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.

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.

How do we imagine our material world and how much of this conception do we determine through our senses? With which mechanism of terminology do we arrange, organize, and delineate this? Which relations do our sensory perceptions suggest to us? And: How does our reality construct itself, if we forego that sense which determines the structure of our medial world in such a predominating way, i.e., the visual sense? Lights out, senses of hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting on. This is the way the artist consciously spent the last minutes of the day at the time and how he experienced how quickly the familiar dissipates and the unfamiliar gains intensity.

The invisible garden at the Stift Admont embodies this experience. Blindfolded visitors are guided through the world of the invisible garden. Shifts occur in one’s perception of time, distance, space, and rhythm, and the possibility emerges to create a concept of reality in one’s own words or through the help of the explanations of one’s escort.

The leaves of a gingko tree not only feel like rubber but can also be bent accordingly, the leaf with the pointed tips is probably a maple one, the finger with which one brushed the bark of a bush now carries the taste of bitter almond—these are experiences that open the door into another world. They offer a sensuous immersion—let the de- and re-construction begin. (wh/jn)

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.

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.

The city’s collection was available for quite some time, but there was no location available at which it could have been shown. What began with paintings, sculptures, and drawings, grew to include installations, videos, and new media work. If a permanent exhibition space could be found, the collection could be brought to the public’s attention. With each exhibition, a “Museum on Demand” was created, as designated in 1991 by the director of the collection at that time, Wolfgang Hilger, which is also how the name of the permanent institution was coined.

In 2007, the Museum on Demand came into being. In a building next to Vienna’s City Hall, 600 square meters of the most modern exhibition space including storage are located in the former premises of a public kitchen. The MUSA houses a front gallery reserved for young artists in addition to the exhibition hall in order to allow for these single exhibitions. In the Artothek, pieces from the collection can be borrowed and taken home for the small fee of less than three Euros per month.

The goal of bringing art made by the Viennese artists to the Viennese and making access easier is just as much a part of the museum’s program as the promotion of the artists. The museum offers three large-scale exhibitions per year and ten exhibitions in the front gallery, as well as an ambitious revolving program which takes into account individuals with special needs. Admission to the exhibitions is free. It would be inappropriate, according to the director of the museum, Berthold Ecker, if the Viennese and their guests, as patrons of the collection, had to pay admission.

An independent jury decides on the purchases as well as the selection of the young artists that are featured in the front gallery. Submissions for purchase are available here and those who are interested in an exhibition in the front gallery can submit an application accompanied with a biography and portfolio to MUSA. (wh/jn)

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.

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. What was once a valuable, sought-out item as little as one or two years ago becomes worthless material for the junkyard today, and the cycle accelerates with the emergence of every shiny new model that appears in the store each year, month, week, even—as the regular lines of hungry customers at every new Apple store will attest.

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Noah Fischer brings this frantically mass-produced object back to its simple lo-tech origins: as a relic, a piece of furniture, and most poetically, as a light source—a kind of simple lantern emitting a soft, ethereal light. He re-introduces the most basic structural and aesthetic features of the object in terms of its color, its material, its form. As the newest models of monitors become ever-more streamlined, flatter, smaller, trying to divert attention, in fact, from their condition of being actual physical objects, the obsolete models that once enjoyed such state-of-the-art status become ever more strange and quaint in their outdated bulkiness—a quality made even stranger by the fact that early models of monitors were once a product of designers who even marked each of their works with their signatures.

In an age when video art represents the most cutting-edge medium of young artists, Noah Fischer turns the ubiquitous monitor—both figuratively and literally—on its head, evoking a decidedly modernist, Duchamp-ian gesture in the process. In this case, the signature on the object is his. (jn)