Great sadness – short serious illness: Peter Weibel has passed away

“It is with dismay and sadness that we have to announce and acknowledge that our friend, our teacher, the artist, thinker and researcher Peter Weibel passed away much too soon and unexpectedly last night,” explains the Rector of the University of Applied Arts Vienna. , Gerald Bast on Thursday. With the death of Peter Weibel, the Vienna University of Applied Arts loses one of the most important thinkers, researchers and teachers in its history.

From refugee child to scholar
Weibel was born on March 5, 1944 as a “product of migration” in Odessa. “Then my mother fled with me via Poland, the Czech Republic, the Black Forest to Upper Austria to an American displaced persons camp,” Weibel said in an interview. He began studying French and French literature in Paris, began studying medicine in Vienna in 1964, and switched to mathematics and logic. He wrote a dissertation on mathematical logic, but never submitted it. But he was in the middle of the Viennese Actionism of the 1960s, around 1968 at the scandalous action “Art and Revolution” at the University of Vienna.

Equally at home in vision and subversion, he engaged early on with questions of video and computer art and virtual spaces. Weibel used interactive practices in his work from 1966 and interactive computer installations from 1990. The controversial thinker quickly became a sought-after lecturer and professor at international art academies from Kassel to Halifax. From 1981 to 1984 he was visiting professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, from 1984 to 2011 he was professor of visual media design and later media theory at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. From 1982 to 1985 he was also professor of photography at the University of Kassel.

From 1985 to 1989 he also taught at the State University of New York in Buffalo, from 1989 to 1994 he was director of the Institute for New Media at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. From 1992 to 1995 he was Artistic Director of Ars Electronica in Linz. From 1993 to 1997, Weibel was also Artistic Director of the Neue Galerie at the Landesmuseum Joanneum in Graz, where he became Chief Curator. From 1993 to 1999 he was also commissioner of the Austrian contribution to the Venice Biennale.

Last project can no longer be executed
Considered a fast talker and a frequent worker, Weibel had helped shape media art and art discourse in German-speaking countries for decades. Most recently, he made headlines announcing that he wanted to build a livable container library for his 120,000 books with an elevator in the middle of Vienna – which he wanted to return to: “The elevator is the apartment. So I will work, write and sleep in a large freight elevator.’ Death spread this plan Weibel would have turned 79 on Sunday.