Univ.-Prof. Dr. Ingeborg Reichle

Ingeborg Reichle

Ingeborg Reichle is full professor of Media Theory and chair of the Department of Media Theory. She studied art history, sociology, and archaeology at the University of Hamburg, and completed an MA (1998) and PhD (2004) in art history at Hamburg University and Humboldt University Berlin where she also gained her habilitation in 2013. Before joining the faculty of the Department of Media Theory as full professor in 2016, she was FONTE professor at Humboldt University Berlin.

At the University of Applied Arts in Vienna her current focus of research and teaching is the many media that are the basis for mediating reality. Structural, historical, and phenomenological aspects of media together with their conditions of production and effects are interrogated, as well as contemporary media theories and experimental fields of action in art (media art, digital art, transmedia art, BioArt). Questions relating to aesthetics, technology, and history of the media are in the foreground, and also technological media innovations that are currently referred to as “biomedia.” The technological and media framing of biology using techniques from biotechnology leads to exchangeability of code and matter, and opens up biology for new design applications, which are also entering the art context as biotechnological constellations of media technologies. Ingeborg Reichle’s investigation of the changes in artistic processes that results from this merges interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary perspectives, with the aim of analysing both artistic ways of production and current social and economic processes.

In the Open Lab Class, which was set up in 2017, through hands-on learning students become acquainted with methods used in biotechnology and the techniques and processes of biodesign. Further, they learn about the relationship of contemporary art and natural production in the technosciences. The Open Lab Class, which is open to students and interested people from all disciplines at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, teaches sound, practical knowledge; for example, how creative approaches can be combined with experimental methods of biodesign and processes of biotechnology, and at the same time their constitutive artistic, technical, cultural, epistemological, and political dimensions can be made visible on a theoretical level. Artistic processes inspired by theory and design-oriented forms of production are taken into account as are the relevant discourses in science. In this way new practices in which theory and practice are mutually enriching can be established, and at the same time a critical and constructive understanding is enabled of which types of biomedia can play a role with regard to social, economic, and ecological aspects of sustainability in the 21st century.

In 2014 she was Visiting Research Fellow for two terms at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas of the Universidad National Autonoma Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City. From 2005 to 2011 she conducted research at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities on image science and visual culture in the interdisciplinary working groups “The World as Image” (Die Welt als Bild) and “Image Cultures” (Bildkulturen). In 2005 she founded the Young Forum for Image Science (Junges Forum für Bildwissenschaft) and in 2010 co-founded the German Association for Interdisciplinary Image Science (Deutsche Gesellschaft für interdisziplinäre Bildwissenschaft). From 2010 to 2012 she was a member of the steering committee for the annual theme of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities “ArteFacts: Art Is Knowledge, Knowledge Is Art” (ArteFakte – Kunst ist Wissen – Wissen ist Kunst). From 1998 to 2005 she held the position of a research assistant at the Art History Department of the Humboldt University Berlin and at the Hermann von Helmholtz Centre for Cultural Technologies at Humboldt University. In 2004 she gained her PhD there with a thesis on “Kunst aus dem Labor. Zum Verhältnis von Kunst und Wissenschaft im Zeitalter der Technoscience”. In 2001 she was a co-founder and Berlin director of PROMETHEUS, a program funded by Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research with 4 million Deutschmarks to set up an expert network to develop concepts for teaching and learning via the Internet. She completed her MA at Hamburg University in 1998 in the subjects art history, sociology, and archaeology. She has been guest lecturer at many teaching and research institutions in Germany and abroad, most recently including the School of Visual Arts (SVA) New York, the Department of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Boston, the Life Sciences Lab of the German Cancer Research Centre (DKFZ) in Heidelberg, Timbusu College, National University of Singapore, SymbioticA at the School of Anatomy, Physiology, and Human Biology, University of Western Australia, Lomonosov Moscow State University in Moscow, and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City. Ingeborg Reichle is a member of the College Art Association (CAA), the International Association for Aesthetics (IAA), and the International Association of Bioethics (IAB).

Contact

Office Hours: Tuesday 9:00 am –10:15 am
and by Appointment

Phone: +43-1-71133-3550
Email: ingeborg.reichle[at]uni-ak.ac.at

Ingeborg Reichles Web-Site

Selected bibliography

  • Books

    Del bioarte a la estética, con un prólogo de María Antonia González Valerio. Mexico City: Herder, forthcoming, fall 2016.

    Bilderwissen – Wissensbilder: Zur Gegenwart der Epistemologie der Bilder, Berlin, 2012 (habilitation thesis).

    Art in the Age of Technoscience: Genetic Engineering, Robotics, and Artificial Life in Contemporary Art. With a preface by Robert Zwijnenberg, translated by Gloria Custance. New York: Springer, 2009.

    Kunst aus dem Labor: Zum Verhältnis von Kunst und Wissenschaft im Zeitalter der Technoscience. Vienna, New York: Springer, 2005 (PhD thesis).