We’re happy to have done a tiny part to support Elisabeth Schimana coming to CU this fall as a visiting artist. She will be giving a book talk Thursday, September 29th @ 5pm, Stadium 255, Gate 7 .
Perplexed by what was purported to be a world without female artists in the electronic music/art genre, I embarked on a search in the 1990s. Geschichten and portrait 01 – Die Futuristin, projects produced by ORF–Austrian Broadcasting Company’s Ö1 Kunstradio - led, following the founding of the IMA Institute of Media Archeology in 2005, to the IMAfiction series, in which 10 female artists, pioneers of their time, told rather a different story and together wove a fascinating network of interrelationships. In this DVD series of five Austrian and five international artists most of the artists chose whom they wanted to be portrayed by. The results are homages that are aesthetically diverse, intimate, and refreshingly free from any conventional film format constraints.
Elisabeth Schimana • https://elise.at/elise/en • https://ima.or.at/en/
Since the 1980s the musician and composer Elisabeth Schimana has been active as one of the Austrian female pioneers of electronic music with projects marked by a radical approach and equally unconventional aesthetics. After completing vocal training, she earned degrees in composition, computer music, musicology, and ethnology. She has worked intensively with the theremin in Moscow and with the Max Brand Synthesizer in Vienna. Not only has she created countless radio works in cooperation with ORF Kunstradio but numerous sound installations and interdisciplinary and performative projects as well. In her artistic work, Schimana examines questions of space, communication, or the body in its presence or absence, especially the imparting of compositional concepts (scores), which gives rise to completely new approaches that experimentally explore how we hear and demand a heightened musical presence on the part of the performer. Her probing approach also led her to found the IMA Institute of Media Archeology, which has dedicated itself to acoustic media at the analogue/digital interface and to the subject of women, art, and technology since 2005.
Contact: august.black@colorado.edu
The Critical Media Practices Visiting Artist & Scholar Series is Sponsored by: CMCI, Critical Media Practices, and The Center for Documentary and Ethnographic Media. Support for the book presentation is provided by The Media Archaeology Lab, Institut für Medienarchäologie, and Bundesministerium für Kunst, Kultur, öffentlichen Dienst und Sport.