Invitation to Rigorosum of Christina Jauernik

The Examination Panel is made up of: Ao.Univ.-Prof. Doz. Mag. Dr. Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein (chair), Univ.-Prof. Mag. MA. Wolfgang Tschapeller (1st supervisor), and Emer. Univ.- Prof. Dr. Vicki Kirby (external appraiser).

The subject of this work is perception. Perception of a space-being, a technical, engineered body of altered senses. Not a single being, but rather a multiplicity of beings whose movements are shared among machines, apparatuses, screens, humans, lenses - others.

Touching Distance questions what constitutes a body, and challenges assumptions about what it means to see, touch, and move. The concept of the diaphanous serves as “transformative in-between space (Zwischenraum)” where these embodied experiences are negotiated. INTRA SPACE, an artistic research project and spatial model as well as the technical framework for this dissertation, is read as a zone that builds identities from the physically present and artificially assembled virtual aspects of bodies and software. Through their shared presence a configuration of an environment for seeing differently is engendered. This environment differs from other contemporary networked systems such as those designed to track and recognize patterns of self and activity with a view to anticipating future behavioural patterns. It differs insofar as while it might appear to enqueue in this narrative of quantification and prediction by virtue of its systems of networked cameras observing and recording moving bodies, it does so instead with a view to experimenting with discordances and incompatibilities of motions and sense in pursuit of the flickering, the incoherent and the unrecognizable othering of relative bodies in and across real and virtual space.

Touching Distance embraces the counter-knowledge and alienated potentiality dwelling in a reworked sense of “the in-between”. Not only is it a call for a subtle change of perspective on architecture and on the conditions of inhabitation, but foremost an inquiry on how to perceive, how to think the moving body relative to its (un)built surroundings, and how to accommodate this body considering the contemporary accelerated, networked, multiple and disparate virtually engineered points of view.

Christina Jauernik, who was born in 1985 in Graz, Austria, is an architect, artistic researcher, and performance artist based in Vienna. She studied contemporary dance at the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Amsterdam, choreography and visual arts practices at Dartington College of Arts (UK), art and architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the University of Arts Berlin. She is Senior Scientist at the Institute for Art and Architecture, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Currently, she collaborates with Wolfgang Tschapeller and Vicki Kirby on the artistic research project „Unstable Bodies“ funded by the Austrian Science Funds.

Please join us for the Rigorosum at Schillerplatz, room 209.

We are looking forward to welcoming you.