During a funeral service on Tuesday at Vienna’s Central Cemetery, family, friends, colleagues and politicians said goodbye to media artist Peter Weibel, who passed away on March 1, just days before his 79th birthday. He was subsequently buried in an honorary grave of the city of Vienna.
The funeral service at Dr. Karl Lueger Gedächtniskirche became a moving farewell to a visionary, as funeral speaker Alfred Weidinger and cathedral priest Toni Faber called him in unison.
“Life is a short-term camouflage for death.” This quote from Peter Weibel was on the back of the memorial cards given to the mourners. His voice was undisguised and unmistakably present – in two pieces of the Hotel Morphila Orchestra, of which he co-founded: “Hear the Forms” and “Alpharhythmen”, which talks about death at the end and Weibel lets us know about the band: “But this time it’s me.”
Jelinek farewell speech on tape
The farewell speech by Elfriede Jelinek also came from the tape, read by the composer Olga Neuwirth. The Nobel laureate recalled the many email exchanges and Weibel’s never-ending drive to create: “Your basic mood was always the moving thing.” Now he’s gone and he can’t say where he is. “I’m sure you’d like to do it—better than other dead people.”
Alfred Weidinger, head of the OÖ Landes-Kultur GmbH, also spoke in his speech about Weibel’s insatiable urge to communicate and the legendary speed of speech. Normally you would fit 700 words into a three minute speech, “I’m sure you could have tripled that.” But even that would not have been enough to adequately appreciate his versatile thinking and work.
Buried in the honorary grave of the city of Vienna
Susanne Widl, Weibel’s love of life and owner of Café Korb, then led the funeral procession, which led to the nearby honorary grave, and which included museum directors Lilli Hollein (MAK) and Stella Rollig (Belvedere) as well as Vienna’s municipal councilor for culture. , Veronica Kaup-Hasler (SPÖ), ex-minister of culture Josef Ostermayer, applied rector Gerald Bast or newspaper founder and artist Oscar Bronner.
A funeral service for a pioneer and mastermind of media art is of course impossible without digital participation. What Chat-GPT had to contribute, when asked by Alfred Weidinger, was of course rather conventional: “His legacy will continue to accompany us, his ideas will continue to inspire us,” the AI application informs posterity. “We will miss him, but we will not forget him.”
Source: Krone
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