Description

•  The rapid development of communication and recording technologies after World War II evoked the artists’ interest in aesthetic, political, and social influence of mass distribution and global communication. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, artists in Austria—some coming from action art and Expanded Cinema—started to work with audiovisual home technologies which then were new on the market (video equipment, stereo magnetophone, audio cassette). In doing so, Austrian media-art pioneers were fully integrated in an international information network on current art trends, gathering experience abroad or placing their independent approaches in context with those made by international artists, notably in Germany and North America. Exhibitions and symposiums with prominent international protagonists in the field focused on questions of dematerialized, mediatized art and redefined notions of the work of art and authorship. Moreover, feminist approaches and alternative models of (media-)art production and distribution were discussed. As venues of a number of cross-border events on performance and media art, on art and art theory, Vienna, Graz (Styria), and Innsbruck (Tyrol) developed into important meeting places for many of the meanwhile best-known international artists. At the same time Austria’s artists were invited with increasing frequency to major international events abroad.