Armin Medosch

Born	September 16, 1962(1962-09-16) Graz, Austria
Lives in	Graz (1962-85), Vienna (1985-2017), London (1997-?)
Died	February 23, 2017(2017-02-23) (aged 54) Vienna, Austria
Web	Using "Academia.edu" as base chain is not permitted during the annotation process., Wikipedia-DE

Armin Medosch (1962, Graz - 2017, Vienna) was a writer, artist and curator. His work dealt with media culture, wireless networks, online communities, and the political history of art and technology. He published a book on the international art and technology movement New Tendencies (2016). Medosch received his PhD degree in arts and computational technology from the Goldsmiths London (2012).

1980-84 studied German literature and philosophy at Graz University. 1982-85 theatre direction at Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst. In 1985 moved to Vienna. 1986 founded Subcom art group and 1989-92 participated at art festivals (Ars Electronica), warehouse-parties, VJing. Worked as a journalist for ORF, Radio Ö1.

1992-94 co-founded STUBNITZ Kunst-Raum-Schiff, Rostock. Curated and organised exhibitions and symposia in Rostock, Hamburg, Malmö and St.Petersburg. With Stefan Iglhaut and Florian Rotzer, he curated Telepolis (Luxembourg, 1995), an exhibition and symposium about interactive city.

From 1996-2002 he was co-editor of Telepolis: The Magazine of Netculture. With Telepolis he won the European Online Journalism Award 2000 for investigative reporting and the Grimme Online Award 2002 for media journalism.

From 1997 he was based in London. There he co-initiated the monthly Cybersalon events, joint the University of Openess, a self-learning institution, and organised Art Servers Unlimited conference (with Manu Luksch, 1998). He was associate senior lecturer at the MA course on Interactive Digital Media at Ravensbourne College, London (2002-07).

Together with Yukiko Shikata and Shu Lea Cheang, Medosch curated the research-activist project Kingdom of Piracy (<KOP>, 2001-06). The initiative produced DIVE - collaborative tools for online communities (2003), a printed catalogue and CD with texts, art projects and software. In 2006, with <KOP> and xxxxx he organised Plenum as a novel event format.

In 2002 he co-organised "BerLon" - Berlin/London wireless community networking workshop in bootlab, Berlin. In 2004 he held a NinePin research residency by Scan Network in the South West of England, investigating real and virtual ports and their role as cultural socio-economic hubs of transmission, gatekeeping and control with the Ports project.

Medosch curated the exhibitions Waves (Riga, 2006; Dortmund, 2008) and Fields (Riga, 2014), and convened the conferences Goodbye Privacy (Ars Electronica, 2007) and Creative Cities (Vienna, 2009).

In 2009 Medosch founded the Technopolitics working group together with Brian Holmes. Since 2011, the group has been regularly hosting talks and workshops with invited guests in Vienna, growing to comprise about 10 core members and 30 contributors (artists, theoreticians, curators, journalists) as of 2015. In 2015, the group launched the project Tracing Information Society; its Technopolitics Timeline was first displayed at the exhibition Social Glitch: Radical Aesthetics and the Consequences of Extreme Events at Kunst Raum Niederösterreich (2015) [1] [2] [3], later at MAK Vienna (2016), nGbK Berlin (2017) and elsewhere.

He was a regular speaker at international conferences on digital culture and frequently involved in organising and curating conferences. He contributed articles and essays to many books, catalogues, magazines and newspapers.

Publications

Books, catalogues

• editor, with Janko Röttgers, Netzpiraten. Die Kultur des elektronischen Verbrechens, Hannover: Heinz Heise, 2001, 192 pp. [4] (German)
• editor, DMZ Media Arts Festival, London, 2003. Catalogue.
• editor, DIVE - collaborative tools for online communities, 2003. With CD.
• Freie Netze. Geschichte, Politik und Kultur offener WLAN-Netze, Hannover: Heinz Heise, 2004. On the politics, history and culture of (wireless) community networks. (German)
• New Tendencies: Art at the Threshold of the Information Revolution (1961-1978), MIT Press, 2016, x+395 pp.

Theses

• Technological Determinism in Media Art, Ravensbourne College / Sussex University, 2005, 57 pp. Master's thesis.
• Automation, Cybernation and the Art of New Tendencies, 1961-1973, London: Goldsmiths, 2012, 369 pp. Ph.D. dissertation.

Selected essays

• "Not Just Another Wireless Utopia: Developing the Social Protocols of Free Networking", 2004. Written for The Future of Computer Arts & The History of the International Festival of Computer Arts, Maribor, 1995-2004, ed. Marina Gržinić, Maribor: MKC, and Ljubljana: Maska, 2004.
• "Roots Culture: Free Software Vibrations Inna Babylon", in How Open is the Future? Economic, Social & Cultural Scenarios Inspired by Free and Open Source Software, eds. Marleen Wynants and Jan Cornelis, Brussels: VUB Brussels University Press, 2005, pp 135-162; upd. in Engineering Culture: On 'The Author as (Digital) Producer' , eds. Geoff Cox and Joasia Krysa, New York: Autonomedia, 2005, pp 177-201. Draft.
• "Meshing in the Future: The free configuration of everything and everyone with Hive Networks", 2005.
• "Auf freien Wellenlängen: Funknetze als techno-soziale Entwürfe", in Open Source Yearbook. Zwischen Softwareentwicklung und Gesellschaftsmodell, eds. Bernd Lutterbeck, et al., Berlin: Lehmanns Media, 2006. Draft. (German)
  • "On Free Wavelength: wireless networks as techno-social models", trans. Nicholas Grindell, 2006. Translated for the publication Ambient Information Systems.
• "The Spychip Under Your Skin", ed. Marina Vishmidt, 2006. Commissioned by Space Media Arts.
• "The Story: Ambient Television Dot Net", 2007. Draft for the publication Ambient Information Systems.
• "The Next Layer or: The Emergence of Open Source Culture", 2007. Draft for Pixelache publication, London/Vienna, 2006-07.
• "45 RPM / Revolutions Per Minute - Radio Art Histories Remixed, Maxi Single Version", 2007. Subjective and abbreviated history of radio told from the angle of radio art as an emancipatory project with a 100 year life-span so far, including remarks covering Brecht, Benjamin, Subcom, Dyne, Pure Data and others.
• more, more

Interviews

• Geert Lovink, "Interview with Armin Medosch", 1997.
• "We gotta be good neighbours. Interview with Bruce M Simpson", London, Summer/Autumn 2006. On FreeBSD, ZORP and free networks.
• "The computer lets us rediscover imaginative power. Interview with Eleonora Oreggia", Amsterdam, Jun 2006
• "Interview with Harwood / Mongrel: Between Social Software and the Poetic", Southend/Leigh On Sea, 30 Jun 2006.
• "Plötzlich gibt es nicht nur eine Stimme. Interview mit Elektra", Berlin, 16 Sep 2006. On Freifunk, C-Base and mesh-routing. (German)

Links

• Personal webpage
• Technopolitics working group
• TheNextLayer, a research project investigating the culture of open sources. (archived 2017)
• medien.Kunstlabor wiki (personal wiki, archived 2007)