Work in the last 25 years gradually shifted from cultural management towards today’s mix of curating, conceptual work and consulting in mainly three areas of expertise: Art-Museum-Exhibitions, Internet Projects and the Social Web as well as Culture and Politics.

Art – Museums – Exhibitions

For more than 20 years my love for the arts and my enthusiasm for museums and the medium of the exhibition brought me in contact with numerous art institutions and artists. Curating and managing exhibition projects and interventions in the public space as well as media art projects in different contexts proved to be an ever challenging and rewarding experience. Even more so today I believe in the ability of the museum to survive in a changed form as well as the exhibition as a cultural medium to take on new roles in new contexts of perception – and for the arts themselves, with all the usual mixture of excellent and mediocre, I am not afraid as long as it keeps challenging societies as well as its own disposition, as long as it stays fresh and has the ability to truly touch us.

Internet – Social Web

Getting involved with the use of the internet in the earlier part of the 1990ies and with the creating of numerous websites, web-applications and internet-related projects in the years since 1994 and becoming immersed in the wave of enthusiasm and hopes that was shared by many early adopters of the internet then, was a key experience of my working life. Events like “Doors of Perception 2″ in 1994 in Amsterdam and “Global Village” in 1995 in Vienna were personal milestones as were encounters with people like Louis Rossetto, co-founder of WIRED Magazine, or Howard Rheingold, author of pioneering books like “The Virtual Community”. Working years later with the developing “social web” after the turn of the millenium proved to be a more mature but nonetheless exciting experience. Creating the “Digital Communities” category for Prix Ars Electronica in 2003 meant focusing this interest in the collaborative potentials of the internet reclaimed as a social space. It also meant the privilege working with people like Howard Rheingold, Jane Metcalfe, Joichi Ito, Cory Doctorow, Olivieiro Toscani or Steve Rogers.

Culture – Politics

Cultural politics have followed me all through my working life. Encounters with cultural politics reached from working in the office of the City Councellor for Culture in Vienna, Ursula Pasterk, to international processes like the Word Summit of the Information Society or the first World Culture Forum in Sao Paulo. Cultural politics today is no longer separable from net-politics and from questions of intellectual property rights. Cultural memory and cultural diversity are key elements of what cultural politics should mean today.