Artist and Media Mentors
Students choose their own artist and media mentors. Students also have access to a pool of mentors. Faculty will make suggestions at the residencies. Mentor choices, along with study plans, need to be approved by Transart faculty at the residency. An initial list of mentors is available here. Information for becoming a mentor and an application form can be found here.
Faculty 2007
Lynn Book's adventurous performance work has evolved over the past 20 years from a very physical and visually charged form to include a broad range of vocal activities ranging from textual play and DaDa scores to more free-form musical and extended vocal territories. Her vocal work appears on several compilation recordings and she has produced CDs and tapes on her own and other independent labels.
Jean Marie Casbarian is an interdisciplinary installation artist who incorporates photography, film and video projections, sound, sculpture and performance into her artworks. She received her MFA from Milton Avery School of Art at Bard College in New York in the year 2000. She has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the City Colleges of Chicago. Along with a nomination for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Jean Marie has received a number of awards and artist residencies including The LaNapoule Foundation Grant in LaNapoule, France, the Chicago Artist’s Assistance Project Grant, and a yearlong Associateship with The Rocky Mountain Women’s Institute. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Currently, she resides in the Pioneer Valley where she is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Film, Video, and Photography Department at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Geoff Cox has a research interest in 'software art'. Geoff co-curated the touring exhibition 'Generator' in collaboration with Spacex Gallery, and 'Vivaria.net' that asks the question 'why look at artificial animals?'. He co-organised (with Joasia Krysa) two conferences: 'globalica: artistic and conceptual tensions in the new world disorder' as part of the WRO biennial, Poland, and 'artist as engineer', as part of an Arts Council of England initiative around socially-engaged arts practice.
Claire Daigle holds a Ph.D. in Art History from The Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York and is a Whitney Museum of American Art Fellow in Critical Studies. She is an assistant professor at the San Francisco Art Institute and taught at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, the School of Visual Arts, New York as well as Hunter College, New York.
Aaron Levy is the Executive Director and a Senior Curator at Slought Foundation in Philadelphia. He teaches in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also lectures in the History of Art Department on curatorial practice and theory. He has organized over 200 exhibitions and events on contemporary art and theory with figures such as Hélène Cixous, Arakawa + Gins, Gayatri Spivak, William Anastasi, Dennis Oppenheim, and Hal Foster. In March 2007 he co-organized Evasions of Power, an international conference situated at the intersection of literature, architecture, and geopolitics.
Christopher Hewitt has been involved in the international arena of performance art and interdisciplinary artistic practice for over 15 years. A graduate of Time Based studies at the University of Wales Institute of Cardiff, he has since worked as a practicing artist, administrator, curator and teacher in a diverse range of artist run initiatives and institutional arts organisations, including the Arts Council of England and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London where he held the position of Director of Live Arts.
Carolyn Guertin, Director of the eCreate Lab and Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Arlington. She is also a Mentor in the de Montfort University's Online MA in Creative Writing and New Media in the U.K. and Senior McLuhan Fellow at the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto, Canada. She was last in Linz when she was a presenter at the Hybridities Symposium at Ars Electronica in 2005. She earned her doctoral in digital narrative at the University of Alberta in 2003, and does theoretical work on cyberfeminism, interface technologies and born-digital arts. The author of textbooks on hypertext literature and information aesthetics, she is a literary adviser to the Electronic Literature Organization, an editorial board member of Convergence, a founding editor of the online journal MediaTropes, and curator of Assemblage: The Online Women's New Media Gallery. She is working on a new book called "Connective Tissue: Queer Bodies, Postdramatic Performance and New Media Aesthetics".
Klaus Knoll received a PhD from the University of Salzburg for work on "Social and Private Use of the Photographic Medium". Klaus has lectured and taught photography and media studies in Europe and Japan. His photographs are in the collections of the Cologne Museum Ludwig, Bibliotèque Nationale in Paris, and Austrian National Fine Art Photo Collection. His exhibition record includes one man shows at the Tokyo Shinjuku Nikon Salon, Berlin Brennpunkt/DGPh, Alfred Lowenherz Gallery, New York, the Art Complex Musem in Boston.
Born in Cuba and raised in Puerto Rico, transdisciplinary artist Rosina Santana calls her work a “performative amalgam” blending her varied skills (she holds a B.A. in Psychology and Anthropology, a Masters in Community Organization and an M.F.A. from Carnegie Mellon) into one purpose: to bring "art" into the "real world". A refugee by age 10, Santana has used the experiences of exile as a pivoting point to dialogue with communities who are suffering trauma due to urban redevelopment or underdevelopment. Santana has lived and worked in South America, Europe and the United States, and most recently has completed a community public art commission in the island of Vieques, in the Caribbean. Her work has been presented extensively in the U.S. and Europe. She is presently teaching a Transdisciplinary Seminar at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas de Puerto Rico in San Juan.
Gebhard Sengmüller is an artist working in the field of media technology, currently based in Vienna, Austria. Since 1992, he has been developing projects and installations focussing on the history of electronic media, creating alternative ordering systems for media content and constructing autogenerative networks. His work has been shown extensively in Europe and the US, among others at Ars Electronica Linz, the Venice Biennale, ICA London, Postmasters Gallery NYC, ICC Tokyo. His main project for the last few years has been VinylVideo™, a fake piece of media archeology.
Wolfgang Sützl is a transdisciplinary researcher, writer and educator chiefly concerned with a critique of violence and understanding the conditions in which such a critique is possible. His Ph.D. is in Philosophy from the Universitat Jaume I de Castellón, Spain where he wrote on "Emancipation or Violence. Aesthetic Pacifism in Gianni Vattimo“. He is Chief Researcher of World-Information.Org a project of Public Netbase / Institut fuer Neue Kulturtechnologien, Lecturer in Peace Studies at the MA Programme in Peace Studies at the University of Innsbruck, Universtat Jaume I (Spanien) und Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Méxcio, Mexiko, a Faculty member of the UN University for Peace; MA Program in Media, Conflict and Peace Studies, Lecturer in political science at the Department of Political Science, University of Vienna, and Lecturer in philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, University of Innsbruck
Within Mary Ting’s varied art practice of installation, drawing, photography and video, the prevailing emphasis is the use of the fragment within a nonlinear narrative. Her work inhabits the realm of temporality, private obsessions and the sensual. Layered with stories, glimpses of memories, metaphors, her animals, figures, limbs, and cropped forms are both personal and allegorical. Mary Ting's artwork has been exhibited extensively in the U.S. and abroad since 1986. Mary currently teaches sculpture, drawing and paper, 2D/3D, and bookarts for Pratt Manhattan, SUNY at Nassau Community College and CUNY- John Jay College. She lives and works in New York City.
Marjorie Vecchio recently left New York City to become Director of the Sheppard Fine Art Gallery at University of Nevada, Reno, where she is also faculty. As an independent curator, Marji exhibited the works of international artists of all media, age and career level, for example in the exhibitions, The Grotesqueness of Desire, tracking (in search of objects), and Arranged Marriage: Outer Space(s). As a gallery president in the late 90’s, she was involved in numerous international exchanges, and recently finished a Ph.D. at the European Graduate School in Switzerland in the field of Philosophy of Communications Media, where she concentrated on the failed dialectic and revival of the creative polyhistor and Renaissance personality. As a photographic artist she worked primarily in abstract photogram installation. She taught photography for eight years in Chicago, has won awards for her work and exhibited in the United States, Canada, Europe and the Faroe Islands. She has MFA, BFA and BA degrees from Bard College, The Art Institute of Chicago and Mount Holyoke College, and also a background in Early and Baroque cello and viola da gamba performance and Argentinean Tango dancing. Vecchio is currently editing an extended series of found interviews between a secretive and mysterious, unnamed filmmaker and her equally elusive interviewer, Sally Sound.
Jeff Thompson currently lives and works in New York. He received his MFA from Rutgers University Mason Gross School of Art in 2006. Thompson’s work uses similes, amplification, distillation, and chaotic systems to build sculpture, sound, and performance works. Materials are not transformed, but are surfaces of potential. Layering and sifting systems are used by which small bits are organized in a way that is at once ecological, poetic, and conceptual. Scintillations found in macro experience are amplified within a chaotic system. Subtle chance variations are made manifest. Thompson has exhibited his work in the US and internationally, most recently at Hogar Collection Gallery in Brooklyn, NY; Ohio State University Gallery in Columbus, OH; and Elsewhere Artist Collaborative in Greensboro, NC. Among various awards received, Thompson was selected for the Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Art at the Weisman Museum of Art, a residency at the Vermont Studio Center, and a collaborative project with Dispatx.com. His sound work is currently traveling with SoundLab, which has been exhibited at museums and galleries in Palestine, Italy, Poland, and Argentina.
Thomas Zummer lectures on philosophy and the history of technology, and currently is an Assistant Professor in Critical Studies at Tyler School of Art and a regular Visiting Professor in the Transmedia Programme/post-graduate at the Hogeschool Sint Lukas,Brussels. Among his recent publications are “Projection and Dis/embodiment: Genealogies of the Virtual,” in Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977, Chrissie Iles (Whitney Museum), "What the Hell is That?" Induced Aberration in Cinematic Taxa, a digital book on cinema and the taxonomy of monsters, (Beehive Microtitles #1). Thomas is currently completing a book on the early history of reference systems entitled Intercessionary Technologies: Archive/Database/Interface. He is also a practicing artist, and exhibits his drawings, sculptural and media works.
Faculty 2006
Visiting Artists and Curators 2007
Deutschbauer/Spring. Julius Deutschbauer, founder and head librarian of the "Library of Unread Books", and Gerhard Spring both live and work as artists in Vienna. Their most recent exhibition and event projects include "Entsetzliche Malerei" ("Dreadful Paintings") at the Galerie Steinek, Vienna, "Urlaubs- und Abenteuerreisen von Linz bis Liverpool" ("Vacation and Adventure Trips from Linz to Liverpool") at the Galerie Halle, Linz, and "Die zwei Räuber" ("The Two Robbers"), Schillertage 2003, Mannheim, Germany. Their subversively humorous work has taken place inside and outside the established venues, e.g. at Kunsthalle Vienna, Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna, Shedhalle Zürich, but they also gave numerous fictitious openings of real world events, e.g. the Venice Biennale and the Salzburg Summer Music Festival. Julius' most recent book publication is: "Political for Artists. A Study Course on How To Become a Successful Political Artist." (Triton, 2003).Ty
Stefan Keller was born in Bern in 1971 and is based in Zurich. He was artist-in-residence at PS1 New York. He participated in exhibits at the Palais des Beaux-Arts Brussels, Kunsthalle Zürich, Ludwig Museum - Museum of Contemporary Art - Budapest, amongst many others. Sylvia Rüttimann from Kunsthaus Uri: "San Keller makes contact with his surroundings; in doing so, he takes account of the finely woven contextual waves that we normally take for granted. (...)Surrender, with a certain active approach and inquisitive observation, to San Keller's experiments – as he does himself, in a way that is at once active and passive (when, for example, he talks to motorbike riders and allows himself to be carried away). (...) By questioning the unwritten laws and power relationships, not just between individuals but also between institutions; and, last but not least, by thinking about San Keller himself and about how he deals with us as an artist. Or how we deal with him."
Natalie Bewernitz and Marek Goldowski are New Media artists, based in Cologne, Germany. They are working with sound and video as installation and performance. Their special interests are working on interdisciplinary projects with focus on multichannel sound and video, as well as in basic high quality production techniques as base material..
Administration
Cella, MFA
Director, Transart Institute
Margarita Benitez, BFA
Julie Bush, BA
Administrative Assistants
Transart Institute
Dr. Klausjürgen Heinrich
Head of Center for New Media
Danube University Krems
Birgit Tesnohlidek
Administrative Assistant
Danube University Krems
Alumni
Students who have graduated from the program are invited back each year for the residency in order to stay connected to the Transart Institute community, to be stimulated by a continued dialogue, feedback on their projects, and new ideas generated in the annual symposium. Alumni partake in alumni group critiques with faculty, visiting artists and guest lecturers, conduct student critique groups, attend symposia and studio workshops. Alumni registration deadline is eight weeks prior to the residency.
Transart Institute Boards
Transart Institute Collegium: A board of representatives consisting of two students (one for each year), two faculty, and two directors. Agenda: Program, faculty and student matters.
Transart Institute Academic Board:
The Academic Board, appointed by the Directors of the Program, serve in an advisory capacity to the Directors on a variety of matters including admissions decisions, student progress, curriculum design and general policy.
Members of this board consist of Transart Institute faculty and mentors. Committees formed for evaluating work, admitting students, faculty searches consist of four rotating faculty. Mentors and faculty working with students in a given semester do not participate in this student's progress evaluations or academic decisions. Not all members view or comment on all students' work or review all applications. Questions or concerns reported by the board should be addressed to the committee in general, not to a specific member.
The 2006-07 Transart Institute academic board includes:
Geoffrey Cox
Claire Daigle
Christopher Hewitt
Phillis Ideal
Wolfgang Suetzl
Marjorie Vecchio.
Academic Advisory Board:
Dr. Roland HAAS, President, Art-University Mozarteum, Salzburg, Austria
Prof. Giaco SCHIESSER, Head of Media & Art, University of Art and Design, (HKGZ) Zürich, Switzerland
Alan SEKERS, Director of MultiMeda Studies at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts, London, UK
Annette WEINTRAUB, Professor of Art, The City College of New York; Director, Robinson Center for Graphic Arts and Communication Design, New York City, USA
Mag. Rainer ZENDRON, President of Academic Development, University of the Arts, Linz, Austria