Peter Weibel, an artist, curator and theorist known for his far-sighted advocacy of media art, has died at the age of 78.
Born in Odessa, Ukraine in 1944, Weibel received an education in cinematography in Paris, before moving to Vienna to study medicine and then pivoting toward mathematics. In the 1960s, Weibel combined his interests in film with language and semiotics in a period of experimentation that brought him into contact with Vienna avant-garde groups, including the Actionists. From the mid-seventies, Weibel taught at multiple institutions, and in 1989, he co-founded the Institute of New Media at the Städelschule in Frankfurt.
Weibel is best known for curating the 1999 blockbuster exhibition Net_Condition at the ZMK Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. It was the first large scale new media exhibition to gather together works of 66 artists, including JODI, Alexei Shulgin and Markus Hemmer. His interests in media and technology continued in his 2002 show: in Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art, co-curated with philosopher Bruno Latour and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, Weibel confronted various ideological frameworks governing the laws of representation. Weibel’s time at the helm of ZMK since 1999 has fashioned the museum as a leader in media arts.
His recent retrospective Peter Weibel: Art as an act of cognition, which opened open on 3 February, overviews 70 of his works in performance, photography, video, installtion and writing. In a press preview of the exhibition, Weibel told the Korea Times: ‘Normally, media art is seen in the history of art as a medium of images, as a medium of representation to depict the world. But I have a different position: I say the media are extensions of all sensory organs, artificial sensory organs. And with these organs, we don’t only receive the world, we also produce the world.’
