Research Cluster Digital Cultures
The Research Cluster Digital Cultures brings together and promotes research interests – both discursive and practical – in order to anchor and raise awareness of interdisciplinary dialogue on the topic of digital cultures at the Academy.
The Research Cluster Digital Cultures develops, supports and accompanies research proposals and research projects. International artists and researchers working at the Academy are networked with each other and the content of their research activities is communicated. Cooperation with external partner institutions is developed and implemented.
The Research Cluster Digital Cultures organizes regular networking meetings, workshops and talks.
The cluster is currently focusing on the following research threads:
- How are aspects of digital innovation addressed, discussed and highlighted in aesthetic practices? What challenges arise from the increasing digital nature of aesthetic practices?
- What perspectives are opened by aesthetic and theoretical practices of criticism under the conditions of digital media? Which novel challenges rise from contemporary technological innovations and increasing digitization of artistic practices?
- How do contemporary aesthetic practices reshape our perspective on the past? What historiographical implications characterize contemporary art? And to what extent does this also change our view of the future?
About the colleagues of the Research Cluster Digital Cultures:
Katerina Krtilova (she/her) is a philosopher and media theorist focusing on media philosophy, European media theory, aesthetics, and the relations between reflexivity, performativity, and materiality in twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy. She received her PhD from Bauhaus-Universität Weimar with a thesis on Vilém Flusser's media philosophy and has held positions as a researcher at the Center for Media Anthropology in Weimar and the Institute for Critical Theory / Research Focus Aesthetics at the Zurich University of the Arts, where she also coordinated the PhD program "Epistemology of Aesthetic Practices" at the Collegium Helveticum in Zurich. She initiated the DFG-funded research project "Positions and Perspectives of German and Czech Media Philosophy" (2013/2014) and co-coordinated the International Network for Media Philosophy (2015-2017). Her publications address questions of mediality, aesthetic practices and technology, as well as the relationship between theory and practice, and the philosophical stakes of digital culture. Her recent work has explored the intersections of media theory, religious practices, and the un/computable. She is a member of the editorial board of the International Yearbook for Media Philosophy and Media Aesthetics.
Axel Stockburger (he/him) is an artist and Associate Professor for Art and Cultural Theory at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Born in 1974, he studied Visual Media Arts with Peter Weibel at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and Art History and Philosophy at the University of Vienna. His PhD from the University of the Arts, London, examined the spatiality of digital games in the context of contemporary art. In 2018 he completed his habilitation on the paradigmatic shifts of processes of canonization in digital cultures. His artistic and theoretical practice traces the paradigm shifts in cultural production and consumption brought about by digital technologies — spanning global fan cultures and cosplay, digital play and games, and questions of canonization and canon critique in contemporary art. His videos and installationssare exhibited internationally. Since 2006, Stockburger has worked at the Academy's studio for Art and Time | Media and he supervises graduate and PhD students. He is a member of the research group Technopolitics and, since 2020, a board member of the Association of Visual Artists Vienna Secession.