The Interface Culture Lab at the University of Art and Industrial Design in Linz/Austria provides an internationally oriented master program in Interactive Media Arts. The two-year program, which is entirely organized in English language, is open to prospective students with multidisciplinary backgrounds integrating art, design, science and technology.
We are currently accepting new students for the master class of the upcoming academic year 2010/11 and would therefore like to point you to the online registration form, which will be open until June 18th 2010. The application interviews will take place in Linz on June 30th or alternatively on September 7th during the Ars Electronica Festival.
May 20, 2010 at 8:23 pm | digital art | No comment
During this semester I will hold an interim position as Professor for Interface Culture at the University of Arts in Linz, appointed to act for Prof. Sommerer & Prof. Mignonneau during their sabbatical leave. The Interface Culture Lab looks back to an exciting history of five years leading to the establishment of one of the most innovative master programs for digital arts in Austria. Apart from managing the continuity of the master program and student activities I am planning to give an impulse towards the research in human computer interaction and the development of open tools for creative production during my stay. Our new team is completed by senior researcher Dr. Georg Russegger, who will be responsible for the research towards a new European master program in Ludic Interfaces.
January 22, 2010 at 12:09 am | digital art | No comment
Well, it is pretty difficult to stay sober at Roboexotica. Back from the opening at the old Drinkomat factory in Vienna, I am still excited by the overall quality and fun-factor of this cocktail bot exhibition. There is an award ceremony planned by the end of this week, but I reckon it will be rather hard to choose the best submission. Here are my favourites starting with last year’s winning installation “Pressoir de la Fee” or Fairy Juice Squeezer, an amazing electro-mechanical device that is capable to squeeze a tiny amount of green alcoholic juice from a fairy trapped within the device.
As you can obviously guess from its name, “Plasmastaub” is set up within a kind of spaghetti western saloon bar, where one has to arm-wrestle against the robotic bartender, who will subsequently fill and toss a glass of whisky over the bar, which is not that easy to catch actually. The “Facehugger” is an alien creature, which attacks selected visitors who are tied-up on a bed within a closed room. Apparently the lucky victims eventually can suck some liquor from an alien rubber vagina monster which drops onto their face. The “loaded question” installation on the other hand manages to place the shot (more or less) directly into the mouth of its customer … from a distance well over a meter. Bartris is a modified version of the classic Tetris game, where the composition of different block colours that are eliminated within a row, determines the final ratio of a drink made of rum, coke and water. The “Miraculous Stigmatatron” – a crucified steampunk Jesusbot – is capable of turning water into wine. But I still don’t believe … even if it happens to reboot after three days. And finally the “Corps Reviver” is a beautifully crafted alchemist machine, mixing a nicely cooled alcoholic potion in perfect proportions.
December 4, 2009 at 5:07 pm | digital art | No comment
The metalab is Vienna’s most active hacklab, where people meet up and work on their various hardware, software and other community projects. It seems to be a quite open place, they offer a membership program, which allows people to take advantage of the quite advanced infrastructure, but apparently they are even allowing non-members to participate. Last weekend the lab celebrated its 3rd anniversary with an exhibition showing most of the work that has been done during the last three years. Of course they have their own 3D printer, but other fun projects which caught my attention were the robotflowr and an interesting LED device that allowed writing on fluorescent paper. And they even showed a performancer table based on reacTIVision, what a surprise!
After talking to a bunch of nice people, we agreed that I will do a presentation there for the next Dorkbot Vienna on Sunday June 28th.
June 16, 2009 at 10:37 am | digital art | No comment
Since my web server (hosted by kooperative.at) was upgraded last week, here follows my delayed report on my last trip to Portugal. Before attending the OFFF festival in Oeiras, I had the chance to meet the people from ALTlab, an emerging hacklab community in Lisbon, dedicated to open hardware projects. Currently they are working on the PAPERduino and they are also planning to build there own 3D printer, based on the open Reprap design. Unfortunately I was only able to attend half of the OFFF presentations, but I particularly was impressed by the talks of Karsten Schmidt and Aaron Koblin, two of the most creative innovators in the visualisation scene. Karsten aka toxi is also the author of a nice fiducial generator application that can be used with reacTIVision. The really remarkable music program at OFFF was mostly covered by the guys from the raster noton label.
May 15, 2009 at 2:06 pm | digital art | No comment
Yesterday I got the chance to see the robot band The Trons live at the Time’s Up lab at the harbour in Linz. The Trons have been brought to life by Greg Locke from New Zealand, who is currently touring around Europe with his creation. The band consists of four mechanical robots playing bass, guitar, drums and keyboard in a very particular style. Also the overall aesthetic design of the robot stage presence is quite remarkable. Check out this video on Youtube to see yourself.
May 3, 2009 at 12:37 pm | digital art | No comment
Yesterday I attended the second dorkbot meeting in Linz and I have been quite impressed by the active international media art community which has been formed in this city. The most remarkable presentations have been robotcowboy by Dan Wilcox (a head mounted imac audiovisual performance instrument), then with.in by Damian Stewart and Tine Papendick (a work in progress report about an interactive video puppet project) and finally the hilarious ican by Christian Vogel.
March 27, 2009 at 11:53 am | digital art | No comment
