Digital Art (Visuelle Mediengestaltung)

Sound became one of the central paradigms in the visual arts of the 20th century. As acoustic architecture, "The Morning Line", is an autonomous sound system of irregular spatial structure that is controlled by digital programming and that can also be played as a live electronic multichannel instrument. The concept can be seen in the context of significant sound architectures such as the Philips Pavilion in Brussels or the Spherical Concert Hall in Osaka. At the same time it can be understood as the inversion and the opening to the public space.

Der Einsatz von Medientechnik als ›taktische Medien‹ (Lovink 2003) wird im Kunstdiskurs häufig als subversive Strategie bezeichnet (Arns 2004). Subversion wird hier gleichgesetzt mit analytischer Dekonstruktion und der Konstruktion alternativer Produktions- und Distributionskanäle, also einer praktischen Unterhöhlung der bestehenden Markt- und Verteilungsverhältnisse. Das Subversive wird bei Arns der jungen Medienkunst der 1960er und 1970er Jahre zugeschrieben, wie auch den Netzkünstlern der 1990er Jahre, die wieder in neuen Technologien taktische Medien entdecken. Das Subversive kann hier auf zwei Ebenen lokalisiert werden: einerseits im Kunstwerk selbst, das aufgrund des Einsatzes von Technik und ästhetischen Codes das bestehende Verständnis von Kunst umdrehen kann und Kritik am herkömmlichen Kunstbegriff und dem gesellschaftspolitischen Status Quo formulieren kann; andererseits in der Zuschreibung des Subversiven, also in der Rezeption und der retrospektiven Beurteilung und Bewertung des Kunstwerks. Subversion wird also nicht nur durch die Anwendung bestimmter Strategien definiert, sondern auch durch Zuschreibung. Dadurch entsteht noch kein Kanon des Subversiven, aber dennoch Konnotationen, die das Begriffsverständnis maßgeblich prägen. Die neuen ästhetischen Codes und die Strategien ihrer Konstruktion und Präsentation werden affektiv diesem Subversionsbegriff zugeordnet. Sie formen eine kulturelle Grammatik, einen Zeichenvorrat, der das Bild vom Subversiven prägt.

UBERMORGEN met Edward Snowden at Vienna's International Airport in Vienna on July 2nd, 2013 shortly after Bolivia's presidential aeroplane, having been denied the right to cross their respective airspaces by France, Spain, Italy and Portugal, was forced to land in Schwechat. Snowden had been on board as a guest of Evo Morales. They recorded a conversation and published it in their exhibition catalogue 'u s e r u n f r i e n d l y' that was published for their solo show at Carroll / Fletcher Gallery in London

Hans Bernhard: Hullo, Tobias, we have this publication in the pipeline about  our exhibition and what I want to talk to you about is grid paintings, surveillance, black holes, paranoia, infinity, psychoses, cyborgs, performance art, research at the border of the thinkable and knowable, and parallel universes. I would like to talk to you in your capacity as a physicist. What fascinates me is the possibility of picking up again the thread of a conversation with you, a scientist who has been described as Austria' s one in a century scientific talent, that we started in Vienna about pixels as the smallest visual unit and about physicists working for Wall Street.

Hackers break into systems and change rules. Artists are also fascinated by this, as the work of etoy, UBERMORGEN and the !Mediengruppe Bitnik shows. Contributions by Raffael Dörig, Hannes Gassert, Verena Kuni, Claus Pias and Felix Stalder.
Edited by Dominik Landwehr

Beyond action lies truth, and truth is pure and simple repeatable verifiable patterns. This 'Press Release' is the third of a series of releases to reposition UBERMORGEN beyond action. Beyond action lies truth, and truth is (pure and simple) repeatable, verifiable patterns. We call those truths 'laws' or 'rules'. Simultaneously such patterns can appear as ephemeral, aesthetic and delusional: Binary Primitivism, creating a state of insecurity, filling the void and creating a bubble between on and off, between zero and one.

We hallucinate about living in a consensual hallucination, a space and time construct that is both so exciting and so scary, that to survive, we create stress outlets that are killing, hurting, entertaining and amusing us. The physical, hence, sensory feeling and the assumed knowledge about the atomization of everything, hands us the opportunity to switch, to recombine and to think on so many levels and in dimensions and collusion that our actual existence at times truly feels like pure energy.

Because of our understanding of the physical universe as unified - based on laws and repeatable verifiable patterns - it is both imperative and immaterial that humans and machines are not falling for the synthetic, ideological and arbitrary separation between matter and antimatter, human and machine and Pre-Internet and Post-Internet.

The basis of theoretical art is the existence of immateriality in art going beyond matter, code, ideas and concepts, to a higher understanding of the underlying rules and patterns of the artistic universe; and on to formulate a universal theory based on models and abstractions that may include formulas of subversion, affirmation, aesthetics, intuition and other parameters.

What does “to live” mean for me as an artist? Which contents and criteria matter most? On the other hand, and inextricably linked to the question the life one lives, is the issue of “survival” – in an economic, but also in a psychological, physical and cultural sense.

From the paper: 'Our Strategies have changed radically over the years, as well as our topics and our research and communication methods. Perpetual change was not a successful strategy in terms of money and fame, but it offered a priceless reward, the maximum amount of freedom we could imagine.'

This UBERMORGEN talk about AI was designed and intended as a raging programmatic testosterone ego-driven declaration, a fundamentally unpleasant experience. We are completely occupied by anthropocentric and patriarchal views on what is called Artificial Intelligence. We can see a tragic clash of identity and individualism versus control and repression unified and fought within our own species. This psychological disaster, a classical double bind, is created by two or more conflicting messages. Posthumanism, Transhumanism and Accelerationism are reflections on being human. While the Anthropocene deals with the ecological footprint of humanity on Earth, posthumanism proposes the question of what comes after the species human. By that, the special status of humans is challenged and the human is put amid all other animals.