Petra Gemeinboeck
(1971)
Austria
  

 

 

 Petra Gemeinboeck is both an architect and an interactive media artist. She holds a Master’s degree from Stuttgart University and a Master’s in Fine Arts from the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois, Chicago. In Petra Gemeinboeck’s virtual worlds, she explores the performative relationship and ambiguous interdependency between Self and Other in the context of a computer controlled interplay of resistance and representation. Her works have been exhibited in international art centres such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Ars Electronica Center in Linz (Austria). She is the author of many writings and papers delivered at international conferences and universities. Through her work, Petra Gemeinboeck develops her interest in the potential that can be generated by dynamic behaviour patterns in the context of virtual and tele-immersion environments, thus addressing the evolutive relations between users and the systemic “transformer”. Ma la - Veil of Illusion (2002/2004) displays a networked virtual mirror world of images filmed by a webcam. Moving towards the screen, Ma la‘s virtual veil seems to extend and allow one’s self-reflection to reach to the ‘other side’. Yet the more one tries to touch the other, the more one’s flickering Self image melts into the other’s projection. It deals with and interprets recorded data and materializes an interface of communication whereby an intermediate space is reduced to a single depth, an elastic membrane. This interferes between two remote users and becomes a third virtual participant reacting to the tactile effect of their movements. Petra Gemeinboeck is a Lecturer in Digital Media at the University of Sydney and teaches a course in “Reactive Architecture” at the Technological University in Vienna.