STEFANIE WUSCHITZ
“I once met
Laurie Anderson
in person
and she said
something
along the lines of:
‘If you do not fit in,
build your own structures.’
I loved that.”
#ANIMATION #ARTS-BASED RESEARCH #BIO #COMMONS #DRAWING #ECOLOGY #FABULATION #ELECTRONICS #INSTALLATION #INTERACTIVE #MATERIAL #HACKING
BIO. Stefanie Wuschitz works at the intersection of art, research and technology, with a particular focus on feminism, open source technology and peer production. 2006 She graduated from the University of Applied Arts Vienna (Transmediale Kunst) with honors. 2008 she completed her Masters at TISCH School of the arts at NYU and became Digital Art Fellow at Umeå University in Sweden. 2009 she founded the feminist hackerspace Mz* Baltazar’s Laboratory in Vienna, encouraging art and technology that is developed from a female perspective. In 2014 she finished her PhD with the title ‘Feminist Hackerspaces. A Research on Feminist Space Collectives in Open Culture’ at the Vienna University of Technology.
Photos: © Stefanie Wuschitz
The women* who made it (2020)
Interactive light installation
This interactive portrait of female* identified geeks, nerds, artists and hackers is based on interviews with Schmiede participants conducted by interaction designer Dorothé Smit and drawings and electric circuits by Stefanie Wuschitz (with support by Per Salkowitsch).
The users can control the speed of the wheels and therefore the combination of projections on display.
The installation consists of several acrylic, transparent wheels that glow in the dark and spin in variable speed. With their interaction users can assemble portraits to emerging/potential/future feminist hackers. Through pointing lights on the spinning wheels the projection keep overlapping.
The portraits of female artists/hackers are divided into hair and face elements and therefore create speculative new faces when overlapping at different moments in time.
Photos: © Stefanie Wuschitz
Congklak (2017)
Interactive sound installation
This interactive sound installation refers to a very popular Indonesian 9000 year old board game.
The game was originally a training in strategic thinking for young girls. Tokens need to be seeded into the fields equally and in a circular movement. The winner is the player who succeeds to get all tokens from the child fields into the mother field first. In this variation the tokens are substituted with metal balls, attracted by electric magnets on the bottom of the board. The player’s moves are amplified and create the typical rhythmic sound of this game. With support from Andreas Siagia.
Images: © Stefanie Wuschitz
Corona Diary (2020)
Hand drawn drawings and postproduction in Gimp
During the COVID 19 pandemic I try to keep this Corona Diary. Staying at home is not easy, drawing helped me to not get sick. Being a good mom in a lockdown situation is difficult, so to release tension through humor was and is still a helpful strategy, I believe, at least in order to construct stability where there is none.