The VALIE EXPORT Center at the University of Art and Design Linz processes, researches, contextualizes, and mediates VALIE EXPORT’s premortem bequest. As an internationally oriented research center, it promotes an artistic and scientific confrontation with media art and performance art. The VALIE EXPORT Center is part of the University of Art and Design Linz.
The VALIE EXPORT Center is issuing a call for applications for two Junior Fellowships for PhD candidates. The planned doctoral thesis must deal with one of the two thematic fields:
1. In the context of a research focus on “art and language in artistic practice”, linguistic-structuralist aspects in medial works should be studied on the basis of VALIE EXPORT’s oeuvre. This includes media-critical and reflexive processes, such as (medial) anagrams, and aspects of play, combinatorics, overdetermination, and associated with that, of multivalence and (poetic) surplus in significance. For the artist, anagrammatic context shifts also stand for an exploration of the media’s diverse languages and representations of “reality” that involve specific imagery. With particular consideration of VALIE EXPORT’s oeuvre, the object of investigation refers to the ways that linguistic-structural and visual artistic practices mesh.
2. The relationship of art and science should be examined based on the implementation of new technologies in artistic practice and their diverse possible applications in the field of artistic-scientific research. Starting point for this is VALIE EXPORT’s extensive oeuvre. Use of the computer and the possibilities offered by digitization are analyzed directly in her work as media- and socio-critical processes with regard to the transformation of the human image in the sciences and social theories. The time frame under investigation should extend mainly from the late 1980s (experimental works by EXPORT on “digital photography” and works with the computer) until the 1990s (screen plays for unrealized film projects, such as “The Virtual Body. From the Prosthetic to the Postbiological Body”).
Application deadline: 1 September 2019