From 27 February to 1 March, the two pioneers of media art Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau will hold the workshop Solar Insects for the School of New Technologies for Art.
Since the 1990s, the two artists and researchers have worked with museums and institutions around the world and have constantly cultivated teaching, starting with the Department of Interface Cultures Study Program at the University of Art and Design in Linz, which they founded in 2003.
Their research and production revolve around themes related to life, such as creation and genesis, considering the work of art as a vital organism, positioning themselves on the border between nature and artifice and on their integration with each other. Moving between the natural sciences, technology and art, they have been pioneers in positioning themselves, with their interfaces, on the border between synthetic and organic worlds. Very early on, they also used algorithms to represent not only life forms, but also their evolution and growth.
At the forefront of all of Sommerer and Mignonneau’s projects is the performative process of potential birth and decay. Clarifying which concept of life underlies each work can greatly contribute to understanding its meaning.
Workshop participants will learn how to make intelligent objects with them using electronic components and sensors. The workshop is aimed both at those approaching these techniques and technologies for the first time and at those starting from a good basic knowledge.
Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau are two internationally recognised pioneers of media art. They worked for ten years in Japan as associate professors at the IAMAS Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences in Gifu and as researchers and artistic directors at the ATR Advanced Telecommunications Research Lab in Kyoto. Previously, they were artists-in-residence at MIT CAVS in Cambridge, artists-in-residence at the NCSA National Center for Supercomputing Applications Beckmann Institute in Champaign Urbana, IL, USA, and artists-in-residence at the NTT-InterCommunication Center in Tokyo. In 2004, they created the Department for Interface Cultures at the University of Art and Design in Linz, Austria, where they are both professors. Together, they have created around 50 interactive artworks so far, for which they have received numerous awards: these include the Golden Nica Prix Ars Electronica in 1994; an Ovation Award at the Interactive Media Festival in Los Angeles in 1995; a Multi Media Award ’95 from the Multimedia Association of Japan; the World Technology Award 2001 from the World Technology Network in London, UK, and the uni: invent Prize, 2008, awarded by the Federal Ministry of Science and Research in Austria; the Wu Guanzhong Prize for Innovation in Art and Science, awarded by the Ministry of Culture of the People’s Republic of China, in 2012; and the ARCO BEEP Prize in Madrid, Spain, in 2016.