This year’s university portrayal presents the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna introduced by Constanze Ruhm and students. The program will show eleven works recently produced at the Institute for Fine Arts – Department Art and Digital Media.
About the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Today, the Academy offers roughly 1,400 students a variety of courses ranging from painting and sculpture to photography and video, performance and conceptual art, also including architecture, scenography and conservation/restoration. By offering seminars and carrying out a great variety of projects, the Institutes of Art Theory and Cultural Studies and of Natural Sciences and Technology in the Arts ensure a high theoretical standard in all the departments. This is closely linked to the training of art teachers, which is considered central in conveying and communicating art to others. The course structure, based on diploma studies and/or bachelor/master programs, is augmented through various doctoral studies, including an internationally renowned PhD-in-Practice program, as well as through the master program Critical Studies. This wide range of courses offered by the Academy enables students to pursue their own individual goals, and to obtain a variety of qualifications.
As a university, the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna is especially dedicated to teaching processes based on research and art alike, i.e. on scientific and artistic research, the findings of which are integrated into the curricula in different ways and communicated to a wider public through exhibitions, symposia, lectures and a publication series. Conveying a complex understanding of art to a knowledge-based society is one of the main tasks of the Academy, apart from teaching students.
The Academy's teaching and research work rests on a differentiated concept of art which relates to the aesthetic appearance of a work of art as well as to the characteristic forms of thought underlying artistic practice. First and foremost, we understand art as a mode of thinking and acting which becomes manifest in a wide range of media. Art, as a specific form of insight, can also be expressed by representatives of many professions seemingly unrelated to art.
About the Department Art and Digital Media
The Ordinariat für Kunst und Digitale Medien (Chair for Art and Digital Media) offers students a program that develops and mediates contemporary art terms and artistic practices in relation to media discourses and digital cultures. At the core of this program is the development of a range of artistic methods, which emerge from various discourses and fields of interest. The terminology of digital culture operates as pivotal interface that offers a perspective onto a set of different domains all pertaining to time-based media (film / video / TV; theatrical and performative practices, architecture, sound art, netbased technologies, game cultures...). From this starting point, advanced artistic productions ("new genres") should emerge.
As opposed to the concept of "media art" (and its associated vocabulary) as historic term, this program should allow for the development of a notion of art practice which is informed by a culture of (digital and popular) media and net-based technologies. The program is understood to be "operating system" and "interface" at the same time, thus constituting a mixing board, which channels and feeds back upon contemporary art practice through the syntax of digital cultures and new media, in order to generate contemporary "scripts". In this sense, the critical reflection of sociopolitical as well as cultural contingencies of media-technological developments is regarded as a crucial point of departure for artistic practice.
FILM PROGRAM:
AUTOKORREKTUR (Ich tippe das jetzt mit der Faust, damit auch was bei dir ankommt!)
AUTOKORREKTUR is based on 200 pages of anonymized chat logs. Chat messages, blog entries and comments evolve from a constant dialogue with ones self-image. „Ich tippe das jetzt mit der Faust, damit auch was bei dir ankommt!“ (engl. “I'm going to type this with my fists, so that I get to you!”) questions the performative and improvisational effort preceding the moment we hit the return key. The video shows five actresses self-taping their audition for characters derived from the chat logs.
Austria 2013 / 06:03 min / German, English
Filmmaker: Marlene Maier
World Premiere
FRAGMENT & ANTWORT
Evident evolvent excedent excellent excrement exhaustment existent experiment explodent exponent facient ferment firmament fitment flatulent fleshment florescent fluent fluorescent forejudgment forspent forwent fosterment FRAGMENT & ANTWORT
Austria 2013 / 06:21 min / German
Filmmaker: Julia Haugeneder
World Premiere
I talk, you listen
Things move within an undetermined space until a potentially invisible animator enters the scene.
Austria, Germany 2013 / 03:40 min / German
Filmmaker: Michaela Schweighofer
World Premiere
Satzball
The video engages with the complex issues of representation by referring to Schnitzlers “Fräulein Else”. One central question sprawls across the lines of the tennis court: “Am I willing to give up my integrity in order to find recognition”?
Austria 2013 / 10:00 min / German
Filmmaker: Jessyca R. Hauser
World Premiere
How to Become a Successful Artist
The video consists of a series of interviews with artists, curators and art theorists about how to become a successful artist. The interviews constitute a guide which might help artists to rehearse in order to find success in their work.
Austria 2013 / 09:00 min / German
Filmmaker: Claudia Sandoval Romero
World Premiere
Headlock
A person throws tomatoes against herself. Afterwards she ends in a labyrinth reminiscent of that of Minotaurus. Her pain melts into an emotional and physical mash. The character serves as a focus for associations related to human failure in a world of strict ideals.
Austria 2013 / 05:50 min / No Dialogs
Filmmaker: Marie Klein
World Premiere
The Austrian Psycho
Vorbereitendes Material für eine Selbst-Theorie der Theater-Arbeit vor der Bühne
”Perdormance, perboremance, performance, perdormance, perborebance, performance. Ideology critique in the universe of ideology critique in the universe of high culture“ is what the person working at the ticket counter of Vienna’s Burgtheater thinks, while his self remains utterly unexpressed.
Austria 2013 / 06:51 min / German
Filmmaker: Christian Diaz Orejarena
World Premiere
Tic Tac
Tic Tac is a zigzagging parkour move in which the runner pushes off from a surface to jump over obstacles or climb tight spaces between buildings. However, not much of the eponymous technique can be seen in young filmmaker Josephine Ahnelt’s work: The movement takes place in the protagonists’ faces. TIC TAC examines in microscopic detail the psychological processes that play out while a group of young parkour traceurs do their thing. The camera focusses on their facial expressions and gestures, their anxiety and nervousness, and also their pleasure and pain. (Angelika Unterholzner)
Austria 2011 / 03:00 min / No Dialogs
Filmmaker: Josephine Ahnelt
PREMIERE DELAYED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE
The video deals with the phenomenon of ”Gastarbeiter houses” in Serbia. Whilst living and working in a host country, the Gastarbeiters invest most of their money in building big houses at home, since they plan to move back one day.
Austria 2013 / 10:40 min / Englisch
Filmmaker: Paran Pour, Dunja Predic
World Premiere
Vision of traces
VISION OF TRACES is a secondary project which resulted from a previous attempt to remove the surface of found footage filmstrips on to paper with the aid of chemicals. The visible elements of the found footage filmmaterial, which show mostly rehearsals and unused scenes, are the remaining traces of this film printing process.
Austria 2012 / 01:09 min / No Dialogs
Filmmaker: Johannes Gierlinger
German Premiere
State of Stage
Everything starts with the view of the screen and ends out with the look of it. A scenario of unplanned, unrepentant rehearsal results. STATE OF STAGE is an exploration of different “states” or terms of stages, places of self-presentation and representation, trying through its virtual origin at the crossroads of cinema, theater and the Internet to explore the cinematic, performative and virtual space but also following the question of their blending, and interacting with each other to investigate. The different ”stages” (empty theaters and cinemas, the Internet itself as a performative space, and finally analog film) are emblematic of the "space" of the left, now or from time immemorial, creating a void, although in these places great feelings and emotions are negotiated, mediated and experienced.
Austria, Germany 2013 / 14:36 min / Englisch
Filmmaker: Jennifer Mattes
World Premiere
