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.

Raoul Bukor
Matt Edgeworth
Nikolaus Fuchs
Philipp Haupt
Nina Herlitschka
Katrin Hornek
Krassimira Kruschkova
Gabriele Mackert
Karin Raith
Claudia Slanar

Ausgehend von Satellitenaufnahmen und GIS-Daten gehen wir ins Format 1:1 - mit Maßband, Nivelliergerät und Distomat.

Artificial Islands

Our landing point for explorations will be several public fire pits on the Donauinsel. In BBQ meetings we will develop and discuss site-specific projects while thinking about our intimate interconnections with oily dinosaur bones, ice cream and Waluliso.

Künstlerische Herangehensweisen an das digitale Arbeiten im Medienverbund Audio, Video, Computer

What are the artistic issues involving digital technology today? What about the historical traditions of the „Aufschreibesysteme“ we work with?

Modernity is based on industrialisation and urbanisation, on faith in social and technological progress and the will to dominate nature. Yet, the most sensitive landscape paintings en plein air were produced in the early phase of Modernism.

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.