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.
Lingering with Bass (2024, Steve McQueen)
29. April, 17.00 Uhr Kunstuni Linz, Hauptplatz 8, 4020 Linz (Lecture Hall F - H8.05.03)
Die Professur für Wissensgeschichte und das ERC-Projekt OLFAC laden zur Vorlesung von Ulrike Hanstein (VALIE EXPORT Center, University of Arts Linz).
Ulrike Hanstein (VALIE EXPORT Center, University of Arts Linz)
British artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen is celebrated for his uncompromising works of moving images, which scrutinize embodied subjects as precarious agents in past and present political life. Probing opacity and the difficult to see, McQueen’s multi-sensory and large-scale installations take up a critical stance towards representation in the visual field. My talk is a response to Bass (2024), an immersive installation and intense composition of light and sound, which was jointly commissioned by Dia Art Foundation New York and Schaulager Basel. Bass might be best described as a durational audiovisual performance: In the huge empty exhibition space a pulsing soundscape of five different bass instruments interweaves with the highly saturated colored light from LED tubes, which moves through the entire visible spectrum from violet to red. Disorienting the beholders’ embodied sense of place and time, the throbbing shifts of hue, luminance, volume, vibration, frequency, pace, timbre, and tone seemingly improvise the beholders’ own acts of perception. How could a history of violence appear in abstract but singular shapes, and reverberate by means of musical forms unfolding in the present? What does it mean for beholders to attune to color, tone, and scale in the vacillating experience of sensing the chromatic? How can light and sound be described as spectral – as haunting and physical – conditions, which link embodied sensory perceptions with social constructions of race?
Ulrike Hanstein is director of the VALIE EXPORT Center Linz _ Research Center for Media and Performance Art and professor for aesthetics and media studies at the University of Arts Linz. She has held academic positions at universities, art academies, and film schools in Weimar, Jena, Vienna, Leipzig, and Cologne. Her research interests include performance art and live art, experimental film and video practices, feminist art, and the materials and methods of art and media historiography.
Alle Termine der Ringvorlesung “The Senses in Performance”:
11. März 2026
Introduction by OLFAC – Silke Felber, Freda Fiala and Julia Ostwald
25. März 2026
320 GB im Rucksack – der physische Aspekt digitaler Kunst über Gletscher
Tina Frank (Visual Communication, University of Arts Linz) &
Alexis Dworsky (Media Design, University of Arts Linz)
15. April 2026
Dis_sensual – A crip choreographer’s re-distribution of the sensible
Michael Turinsky (Artist, Vienna)
22. April 2026
Performing Snakes in Modernity and Today
Nicole Haitzinger (Dance Studies, University of Salzburg) &
Christina Gillinger (Tanzquartier Vienna TQW)
29. April 2026
Tasting skin. On chilis and chills
Karin Harrasser (Cultural Studies, University of Arts Linz and Director of
ifk – International Research Center for Cultural Studies)
6. Mai 2026
Sinn für Unlösbares
bankleer – Karin Kasböck & Christoph Maria Leitner
13. Mai 2026
Mimi o Sumasu – the Very Act of Listening
Miya Yoshida (Artistic Research, University of Applied Arts Vienna)
20. Mai 2026
Lingering with Bass (2024, Steve McQueen)
Ulrike Hanstein (VALIE EXPORT Center, University of Arts Linz)
27. Mai 2026
Olfactory Violence and the Freedom to Speak: Stink Bombs in Interwar Europe
William Tullett (Early Modern History, University of York)
3. Juni 2026
Sensing the Atmospheres of Painters’ Studios in Nineteenth-Century France
Erika Wicky (Olfactions, Université Grenoble Alpes)
10. Juni 2026
Hee-Hawing Democracy: Somatic Articulations Beyond the Logos
Bettina Wuttig (University of Marburg)
17. Juni 2026
Greetings from the Swamp
Maria Nalbantova (Artist, Sofia)
24. Juni 2026
A loving ear – toward a poetic ecology of feeling
Brandon LaBelle (Independent Researcher, Berlin)
Es wird einen Live-Stream geben. Der Link wird den angemeldeten Teilnehmer*innen mitgeteilt.
Wenn Sie online teilnehmen möchten, melden Sie sich bitte über folgende Adresse an: office.olfac@kunstuni-linz.at