“Life and work of Ludwig van Beethoven are surrounded by a myriad of legends and fictitious stories, of heroic and idealistic accounts and attempts to possess him. Beethoven’s lifetime at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century may – a good two hundred years later – seem alien and remote, and yet a lot of it might seem surprisingly familiar and timeless today. Persistent and serious research as well as courageous and inquisitive artistic approaches shed more and more light on Beethoven’s life, opening up new avenues to his music.” Andreas J. Hirsch (author and photographer), Beethoven in Vienna, Edition Lammerhuber, Baden / VBW, Vienna, 2019 Taking the Theater an der Wien as a starting point, the author […]
Yearly archives: 2019
“The invention of photography was also quickly picked up in the Biedermeier idyll of Vienna. As early as 1839, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre sent from Paris some of his first images to Metternich, who showed them to the emperor and had them exhibited in the Art Academy. Metternich dispatched the physicist Andreas von Ettingshausen to Paris. Ettingshausen took photography lessons from Daguerre and acquired a Chevalier camera in Paris. The oldest known photograph of Vienna, which shows Michaelerplatz, originates from him. From this point on, the transformation of the city has been recorded in a burgeon ing production of photographs. The first fast portrait lens, made according to the precise calculations of Hungarian mathematician Josef Petzval, was produced by Viennese […]
“In 1979, long before anyone started speaking about a ‘digital revolution,’ in the unlikely setting of the small industrial town of Linz in Upper Austria, close to the Iron Curtain, three men—the director of a television station, a musician, and a scientist, who also wrote science fiction—launched a visionary festival for art, technology and society, giving it the Latin name ‘Ars Electronica.’” From: Andreas J. Hirsch, Creating the Future — A Brief History of Ars Electronica 1979–2019, Ars Electronica, Linz / Hatje Cantz, Berlin, 2019 “Creating the Future – A Brief History of Ars Electronica” follows the history of Ars Electronica from the pioneering days of its inception through the turbulent times at the advent of the digital revolution up […]
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS?A Photographic Odyssey Through Salzburg Exhibition at the Space for Photography at the Fortress / Traklhaus, Salzburg April – July 2019 Opening talk by photography-historian Margit Zuckriegl. Where is the woman in the red coat going? What makes her wander through Salzburg alone? Why does she refuse to re- gard the “postcard-views” of the city and stubbornly looks in the “wrong” direction? Is she fleeing from the camera? Does she look at those places in personal reminiscence? Or is her gaze directed at almost forgotten things or at the suppressed ones? Could it be worth searching ourselves for the things she actually might be seeing? – The series, which has been developed by Andreas J. Hirsch specifically […]