What would a virtual world be like without computers? The artist Johannes Deutsch tries to make the answers to this question tangible through his art project, “The Invisible Garden”. Located in the outdoor park area of the Museum Stift Admont, the interactive garden world of the media artist has been growing for two years as part of the museum’s “Made for Admont” series, and offers a feast of feeling, smelling, and hearing experiences to the visitors of the museum.

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The idea for the garden developed at a time when the artist was planning an interactive television world for the West German Broadcasting Corporation. Johannes Deutsch approached this project with the structure of a new world and the possibilities of its development in mind. He is fascinated by the question of how we derive our conception of the world on the basis of perception, sense, and knowledge processing, not only within the virtual realm, but also in the realm of our life that we regard as material. more »

We keep things on hand because they are important to us. We store them. They are available: for example, birthdays of friends, important telephone numbers, and sometimes, works of art. In Vienna, the Museum on Demand (Museum auf Abruf, MUSA) serves this purpose. This museum of the city of Vienna keeps a collection of artworks by artists living in Vienna which is accessible to the city’s residents.

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The collection began in 1945 with an acquisition of watercolors. Since then, the art collection has increased to nearly 20,000 works. They represent the work of Vienna’s resident artists for over a half century. Acquisition, says the present director of MUSA, Berthold Ecker, is the most significant form of support for artists. This has been the cornerstone of MUSA’s artistic policy since the beginning and remains so until today. The city of Vienna purchases about 130 new works of art annually for this collection. Today, one can find works from Franz West, Maria Lassnig, and Erwin Wurm there. more »

As you are looking at this podcast, you are looking into a monitor, be it on your laptop, your iPod, your mobile phone, etc. But how much time do you spend actually looking at your monitor, a physical object that one has come to take completely for granted? The point of a mobile world, in fact, is that these objects, through which we stay connected with an information-saturated world, are disposable—toys that we purchase and update on a regular basis, and, at the same rate, discard and forget about just as quickly.

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In Noah Fischer’s work, one returns to looking at this neglected object, the monitor, in all its different versions and models over the ages—a technological “era” which only really covers about thirty years of time. The Brooklyn-based artist was first drawn to the monitor by noticing the predominance of them in trash heaps on the streets of New York. more »