Peter Weibel

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Peter Weibel (5 March 1944, Odessa, Ukraine - 1 March 2023, Karlsruhe) was an artist, curator and theoretician. From 1999 he was the director of the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe.

Studies

Having grown up in Upper Austria, Peter Weibel first studied French and French literature in Paris for a year, then began studying medicine in Vienna in 1964 before switching to mathematics, specialising in logic.

Work

The majority of Peter Weibel's work can be categorised as conceptual art, performance, experimental film, video art, computer art and media art in general.

Based on semiotic and linguistic considerations (Austin, Jakobson, Peirce, Wittgenstein, etc.), Peter Weibel developed an artistic language that led him from experimental literature to performance from 1964 onwards. In his performative actions, he examined not only the "media" of language and the body, but also film, video, tape and interactive electronic environments. He critically analysed their function in the construction of reality. In addition to actions with representatives of the Wiener Gruppe and Viennese Actionism - to which he gave his name - (Oswald Wiener, Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch, Rudolf Schwarzkogler), from 1966 he worked (together with Valie Export, Ernst Schmidt jr. and Hans Scheugl) on an "expanded cinema" that deconstructed the ideological and technical conditions of cinematic representation. Weibel and his circle did not use the term "expanded cinema" until 1968: in the summer of 1968, Weibel had discovered George Maciunas' Expanded Arts Diagram, which had appeared in the magazine film culture no. 43 (winter 1966), in Sweden, where he worked in different factories for a few weeks every year.

Peter Weibel consistently developed these ideas further in his video tapes and installations from 1969 onwards. With his television actions, the teleaktionen, which Austrian Television (ORF) broadcast in 1972 as part of the Impulse programme, he transcended the boundaries of the gallery space and investigated video technology in its application in the mass medium of television.

Peter Weibel pursued his artistic problems in a wide variety of materials, forms and techniques: in texts, sculptures, installations, films and videos. In 1978, he also turned to music. Together with Loys Egg, he founded the band Hotel Morphila Orchester. In the mid-1980s, he explored the possibilities of computer-aided video editing. At the beginning of the 1990s, he realised his first interactive computer-based installations, with which he again addressed the relationship between media and the construction of reality.

In his numerous lectures and articles, Weibel has published on contemporary art, media history, media theory, film, video art and philosophy. As a theorist and curator, he advocated an art and art historiography that took into account the history of technology and the history of science. As a teacher at universities and long-time director of institutions such as Ars Electronica in Linz, the Institute for New Media in Frankfurt am Main and the ZKM Centre for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, he had a particular influence on the European media art scene through conferences, exhibitions and publications. As a curator and theorist, he has always devoted himself to the classical artistic genres - painting and sculpture - and has shown and written about young artists as well as forgotten protagonists whom he has rediscovered for the art world.

Research and teaching

Peter Weibel has taught at numerous universities since 1976, including the University of Applied Arts Vienna, the College of Art and Design in Halifax, Canada and the Gesamthochschule Kassel. In 1984, he was appointed Associate Professor for Video and Digital Arts at the Department for Media Study at the State University of New York in Buffalo, N.Y., where he set up the Digital Arts Laboratory. In the same year, 1984, he was appointed Professor of Visual Media Design (Vis.Med) at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, which he held until 2017. In 1989, he was commissioned to set up the "Institute for New Media" at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, which he headed as director until 1994. From January 1999, he was a member of the board of the ZKM | Centre for Art and Media Karlsruhe and, since 2017, director of the Peter Weibel Research Institute for Digital Cultures at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. (2024)

Publications[edit]

Books[edit]

  • Kritik der Kunst. Kunst der Kritik: es says & I say, Texte 1965-1973, Vienna and Munich: Jugend & Volk, 1973.
  • Zur Geschichte und Ästhetik der digitalen Kunst. Supplementband der Ars Electronica, Linz: Linzer Verlagsgesellschaft, 1984.
  • editor, with Veruschka Bódy, Clip, Klapp, Bum: Von der visuellen Musik zum Musikvideo, Cologne: Dumont Taschenbücher, 1987. [1]
  • Die Beschleunigung der Bilder. In der Chronokratie, Bern: Benteli, 1987; new ed., Basel: Benteli, 2003.
  • Lebenssehnsucht und Sucht, Berlin: Merve, 2000.
  • editor, with Rolf Sachsse, Gamma und Amplitude. Medien und kunsttheoretische Schriften, Berlin: Fundus, 2004.
  • Time Slot. Geschichte und Zukunft der apparativen Wahrnehmung vom Phenakistiskop bis zum Quantenkino, Cologne: Walther König, 2006.

Essays[edit]

Interviews[edit]

Films[edit]

  • Peter Weibel – Mein Leben, dir. Marco Wilms, 2010, 43 min. Documentary. [2]

Links[edit]

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