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.
Performing Snakes in Modernity and Today
22. April 2026, 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 Nicole Haitzinger (Dance Studies, University of Salzburg) und Christina Gillinger (Tanzquartier Vienna TQW).
In this co-presentation, we would like to introduce exemplary embodiments of snakes in modernity. Against the backdrop of decolonial thinking, we will discuss their relevance to theatre, moving beyond the dominance of distant senses such as sight and hearing, and their relevance to contemporary arts. In modernity (1900–1935), the leitmotif of performing snakes makes seeing experiential, as embodied seeing, and, according to our thesis, has the potential to suspend the conventionalized order of seeing in the European stage dance context. From a performance and movement analysis perspective, three aspects/leitmotifs of the embodiment of snakes in modernity can be identified: (1) dances with snakes; (2) dances in which dancers embody snakes; and (3) dances in which dancers perform snake myths/snake goddesses and snake rituals. Focusing on the snake dances of Nyota Inyoka and Leila Bederkhan, we will finally uncover three aspects – (1) ”cosmic theater,” (2) ‘erotic trans/trance performance,’ and (3) snake-related and sense-expanding movement techniques – that can be identified in relation to each other in contemporary performances.
Nicole Haitzinger is a dance and theatre scholar and Professor of Dance Studies at Paris Lodron University Salzburg. She is the academic director of the transdisciplinary and inter-university doctoral program Cultures in Transition at Wissenschaft und Kunst (PLUS and Mozarteum, 2019–2028) and co-director of the university course Curating in Performing Arts, offered in cooperation with Ruhr University Bochum and Freie Universität Berlin. Her publications include Resonances of the Tragic, Modernity as Plural, Staging Europe, BodyPolitics, Decoloniality in the Performing Arts, and Curating Performative Arts. As a curator and dramaturge, she has realized a wide range of project, including Exótica with Amanda Piña (2023) and To Bloom (2024), presented at venues such as KunstenfestivaldesArts, HAU, deSingel, Festival d’Automne, and Ruhrtriennale. She lives and works in Salzburg and Paris.
Christina Gillinger-Correa Vivar is a dance and theatre scholar and has been working at Tanzquartier Wien (TQW) since 2002, where she is currently responsible for the theory department, publications, and the library. She teaches at the Institute for Theatre, Film and Media Studies (University of Vienna), the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. After studying theatre studies and philosophy, dance, and fine arts in Vienna, Paris, and Salzburg, she realized her own artistic projects and collaborated with artists in different contexts. Since 2019, she has been a collaborator on the research project Border—Dancing Across Times at Paris Lodron University Salzburg.
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