The Ambivalent Practice of Immersive Installations and Performances

Since the early nineties, Kurt Hentschlager creates media installations and live shows, most always audiovisual and immersive in nature. The ever-deepening effects of digital technology on individual and collective consciousness, and a subsequent reassessment of concepts of nature and artifice are among the subject matters that inform his practice. His shows have characteristically been visceral and challenging, with extreme perceptual effects, composed from projections, light, sound and fog. These works physiologically and emotionally affect the viewer’s experience. His approach is interdisciplinary and experimental fusing both analogue and digital media. His artistic process is rooted in an early and continuing focus on human interaction with architectural space, light and sound, loosely within the concept of the “Gesamtkunstwerk”. A recurring topic in his more recent works such as as Sub, FeedX, Zee and others  is the human body with its perceptual brain “apparatus”, especially the way that the brain processes the world, colored always by cultural background, habits, imagination, subjectivity and individual psychology.

Speaker: Kurt Hentschläger