Jürgen Buchinger
About

I am an artist and researcher in the field of media art and sound with a special interest in public space and interactive and participatory art.

My research-based approach emphasizes experimentation, and aims to include nature and non-human entities. I utilize artistic artifacts as vehicles to convey knowledge, using the poetic application of data as an emotional trigger to explore the complexities of our world. Through art I explore the connections of a certain medium or technology with a subject matter in search of new forms of aesthetic expression and the communication of knowledge outside of discursive language.

I believe that our current technological and artistic advancements permit us to expand artmaking to a collaborative practice that includes non-human others and nature—thus subsuming the eco-system of our planet itself into the art process. For to deal with our current global predicament, we must find ways to transcend the techno-scientific divide that we have built up by insisting on our own human exceptionalism and built new entanglements with all that surrounds us.

My works have been exhibited in national and international exhibitions. I am teaching at the Lucerne School of Design, Film and Art​ and am currently working on a practice based PhD-project on the transformation of public space through time-based art interventions at the University of Art in Linz and the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

News
Works
Research
Contact

Making Public Space

May 27, 2025
Kunstuniversität Linz
Galerie WHA (EG), Domgasse 1, 4020 Linz

I will defend my PhD dissertation at the University of Art Linz. Come by if you are interested and have a toast with me afterwards!

 

Making Public Space

April 7, 2025
Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts

I will present my PhD dissertation at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. Come by if you are interested!

 

Intelligence is Automatic

February 20 – June 8, 2025
Zebrastraat, Ghent (BE)

I am nominated for the New Technology Art Awards by the Foundation Liedts-Meesen! My own and other stunning works will be on display from February to June next year. Opening is on February 20.

More info on zebrastraat.be.

 

Saari Residence

January – February, 2025
Mynämäki (FI)

I will stay at Kone Foundation's Saari Residency in January and February and continue the work on my project Time out of Present. During the time of the residency I will do speculative artistic research into the sounds of nature happening outside of the human immediate auditory resonance.

More info on koneensaatio.fi.

 

Making Public Space

October 4 – 11, 2024, Splace
Hauptplatz 6, Linz (AT)

I will present my artistic PhD thesis in an exhibiton at Splace in Linz. Come by, see what I have been up to these last years and get a copy of my thesis! The opening will be on Thursday, October 3, 7 pm.

The artistic PhD project Making Public Space explores the potential of time-based media to create places for discussion in urban spaces in order to encourage city dwellers to engage with the design of their cities. Topics such as gentrification, the search for free spaces and our coexistence with non-human city dwellers are addressed directly at the places in the urban space where they occur. The experiments carried out as part of the research process include collaborative filming, large projections in urban space, interactive sculptures and reflective video works. The exhibition offers an insight into the realized works and makes the research process tangible.

Opening: October 3, 7 pm
Opening hours: Thu - Sun, 3 - 7 pm, Mon - Wed on appointment

More info on kunstuni-linz.at.

 

Lynkeus Traum

September 4 – 9, 2024
Kunstuni Linz × Ars Electronica, Linz (AT)

I will exhibit my Epizoons at the Kunstuni Linz Campus exhibition at this year's Ars Electronica Festival. Come by and say hello!

More info on ars.electronica.art.

 

BestOFF Sommerfrische & Parallel Vienna Skulpturenpark

June 28 – July 14, 2024
Toskanapark und Kirchengasse 5, Gmunden (AT)

I will exhibit two Epizoons during the Salzkammergut Festwochen in Gmunden, Austria at the temporary exhibition space in Kirchengasse 5 and at the Parallel Skulpturenpark in Toskanapark.

I'll be there for the opening on Friday, June 28.

More info on parallelvienna.com.

 

Ludic Territories

Mai 30 – June 2, 2024
Das LOT, Vienna (AT)

I'll take part in the transdisciplinary exhibition Ludic Territories at Das LOT in Vienna with my project Epizoons.

Programme:

  • Thursday 30th: 19:00 Vernissage
    19:30 Performance by Litto
  • Friday 31st: 15:00 – 20:00 Open
  • Saturday 1st: 15:00 – 20:00 Open
  • Sunday 2nd: 18:00 Finissage

I'll be there so let me know if you come too!

More info on lot.wien

 

Your Own Spaces

March 21/22, 2024
Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (CH)

The closing conference of our research project Moving in Every Direction will happen at the School of Design, Film and Art in Lucerne. We have a great selection of international speakers and an exhibition of prototypes. I will be showing work and holding a presentation.

More information and registration on hslu.ch

 

Not Quite King, Not Quite Fish

November 9—11, 2023
SODAS2123, Vilnius (LT)

I'll be showing work and holding a talk at the Artistic Research Symposium in Vilnius, Lithuania.

The symposium Not Quite King, Not Quite Fish is a three-day international event for practitioners of fine arts, cinema, dance, architecture and design. The event employs the disciplinary diversity of practice-based artistic research. In this broad field, the real and fictive expectations of artmaking and research occasionally collide and fold into each other. Not quite king, not quite fish, doctoral candidates based in Vilnius have turned to the animal queendom for answers. During the symposium, they will dive into brackish waters like the kingfisher. With contributors from all over the world, the three-day program explores durational and performative forms of presentation and collective experimentation as research.

More information on sodas2123.lt

 

Making Public Space

November 15, 2023
University of Arts Linz (AT)

I'll be presenting my artistic research PhD project at the University of Arts in Linz. The presentation is public and open for all, no registration needed.

More info on kunstuni-linz.at

 

It's business that's all it is

August 24 – September 3, 2023
Villa Renata, Socinstrasse 16, Basel (CH)

I'll be showing new work during the Kunsttage Basel at Villa Renata.

Advertising in public space is the last mass medium; inescapable for city dwellers, it has become a fixed component in our urban landscape. It's business, that's all it is explores claims about the impact and reach of digital out-of-home advertising, its intricate connection with surveillance technologies, and asks what advertising in public space is really for, in a time when we have long since learned to casually ignore it.

The video installation It’s business, that’s all it is is part of my ongoing artistic research project Making Public Space and the first part in a two-part series on digital advertisement screens in public space.

Opening: August 24, 2023, 6–9 p.m.
Kunsttage: August 25–27, 2023, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.
Closing: September 3, 2023, noon–5 p.m.

More info on villa-renata.ch and kunsttagebasel.ch.

 

Time out of Present

Time out of Present is a speculative artistic research into the sounds and cycles of nature that happen outside of human time scales.

The project aims to make audible the manifold cycles and seasonal alterations in our surroundings through sonification of environmental data and passive acoustic monitoring. Thus bringing us closer to nature and building new relations to our environment and its human and non-human inhabitants through sound.

Time out of Present‘s interactive ceramic sculptures take formal inspiration from the natural shapes of clams or microorganisms. The chance based patterns of Raku glazing mimick organic structures and yet have strange otherworldly quality, that both attracts attention and distances itself from the viewer. Arriving at this aesthetic and expanding it with interactive elements, that might or might not be made for human interaction, is an ongoing experimental process.

The sounds produced by the sculptures are derived from natural cycles in our seasons and environment. Through them, we can experience a certain landscape and its changes in time on a different scale to our usual, immediate perception. They enable us to compare the sound of different landscapes or of the same landscape in different times. Thus making audible at the same time, nature‘s own constant evolution as well as the effects of human made climate- and environmental changes.

Epizoons

Epizoons are fictional lifeforms made out of ceramics and electronic sensors that react to their environment with changing voices and sound.

The project draws inspiration from Lynn Margulis’ theory of evolution by symbiosis and Donna Haraway’s concept of “becoming with” of all lifeforms. It explores ways of audiovisually relaying the invisible human-made changes in our environment and its effects on us and our non-human co-lifeforms and fosters awareness of our not being alone on this planet.

It's business, that's all it is

Surveillance technologies and artificial intelligence algorithms are hijacked to counter the methods of surveillance campitalism.

Advertising in public space is the last mass medium; inescapable for city dwellers, it has become a fixed component in our urban landscape. It‘s business, that‘s all it is explores advertisement‘s intricate connection with surveillance technologies, and asks what advertising in public space is really for, in a time when we have long since learned to casually ignore it. Emploing surveillance cameras and facial recognition, the work mirrors capitalist marketing strategies but lays open their methods and structures.

Deep Anatomy

Animation explores its existence in space, it finds new fields that transfer the two-dimensional space of the screen to spatial configurations and multidimensional environments.

Sensor bundles are placed at five locations on the Viskosi site that measure environmental conditions such as particulate matter or CO2 concentrations in the air and transmit them to a central computer. Custom-developed software simulates the evolution of a fictitious life form, an Epizoon. The shape of the Epizoon is determined by the environmental data and adapts to its environment through mutations.

 

Depending on the conditions at each location, mutations take place with varying frequency and intensity, so that an individual shape soon emerges for each location. The project aims to make tangible those subtle changes in our environment that affect us directly but that we have difficulty perceiving with the sensorium we are given from birth. Through procedural animation influenced by sensor data, Deep Anatomy enables viewers to virtually postition themselves in a different, other-than-human sensoric world.

Platz da!

With participative filmmaking in public place kids and adolescents are empowered to think about their city and what they need for it.

In collaboration with artist and filmmaker Gabriel Meisel and the Mobile Jugendarbeit Basel, we staged and filmed discussions in public places that are valuable for and used by young people. We encouraged them to think about what they want for their city and to speculate on the design of the places they use, sometimes in conflict with the intended use by city planners and authorities.

Short videos of the discussions were presented in public space afterwards, in close proximity to where the action took place. That way, the discussion could be taken forward also without our presence as artists.

The Housing Question: An Odyssey

The Housing Question: An Odyssey is a documentary video installation about contemporary urban living, the right to housing and the urban housing market. The work deals with the privatization of our cities and the resulting gentrification processes, that more and more divide cities along monetary fault lines and class differences.

 

Viewers go on a journey with the artist, starting from a house in Basel, the tenants of which had to move out to make room for redevelopment, to discover the financial entanglements of the owners of the house which lead to a refugee camp in Burkina Faso where Doctors without Borders is helping internally displaced persons.

The work encourages viewers to think about their own living situation and introduces tools for research and resistance to affected persons. It does not only point to the concrete hardships of our current housing market, gentrification and the microphysics of power that prevail between landlords, tenants and real estate investors. It also reflects on the philosophical question of what dwelling is for us today and how we can think anew our relationship to the spaces we inhabit.

Making Public Space

University of Arts Linz
Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts

Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation

The artistic PhD project Making Public Space explores the potential of time-based media to create places for discussion in urban spaces in order to encourage city dwellers to engage with the design of their cities. Topics such as gentrification, the search for free spaces and our coexistence with non-human city dwellers are addressed directly at the places in the urban space where they occur. The experiments carried out as part of the research process include collaborative filming, large projections in urban space, interactive sculptures and reflective video works.

A publication of the research is forthcoming.

Publications

Making Public Space: Generating Discourse through Moving Image Practices in Urban Contexts, ed. by Rachel Mader and Wolfgang Brückle. Zurich: Diaphanes. In preparation.

Piercing the Bubble: Sonification of Environmental Data as Expansion of our Umwelt, in: Your Own Spaces: Multiperspectivity and Spatial Practices in Audio/Visual Forms of Knowledge Production, ed. by Jürgen Buchinger, Kathi Kaeppel, Isabella Pasqualini, Fred Truniger und Tamara Zumbühl. In preparation.

Deep Anatomy: Accessible representation of medium-term environmental changes, in: Dimensions of Animation, ed. by Rada Bieberstein, Jürgen Hagler, Kathi Kaeppel, Tina Ohnmacht und Fred Truniger. London: Bloomsbury. In preparation.

Presentations

Epizoons: A case for generative art as catalyst of multispecies relationships, Your Own Spaces: Multiperspectivity and Spatial Practices in Audio/Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Conference), Lucerne School of Design, Film and Art (CH), 21.03.2024.

Making Public Space: Generating Discourse through Moving Image Practices in Urban Contexts, PhD-Colloquium, University of Arts Linz (AT), 15.11.2023.

Epizoons: A case for generative art as catalyst of multispecies relationships, Not Quite King, Not Quite Fish (Symposium), Vilnius Academy of Arts und Lithuanian Theatre and Music Academy, Vilnius (LT), 09.11.2023.

Art and Subjecthood: Über Subjektkonstitutionen generativer Kunstwerke, Multiperspektivik und Inter-subjektivität in der Inszenierung zeitbasierter Medien im Raum (Conference), Lucerne School of Design, Film and Art (CH), 09.06.2022.

Making Public Space: Generating Discourse through Moving Image Practices in Urban Contexts, Research-Colloquium, Lucerne School of Design, Film and Art, 03.05.2022.

Making Public Space, Notationen als Arbeits- und Erkenntnismittel in der künstlerischen Forschung (Conference), Lucerne School of Design, Film and Art (Online), 08.06.2021.

Exhibitions

Intelligence is automatic, group show, Zebrastraat, Gent (BE), February 2025 — June 2025 [link]

Making Public Space, solo show, Splace, Linz (AT), October 2024 [link]

Lynkeus Traum, group show, Kunstuni Linz / Ars Electronica Festival, Linz (AT), September 2024 [link]

BestOFF Sommerfrische, group show, Salzkammergut Festwochen, Gmunden (AT), June 2024 — July 2024 [link]

Ludic Territories, group show, LOT, Vienna (AT), May 2024 — June 2024 [link]

Your Own Spaces: Multiperspectivity and Spatial Practices in Audio/Visual Forms of Knowledge Production, group show, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts — School of Art, Film, and Design, Lucerne (CH), March 2024 [link]

Not Quite King, Not Quite Fish, group show, SODAS2123 Cultural Center, Vilnius (LT), November 2023, As part of my contribution to the symposium titled Epizoons: A case for generative art as catalyst of multispecies relationships. [link]

Werbung & Überwachung(skapitalismus) mit Umkämpftes Basel, screening, Carambolage, Basel (CH), October 2023

It's business, that's all it is, solo show, Villa Renata Garage, Basel (CH), August 2023 — September 2023, Kuratiert von Isabel Balzer; unterstützt von Atelier Mondial. [link]

DOGO Totale, group show, Dogo Residenz, Lichtensteig (CH), November 2022 [link]

Dimensions of Animation, group show, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Lucerne, School of Art and Design, Luzern (CH), November 2022, With workshop and critique by Ed Atkins; Keynote by Erika Balsom. [link]

Entrée & Hommage, group show, Projektraum M54, Basel (CH), September 2022

Platz da!, solo show, public space, Basel (CH), December 2021, in collaboration with Gabriel Meisel and the Mobile Jugendarbeit Basel.

R.I.P. Altes Haus, screening, öffenlticher Raum, Basel (CH), May 2021

 

Jürgen Buchinger

Efringerstrasse 25
4057 Basel
Switzerland

hi@differentspace.com

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