The curatorial collective Artist Project Group interrogates phenomena of capitalism through curatorial and artistic methods, in an attempt to build platforms for resilient aesthetic and artistic practices. In our project for curated_by with Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman and within the framing of Kelet, we continue to investigate the capitalist overproduction of meaning, including the recuperation of crisis phenomena into the market, and ask „What Can Artists Do Now?”
Artist Project Group (Bernhard Garnicnig, Lukas Heistinger, Andrea Steves)
What Would Artists Do? is an agency/festival presenting consultancy services by artists. You can participate in unfolding artworks via messenger conversations and research surveys, and join us in a collective thought process around the Artist As Consultant. The practices of the artists represented here move beyond the formats and economies of the art market and academia. They challenge the dominance of the consultancy industry and its methods as they pervade our political environment and social lives. What Would Artists Do? is the next step towards a cooperative agency for artists‘ performative knowledge practices and succeeds the workshop Artists Have The Answers?.
Artist Project Group (Bernhard Garnicnig, Lukas Heistinger, Andrea Steves)
What happens when we bring the practices of artists and consultants into the same space? Will it be a dance party or a hypocritical brawl? In late October 2021 we will convene a series of workshops in hybrid form (online + in Vienna) to explore this possibility. As the influence of consultancy firms and their methods expand within spheres of the public and policy making, we ask what artists can critically adapt and appropriate from the interfaces, frameworks, tools, and practices of the consulting field.
An introduction to memeclassworldwide in the form of a text and video playlist for the Art & Education Classroom series. Classroom is a series of video programs curated by educators, artists, and writers. Each program assembles films, interviews, lectures, panel discussions, and documentaries from a variety of sources to engage with themes relevant to contemporary art and cultural production.
Original Soundtrack for m h y t n i x, a moving image artwork created with Karin Ferrari and Peter Moosgaard, comissioned by ORFIII Pixel, Bytes & Film.
Talking about the web in art schools shouldn’t be like explaining a joke. memeclassworldwide is a school-in-progress aiming to advance the dialogue about internet-based practices, myths, and memes vis-a-vis the institutions and curricula of arts education.
Between October 2019 to June 2020, work continues on “What Artists Institute,” which proposes an extension of the vocabulary with which practices of relation between artists and institutions are conceptualized.
During a sailing trip on the Limfjord, the artist community of Aalborg declared Aalborg the first city in the world to adopt an Anti-Artwashing Agreement in their cultural policy making process.
A workshop on rewriting the history of New Media Art based on feminist and alternative sources, and rewriting the role of New Media Art as part of teaching and art practices. Institute for Art and Education, University of Art and Design Linz
Exhibition at Museu de Arte, Arquitetura e Tecnologia. The exhibition is thought from the transversal work of the multidisciplinary artist Ernesto de Sousa, in a dialogue with works that promote new readings about his legacy and its political and cultural dimensions of artists from generations and nationalities such as Melanie Bonajo, Rita Sobral Campos, Simon Dybbroe Møller and Supergood.
Experimental Publishing Partner for the Technosphere Project, 2014-2018, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. Image and text-based video and custom coded video/text interface as continent Issue 6.3 / 2017. The emergence of the Technosphere through planetary-scale technologies continues to be manifested only through its points of condensation, that is, as objects of our everyday. (1948) The publishing collective continent. presents their latest issue on the Technosphere, this time entirely realised as a video, continuing a project “to lose all words all together”. notions, visions and intuitions picked up through interviews and awareness at the last technosphere knowledge campus, the work started where traditional interview, editing and omission process ends and creates an associative bridge to the 1948 Technosphere inflection point.
"What Artists Institute" proposes a vocabulary of verbs with which practices of relation between artists and institutions are conceptualized. It focusses on artistic practices, projects, and processes that involve a concern with Institutions, institutionality, and practices of instituting. The thesis is written with the aim of rendering ways in which a practice of instituting can be shared, taught, studied and learned as creative and emancipatory. My research is grounded in experiences gathered over ten years of co-creating ongoing institutional and instituent endeavours, such as the Palais des Beaux Arts Wien, the public-making publication continent. and the Bregenz Biennale. The dissertation is embedded in the SNF-funded research project “Institutions as a Way of Life” at the Institute for Experimental Design and Media Cultures, HGK Basel and supervised by Prof. Axel Stockburger at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
Editor for continent issue 7.1 / 2018. With contributions by Erik Born, Lia Carreira, Fabian Faltin, Geraldine Juárez, Franziska Huemer-Fistelberger, Steve Lyons & Jason Jones, Rosemary Lee, Manuel Minch, Armin Medosch, Jamie Allen, Eva-Maria Mandl and Seth Weiner. Editorial support by Maximilian Thoman, additional editing and translation by Nadežda Kinsky Müngersdorff.
SNF funded research project hosted by the Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures at HGK Basel. 2017–2021. Institutions as a Way of Life explores and projects the legacy of Institutional Critique and develops models of instituent practices in terms of micropolitical actions, radical pedagogies and artistic processes. It will reveal how technology, media and art can reflect and open up new infrastructures for thinking and doing. It aims at generating a critical understanding of the relation between institutions and individuals as a condition to and as a shaper of our relations to the world.
Artist talk at Klasse für Ortsbezogene Kunst, Universität für Angewandte Kunst Wien. 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.
For the Bregenz Biennale 2016, an airplane was chartered to announced the realization of 26 imaginary and immaterial artworks by invited artists. The sunset at Lake Constance seen from Bregenz on the 14th of August 2016 was declared as a work of art. The works are preserved as printed postcards and are now in circulation worldwide.
Richard Prinz, Swetlana Heger, Mathias Garnitschnig, Tim Hartmann, Philipp Leissing, Commendatore Himi Burmeister, Lisi Hämmerle, Rainer Ganahl, Philipp Preuss, Paul Mittler, Maria Anwander Und Ruben Aubrecht, Uwe Jäntsch
Lecture Performance at L’Exposition Imaginaire, Kunsthalle Wien. We talk about the essence of cultural institutions in the post-digital age and imagine the next steps in the genealogy of Wunderkammer – Museum – Archive.
Maren Mayer-Schwieger, Fabian Faltin, Anne Faucheret
Series of renders and prints. “Predicting the world with models and drawing graphs of it is like throwing three balls in the air and connecting the dots.“
Open between November and December of 2015, the Supergood Concept Store hosted a program of performances and workshops, while also operating as a speakeasy superfood bar. This opened up an ambiguous space between product and performance, animating notions of self-optimization, body politics, and postcolonial smoothie cultures.
Artist-run research and teaching have long been the source of transformative potentials and radical rethinkings of how communities can be, work and act together, as distributed, collective, synchronic, autonomous and connective. These communities support and cultivate the knowledge practices of curious people – artists, researchers, designers; thinkers and makers, activists; administrators, activators and organizers. In our current moment, such communities, if they are operational, are by default both digital and real, streamable and graspable. The very existence and prolonged discourse around such communities directly affirms the need for new forms of encounter between people, producers and audiences. We always need to co-create new potentials and formats for discussing, presenting, learning, sharing – knowing – as well via critical reflection on the media and the technological conditions that allow us to work together. For Coded Cultures: Openism, the publishing collective continent. assembles a programme of experimental and experiential, erkenntnis-oriented encounters where people driven by curiosity toward modes of friendship and scholarship support each other in their matters of concern – personal and professional intents forever colliding in "Open Scenarios for Non-Trivial Pursuits".
Peter Moosgaard, Karin Ferrari, Jamie Allen, Seth Weiner, Julia Hölzl, Fabian Faltin, Nina Jäger, Lital Khalkin, Paul Boshears, Franziska Huemer, Maximilian Thomann
Installation at MAGAZIN Vienna for Coded Cultures Festival. The artists recorded a fairly standard situation in a recording studio: a vocalist performing in the live room while the digital audio workstation operator sits in the control room pushing buttons, checking levels, et cetera. The vocalist is trying to imitate the sound of listening into a seashell only using experimental vocal techniques. Bored by the ongoing attempt to record all possible facets of the sound, the operator drifts away watching videos online. The sound carries him to exotic beaches and then away through the spectrum of related videos and screensavers nurturing his escapist fantasies. Meanwhile, the vocal performer records one impression after the other, until he’s exhausted and out of breath. The installation shows the recording situation on a monitor in a silent video. The sound recordings are composed to overlay each other, and played back through modified microphones, mounted in an assemblage with two large seashells.
Bregenz Biennale is a site-specific intervention in the cultural landscape of a small town that finds itself set idyllically at a large alpine lake. It focusses on ephemeral forms of art in public space, avoiding commodification and industrialization but encouraging abstraction and discovery.
Jamie Allen, Albert Allgaier, Simone Borghi, Sean J Patrick Carney, Martin Chramosta, Claude Closky, Constant Dullaart, Fabian Faltin, Karin Ferrari, Alec Finlay, Peter Fritzenwallner, Michele Gabriele, Bernhard Garnicnig, Thomas Geiger, Katharina Höglinger, Barbara Anna Husar, Lisa Kainz, Lital Khaikin, Rick Lins, Romain Mader, Maria Maeser, Fernando Mesquita, Marco Rios, Lina Rukevičiūtė & Lina Zaveckytė, Driton Selmani, Lena Sieder-Semlitsch, Benjamin Tomasi, Gruppe Uno W ien, Noburo W atanabe, Seth Weiner, Arnaud Wohlhauser
Being in the first-worldly absurd position of having a bag of ice cubes in our trunk of our car while driving through the Californian desert with the thermometer clocking 48 degrees celsius, the holes in these ice cubes and the spiky leaves of the Joshua Tree, upon their first encounter, suddenly configured into this perfect modular system. For about half an hour, while the ice disintegrated under the sun, we could hear tiny crackling and sizzling noises, and the damp sound of water drops falling on the ground and being absorbed by the hot sand.
A 1:1 scale model of an art institution for the wireless belle époque. The Palais des Beaux Arts is a conceptual art space set between the historical and stylistic presence of the pre-Secessionist Jugendstil landmark from 1908 and the material and electromagnetic layers of the public space around it. Selected international artists and curators are commissioned to create site-specific works and interventions on our wireless network and the unmarked space around it. The vernissage is on the trottoir. Bernhard Garnicnig was the Very Artistic Director between 2014 and 2018 and was succeeded by Seth Weiner.
Die AutorInnen sind das Problem. Die auf ein Subjekt zurückführbare Stimme ist lokalisier- und somit angreifbar. Dennoch bilden Personenkult, ein hoher Grad an Auffindbarkeit und die sorgsame Pflege der „Eigenmarke“ oftmals das zentrale Interessensfeld künstlerischer Verwertungsstrategien, deren offenkundige Bedingungen scheinbar im diametralen Widerspruch zur freien Verfügbarkeit von Werken künstlerischer (Wissens-)Produktion stehen. Anonym, Kollektiv, oder „just following orders“ – die Ausstellung zeigt eine Konstellation aus künstlerischen Prozessen und Methoden, welche eine identitäre Beziehung zwischen ProduzentIn und Werkbedeutung hinterfragen und aus deren Auflösung etwas machen.
TRAUMAWIEN mit Oswald Wiener, Ulrich Nausner, Mimi Cabell, Jason Huff and American Psycho. Peter Fritzenwallner, der fehlende Auftraggeber und die Ziel-Fokus-Gruppe, Constant Dullaart at suggesteddomain.com et Emilie Gervais on a Soundwwwalk. Christopher Richmond only in Available Light. With Anonymous & others
Unboxing of a sculpture that has been shipped across the globe by two artists and a logistics manager. They took turns applying industrial processes to an unknown object, without knowing what the other one is doing.
Bregenz Biennale is a site-specific intervention in the cultural landscape of a small town that finds itself set idyllically at a large alpine lake. It focusses on ephemeral forms of art in public space, avoiding commodification and industrialization but encouraging abstraction and discovery.
Albert Allgaier, Salvatore Viviano, Markus Proschek, Andreas Trobollowitsch, Andrea Lüth, Paul Landa, Philip Hanich, Peter Fritzenwallner, Albért Bernàrd, Maria Anwander und Ruben Aubrecht
Curated exhibition at Kunstraum Glockengasse, Wien. After all it’s possible that the penguin was just looking for a free WiFi hotspot beyond the comfort zone of network discourses and medium specificity.
Salvatore Viviano, Hennessy Youngman, Claude Closky, Albért Bernàrd and Jesus Papichulo
continent. is a para-academic, experimental publishing collective; a continuous effort to dynamically recompose publics, convene encounters and create open access online and offline collections of text, sound, image and media.
Installation at Artachment, Basel. Interested in modifying the causal relationships and decontextualizing the paradigmatic correlations between space, time and sound in popular electronic media, they juxtapose relics of technoid cultures with romanticist depictions of nature. Through this site-specific installation, Artachments’ idyllic waterfront space is put in a transcendental state by playing an endlessly rising hymnal synthesizer Glissando with glistering bright lights pointing out from whitened windows. The inside of the exhibition space is hidden by transparent material whilst it illuminates and places its surroundings into hyperspatial resonances with an endless loop of anticipative rave euphoria.
Artachment Basel, Juni 2011
A pioneering browser performance format. Soundwwwalks are live, browser-based performances where improvisation meets plugin sound-collage and multitab mixing, shamelessly blending the traditions of acoustic ecologies, pro-surfing, and laptop performance. The artists take the audience on a sonic detour through the World Wide Web.
Ryo Ikeshiro, Emilie Gervais, Michael Pollard, Joel Holmberg, Peter Moosgaard, Will Schrimshaw, Julian Palacz, Jamie Allen, Constant Dullaart, Ceci Moss, Jonas Lund, Jonathan Reus, Andreas Miranda, Antuong Nguyen, Christopher LG Hill
Exhibition at MAGAZIN Vienna. Ast fällt auf Tonspur explores correlations within the fields of experimental and popular music. In particular, the respective strategies of visualization, image production and paradigms of performance and sychronisation have been crafted into a audio-visual constellation of works.
A website that explored the resonating space around computers visiting the site. The website induced a controlled acoustic feedback loop which was recorded to a server.
How can musical structures allow political and social engagement? Final Essay for Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam, Master Media Design & Communication: Networked Media