INFOCRASH: FRI & SAT 21:00 – 6:00 // 1st Floor
River Studies is an ongoing long-term artistic research project about exploring the relationship of rivers and its people, rivers and its transforming cultural landscape, rivers and their function as carrier of cultural landscapes and identities. It utilizes custom, combined and unique methods in digital photography, data visualization, cartography and cultural mapping.
As main imaginary tool River Studies utilizes a line-scan camera to sample riverscapes from a moving vessel: Custom-build machine’s eyes that render into unique representations of precious waterlines. Rivers are natural waterways and lifelines of cultures with complex, diverse and ambivalent historical and contemporary roles. Rivers are connecting as well as bordering, they are deployed as routes for trade, as routes of military actions, as a place of religious worships or as a purely economical resource. My other primary interest is to understand rivers as intersection and connection lines through continents, peoples and cultures – cross lines that form a landscape of natural features and accumulated history, a landscape that is as much a cultural as a geographic landscape.
BIO:
Michael Aschauer is an artist and undisciplined researcher. He lives and works in Vienna. Occasionally he makes money (“0Euro”, “Gibling”) and various projects across media and disciplines.