The ZKM is taking the occasion of the Peter Weibel Film Night to screen a selection of experimental films, concept videos, feature films, and commercial and musical clips that Peter Weibel produced from the mid-1960s onwards as an artist, musician, director and scriptwriter as well as films in which he appeared as an actor. Some of these films have not been shown for years or, indeed, were regarded as lost.

Weibel produced his first films in association with the Viennese experimental cinema (Kurt Kren, Peter Kubelka, Hans Scheugl, Ernst Schmidt Jr.), in which he examined the cultural and technical freedom this technology had to offer. From the end of the 1960s he continued these formal aesthetic experiments in the medium of video, although his work now focused mainly on performances and surreal shorts. In the 1970s, Weibel produced programmes for Austrian television in which he used deviating images to confront and challenge everyday forms of usage and to tap the creative potential of the mass medium. Since he regarded every new kind of image technology as an opportunity to develop an alternative cinematic syntax, he embraced computer-based video montage and image generation at an early stage.
The diversity of Peter Weibel’s cinematic oeuvre reveals several interconnecting elements: an analysis of the world by means of linguistic structures and the technical conditions of communication as well as serious criticism – laced with anarchic humour –of the norms of society and the art system.