Artist statement
In my childhood, piano lessons after school at the Linz Bruckner Conservatory were accompanied by wild summers in the surrounding forests and hills. Not forced to practice, I soon moved in a free world of sound. At the age of 15 I was given a typewriter and it became clear to me that I would become a writer. At the age of 20 I began to take photographs. I preferably worked with 400 ASA films in b/w and fogged subjects and developed the pictures myself in an improvised darkroom. Even before my studies I had found my three artistic veins in music, literature and photography.
I understood early on that specific forms of communication develop in different structures and later dedicated my studies to this topic. This is how I came to Oral History, a narrative format of modern oral tradition. Large series of interviews open up spaces of memory that expand, complement and change the prevailing view of history. I dealt with art in exile from 1933-45 and endless visits to the cinema. I wrote my diploma about Andrei Tarkovsky’s victims. In 1991 I began to work with new media. I completed an additional training on electronic networks and the then operating system DOS. The first computer I worked with subsequently was a friend’s Atari. With his Cubase I generated electronic music.
Subsequently, I developed an online interview series with media artists and kissed on artistic research. In 1999 I founded www.zeitgenossen.com together with Zelko Wiener. In three large projects, poetic spaces of reflection and experience were created, which were and still are freely accessible online. Until 2006, the virtual Gesamtkunstwerk was a central artistic interest. With Zelko Wiener’s death I gave up active work on it, founded the Zelko Wiener Kunst- archiv to preserve the artist’s work and later handed it over to the City of Vienna. On the 10th anniversary of his death we opened an exhibition and presented a book about his work.
For a long time, the question determining my thinking was according to which criteria people and machines „function“. Since 2010, however, I have increasingly devoted myself to the visual recording of nature and urban culture.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)