Welcome at the Interface Culture program website.
Acting as creative artists and researchers, students learn how to advance the state of the art of current interface technologies and applications. Through interdisciplinary research and team work, they also develop new aspects of interface design including its cultural and social applications. The themes elaborated under the Master's programme in relation to interactive technologies include Interactive Environments, Interactive Art, Ubiquitous Computing, game design, VR and MR environments, Sound Art, Media Art, Web-Art, Software Art, HCI research and interaction design.
The Interface Culture program at the Linz University of Arts Department of Media was founded in 2004 by Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau. The program teaches students of human-machine interaction to develop innovative interfaces that harness new interface technologies at the confluence of art, research, application and design, and to investigate the cultural and social possibilities of implementing them.
The term "interface" is omnipresent nowadays. Basically, it describes an intersection or linkage between different computer systems that makes use of hardware components and software programs to enable the exchange and transmission of digital information via communications protocols.
However, an interface also describes the hook-up between human and machine, whereby the human qua user undertakes interaction as a means of operating and influencing the software and hardware components of a digital system. An interface thus enables human beings to communicate with digital technologies as well as to generate, receive and exchange data. Examples of interfaces in very widespread use are the mouse-keyboard interface and graphical user interfaces (i.e. desktop metaphors). In recent years, though, we have witnessed rapid developments in the direction of more intuitive and more seamless interface designs; the fields of research that have emerged include ubiquitous computing, intelligent environments, tangible user interfaces, auditory interfaces, VR-based and MR-based interaction, multi-modal interaction (camera-based interaction, voice-driven interaction, gesture-based interaction), robotic interfaces, natural interfaces and artistic and metaphoric interfaces.
Artists in the field of interactive art have been conducting research on human-machine interaction for a number of years now. By means of artistic, intuitive, conceptual, social and critical forms of interaction design, they have shown how digital processes can become essential elements of the artistic process.
Ars Electronica and in particular the Prix Ars Electronica's Interactive Art category launched in 1991 has had a powerful impact on this dialog and played an active role in promoting ongoing development in this field of research.
The Interface Cultures program is based upon this know-how. It is an artistic-scientific course of study to give budding media artists and media theoreticians solid training in creative and innovative interface design. Artistic design in these areas includes interactive art, netart, software art, robotic art, soundart, noiseart, games & storytelling and mobile art, as well as new hybrid fields like genetic art, bioart, spaceart and nanoart.
It is precisely this combination of technical know-how, interdisciplinary research and a creative artistic-scientific approach to a task that makes it possible to develop new, creative interfaces that engender progressive and innovative artistic-creative applications for media art, media design, media research and communication.
SCMS 2026 Conference
26. März 2026 Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Chicago
Vortrag von Henning Engelke, Professor für Kunstgeschichte, an der Abteilung Kunstgeschichte und Kunsttheorie / Gender Studies / Kuratorische Praxis.
All archival problems are ideological problems: The Survey of American Independent Film (1973–74)
In the spring of 1973, Anthology Film Archives in New York hosted a meeting to discuss plans for “The Survey of American Independent Film,” an NEA-funded film preservation project. Anthology’s founder Jonas Mekas and P. Adams Sitney, its managing director, had invited a group of people who, in different ways, had contributed to shaping the American experimental film scene since at least the 1940s: the filmmaker/film scholar Jay Leyda, the filmmaker Lewis Jacobs, the Los Angeles gallery owner Clara Grossman, the poet and critic Parker Tyler, and Amos Vogel, founder of the film society Cinema 16. Also present were two young curators, Callie Angell (Anthology) and Charles Silver (MoMA). What emerged in the discussion was a view of independent/experimental film that included anonymous films, political films, unfinished films, student films, and failed films. It exceeded and contrasted with Anthology’s narrow focus, at this time, on a canon of “monuments of film art” (Sitney) by mostly white male filmmakers.
The project never went beyond its initial phase and is virtually forgotten today. But it also marks, as I will argue, a critical juncture in the history of archiving, historicizing, and theorizing experimental film. Drawing on archival sources, including the sound recording of the 1973 meeting, this paper traces how funding opportunities, personal networks, institutional policies, and historical contingencies shape archival practices and historiographical perspectives. It also looks at how the Survey intersected and contrasted with other contemporaneous projects such as “The Oral History of the Independent American Cinema” at SUNY Buffalo, and Cecile Starr’s “Women’s Independent Film Exchange.” The tension in these projects between absence, loss, and partial recovery opens up a critical perspective on current debates on materialist historiographies and the complexities of the process of how “value is selectively ascribed to specific films” (Alfaro).
