Univ.-Prof. MMag. Dr. Clemens Apprich
Clemens Apprich is head of the Department of Media Theory as well as the Peter Weibel Research Institute for Digital Cultures at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, where he holds the Professorship for Media Theory and History since 2021. He studied philosophy, political science, cultural history and theory in Berlin, Bordeaux, and Vienna. In 2011 he became research associate at the Centre for Digital Cultures at Leuphana University of Lüneburg, where he was also guest professor from 2017 to 2018. From 2018 to 2019 he was a visiting research fellow at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Concordia University in Montréal, and from 2020 to 2021 assistant professor in media studies at the University of Groningen. Apprich is still guest researcher at the Centre for Digital Culture, as well as an affiliated member of the Digital Democracies Institute at Simon Fraser University and of the Global Emergent Media Lab at Concordia University. His current research deals with filter algorithms and their application in data analysis as well as machine learning methods. Apprich is the author of Technotopia: A Media Genealogy of Net Cultures (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017), and, together with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Hito Steyerl, and Florian Cramer, co-authored Pattern Discrimination (University of Minnesota Press/meson press, 2019). Currently, he is working on a new book about Animated Intelligence (Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming).
Contact
Office Hours: by Appointment
Phone: +43-1-71133-3550
Email: apprich[at]uni-ak.ac.at
Showroom: Clemens Apprich
- title
- Biopolitical Interventions in the Urban Data Space
- type
- Chapter
- keywords
- Media and communication studies, bio-politics, Digital media, media activism, Energy research
- texts
- Abstract
- Taking as a point of departure the acknowledgement that tactical media work has lost in importance over the past ten years, this paper addresses the question of divergent political, artistic, and cultural practices as they relate to the overall themes of activist media and biopolitics. Against this background, it is the modern city and its hybrid of physical and digital space that potentially offers new fields of action. With its architectural form overlaid by a large number of data streams, it could be the site of an entirely new aesthetics of crisis, criticism, and resistance. Vienna’s Public Netbase has been among the pioneering institutions in Austria and Europe who made the digital world accessible for critical media work, taking issue with surveillance and control in this data space. Looking back, it is possible to identify positions of interest and outline their relevance for a future artistic and cultural practice. This paper will focus on the art project Zellen Kämpfender Widerstand/Kommando Freiheit 45 (ZKW) as an exemplary intervention into symbolic spaces of dominance. This project was created as part of a critical engagement with the Austrian Year of Anniversaries 2005, where the biopolitical utilization of public space went hand in hand with historical representations of statehood. Looking back upon the work of Public Netbase makes it possible to create a context for the activist deconstruction of official imageries and biopolitical sign systems, while contributing to the debate on possible points of connection for tactical media work.
- authors
- Clemens Apprich
- editors
- Wolfgang Sützl, Theo Hug
- publishers
- innsbruck university press
- date
- 2012
- location
- Austria
- ISBN/ISSN/ISMN
- 978-3-902811-04-2
- URL
- https://books.openedition.org/iup/1172
- published in
- title
- Activist media and biopolitics
- pages
- 39–46
- language
- English