Obel Guest Lecture by CHRISTA SOMMERER

ART INVITES YOU TO THE OBEL GUEST LECTURE BY CHRISTA SOMMERER

"AESTHETICS OF INTERACTIVE ART"

ABSTRACT:

In this lecture Christa Sommerer will give an overview of various interactive artworks she created together with Laurent Mignonneau over the past 24 years. They range from intuitive interfaces for human-plant interactions, to generative works that use evolutionary algorithms, to media archaeological devices combined with experimental poetry and recent investigations into the value of art and the economy of attention.

BIOGRAPHY:

Christa Sommerer is an internationally renowned media artist, researcher and pioneer of interactive art. Currently she is a professor and head of the department for Interface Cultures at the University of Art and Design in Linz, Austria. She is also a Obel Guest professor at Aalborg University, Denmark and at Guest Professor (Chaire International) together with Laurent Mignonneau at Université Paris 8 in Paris, France. Together with Laurent Mignonneau she has created around 20 interactive artworks, for which they received numerous awards such the *2012* *Wu Guanzhong Art and Science Innovation Prize (for "Escape") *awarded by Ministry of Culture of the People’s Republic of China, the Golden Nica Prix Ars Electronica, the Ovation Award of the Interactive Media Festival Los Angeles, the Multi Media Award'95 of the Multimedia Association, Japan, the World Technology Award - Finalist in The Arts of the World Technology Network, UK and the PRIZE 2008 - uni:invent Award by Ministry of Science and Research in Austria.

Sommerer & Mignonneau have been exhibiting in around 200 international exhibitions, these works are part of museums and collections around the world. They have published four books: Gerfried Stocker, Christa Sommerer, Laurent Mignonneau (Eds.) Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau - Interactive Art Research, 2009. Springer Verlag Vienna/New York; Christa Sommerer, Lakhmi C. Jain, Laurent Mignonneau,(Eds.) The Art and Science of Interface and Interaction Design, 2008. Springer Verlag, XIV, 190 p. 69 illus. Hardcover Studies in Computational Intelligence, Volume 141; Christa Sommerer, Laurent Mignonneau, Dorothée King (eds.) Interface Cultures Artistic Aspects of Interaction August 2008, Transcript Verlag; C. Sommerer and L. Mignonneau, Art @ Science (Vienna/New York: Springer Verlag, 1998) ISBN 3-211-82953-9