irreversibly that the idea of an intact landscape has become invalid and that we have become a geological factor — demands a new definition of the relation between humans and nature, as well as a fundamental revision of our concepts.

Queer Ecologies, Unintentional Aesthetics and Other Conundrums of the Plastic Age

Plastic is one material that scientists are currently considering as a ‘golden spike’ for the Anthropocene.

The Archaeosphere: Beyond the Surface of Anthropocene Landscapes

Landscapes have depth. They have vertical as well as horizontal stratigraphy. In mapping the densely-wrought terrain of the anthropocene, we must do more than merely chart the surface. The depth to which the material trace of human influence extends downwards is as important as the lateral extent of surface features.

Touched Nature

Since Eugene Stoermer and Paul Crutzen proposed to rename our current geological epoch in the year 2000 in an attempt to reflect man-made changes to planet Earth, the idea of an “Anthropocene” is going viral. Natural scientists, humanities scholars, artists, politicians, environmentalists and others are trying to grasp and explore the significance of this new concept and to understand its implications.

Black Paradises of the Anthropocene.
A Critique of Calculability

The Anthropocene, whose onset Paul Crutzen locates in the late eighteenth century, regards the world as a closed system, to be understood in terms of its limits. At about the same time as the Anthropocene’s beginnings, the economist Thomas Malthus also attempted to calculate the limits of the world.

Statement by Matt Edgeworth

It was quite amazing to find that, in participating in the roundtable discussion on ‘Mensch Macht Natur’ (Humans Make Nature) at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, we were also helping to make a work of art. In preparation for the event, the floor of the entire room had been tiled with an unusual polystyrene-like or soft plastic material by members of the Landschaftskunst department.

The class meets Susan Philipsz to talk about her work "War Damaged Musical Instruments (Pair)".

Klaffen, Glotzen, Gähnen – gape: Folgen wir der Sprache, vor allem ihrem Sinn (untrennbar vom Nonsense), über Landesgrenzen hinaus. Dann ist the Land´s Gape ziemlich nah bei the Landscape. Dann steht die Landschaft der Wirtschaft, der Herrschaft und anderen Schaften nicht näher als dem Klaffen des Grundes, dem Gähnen des Bodens und dem Glotzen des Landes. 

Das Seminar widmet sich ausgehend von exemplarischen Diskursen den Utopien von Landschaft. Künstlerische Strategien der 1960er-Jahre werden auf ihr Verhältnis zu Natur sowie Wahrnehmung und Mediadisierung hin untersucht. Zur Diskussion gestellt werden Aneignungen von Wüste und deren thematische Bezüge auf Topoi wie Entropie oder der Natur als Museum etwa bei Robert Smithson. Die Blockveranstaltung bereitet auf den Round Table vor, der Methoden anderer wissenschaftlicher Disziplinen vorstellt, sich dem Phänomen Anthropozän zu nähern.

Mute witness, 2015

Christian Mayer invites visitors to share his focus on a palm tree located at Exposition Park in Los Angeles. At 170 years, this tree is one of the oldest living things in Los Angeles that can be evidenced with photographs.

Johanna Kirsch lives and works in Vienna. Her work deals with the search for freedom: exploring the extent existing ties, norms, regulations and borders are directly relevant or real to individuals and social needs, and how these realms of desires, and their phantoms are defined. Kirsch tests both concrete needs and the corresponding regulations, often physically. http://www.schrik.info

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Filmmaker James Benning visits the class to talk about his artistic background and strategies. He presents older works as well as his newest series "Two Cabins".

Guided tour through the Museum of Natural History with Stefanie Jovanovic, followed by a screening of „Natural History“ by James Benning.

Curator und art historian Claudia Slanar is head of the Blickle Kino at 21er Haus, Vienna. In 2003 she co-edited the first monography on James Benning. We will screen and discuss the film "El Valley Centro"