kurt hentschlager
Austria
(Linz, Austria) will talk about No Exit Oasis, a virtual reality audiovisual environment built on Mozilla Hubs. Kurt's immersive media installations and performances have been featured around the world for over 3 decades. He is considered a pioneer of performative installation. A recurring theme in his work is the human body; human expression; how the brain processes the outside world; and how culture, imagination, mood, and identity influence perception. Kurt studied at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna with Peter Weibel - director of the famous ZKM in Germany. He began exhibiting his work in 1983, building machines and later video, computer animation, and sound work. In 2010 he won the Quartz Media Art Award in Paris. In 2012 he was commissioned, as part of the London 2012 Cultural Program, to create CORE, a large-scale symphonic installation. He premiered SOL, an immersive audiovisual installation at the famous Berghain club in Berlin in January 2017 and ORT, a public project in Le Havre, a 360 projection at Oscar Niemeyer's “Le Volcan” building, which premiered in October 2017. Currently, his work SUB is being presented at iMAL in Belgium, a work that Hyphen Hub was involved in its production capacity when it was presented in New York in the fall of 2019. The installation's gestalt approach gives a heightened sense of drama, drawing visitors into its vast emptiness.
SUB's completely dark environment is punctuated by bursts of intense animated light, leaving ghostly retinal impressions that linger as the light fades. The surrounding sound, which was likewise developed by Hentschlager, provides both an accompaniment to these moments of light and a constant backdrop for the stage. From 2013-2018 he taught as a full-time Visiting Artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).