Peter Weibel

Peter Weibel was born in Odessa in 1944. He studied literature, medicine, logic, philosophy, and film in Paris and Vienna. Through his wide-ranging activities as an artist, curator, theorist, and nomad between art and science, he became one of the central figures of European media art.

Since 1984, he was a professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and, from 1984 to 1989, Professor of Video and Digital Arts at the Center for Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo. In 1989, he founded the Institute for New Media at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, which he directed until 1995. From 2009 to 2012, he was Visiting Professor at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

From 1986 to 1995, Peter Weibel was Artistic Director of Ars Electronica in Linz and, from 1993 to 1999, Austria’s Commissioner for the Venice Biennale. From 1993 to 2011, he served as Chief Curator of the Neue Galerie Graz. In 2008, he was Artistic Director of the Seville Biennial (BIACS3), and in 2011 Artistic Director of the 4th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art. In 2015, he curated lichtsicht 5, the projection biennial in Bad Rothenfelde.

From 1999 to 2023, Peter Weibel was Chairman and CEO of the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. On March 1, 2023, he passed away in Karlsruhe at the age of 78 after a short but serious illness.

Artistic Work

Peter Weibel was deeply involved in three avant-garde movements of the 1960s: the development of visual poetry, Viennese formal film, and Viennese Actionism, a term he himself coined. From the mid-1960s onward, he developed an independent expansion of film through film actions and film installations. At the same time, he produced a series of conceptual photographic and language-based works.

His first videos were created in 1969. With his body- and media-centered performances, he attracted considerable public attention in the late 1960s. In his media works, he combined language criticism with social criticism and sought, through media, to transcend the limits of the body and expand reality.

In the 1970s, alongside an extensive body of video tapes, video installations, video performances, and avant-garde films, he collaborated with VALIE EXPORT on the feature films Invisible Adversaries (1976–1977) and Human Women (1980).

As early as 1974, Peter Weibel published studies on automata theory and thus became one of the few media artists prepared for the digital age at an early stage. Following numerous teaching appointments and participation in international media festivals, he was appointed in 1984 as the successor to Hollis Frampton at the Digital Arts Laboratory of the Department of Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he taught until 1989.

Since the 1980s, Weibel increasingly worked with digital media. During this period, he produced several media operas, including The Artificial Will (1984) and Voices from the Interior (1988), as well as his major videographic work Songs of the Pluriverse (1986–1988), which narrates the technological transformation of the world since 1800 through audiovisual special effects.

Archive and Collection at ZKM

In 2023, the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe acquired an extensive group of artworks and archival materials by Peter Weibel for its collection. The acquisition comprises key works dating from 1968 to 1993 as well as large parts of his archive, including photographs, manuscripts, drawings, videos, films, and audio recordings spanning several decades.

The acquisition was made possible through the support of the Elke and Wolfgang Kuentzle Foundation as well as acquisition funds provided by the State of Baden-Württemberg, the City of Karlsruhe, and ZKM.

Awards and Honors

In 2007, Peter Weibel received an honorary doctorate from the University of Art and Design Helsinki, followed in 2013 by an honorary doctorate from the University of Pécs, Hungary. In 2008, he was awarded the French distinction Officier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and in 2009 the European Cultural Project Prize of the European Cultural Foundation. In the same year, he became a full member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. In 2010, he received the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art, First Class.

Since 2013, Peter Weibel was a full member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts in Salzburg. In 2014, he received the Oskar Kokoschka Prize, in 2017 the Austrian Art Prize for Media Art, and in 2020 the Lovis Corinth Prize. Since 2015, he was an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Arts in Moscow.