Klaus Obermaier + Alexander Vert
Comprehensibility in audiovisual performances and installations.
Many audiovisual performances and installations share a common problem: the music (without lyrics) and sound, as well as abstract images, very often have no conventional meaning or lack substance, making it difficult to understand the connections between what is happening and why. Can interactive technologies help create more depth and improve understanding for the audience and the user?
Klaus Obermaier, artist, director, choreographer and composer.
Alexander Vert, composer and artistic director of Ensemble Flashback.
Klaus Obermaier
For more than two decades, artist, director, choreographer and composer Klaus Obermaier has been creating innovative new media works in the fields of performing arts, music and installations, all to critical and public acclaim.
His performances and multimedia artwork have been exhibited at festivals and theatres throughout Europe, Asia, North and South America, and Australia. Many of his projects, such as D.A.V.E., APPARITION, LE SACRE DU PRINTEMPS, DANCING HOUSE and EGO, are considered revolutionary and define a genre that creates new artistic forms of human interaction with digital systems.
Klaus Obermaier is a visiting professor at the IUAV University of Venice (Italy) and at the Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca (Romania), where he teaches interactive art and performance. He was an associate professor of composition at Webster University in Vienna and taught courses in choreography and new media at the Accademia Nazionale di Danza di Roma. Between 2016 and 2018, he was co-director of the Master’s degree in advanced interaction at the IAAC (Institute of Advanced Architecture of Catalonia – Instituto de Arquitectura Avanzada de Cataluña) in Barcelona (Spain). He lectures at international conferences and institutions. Klaus Obermaier lives between Vienna and Barcelona.
Alexander Vert
He studied composition with Philippe Leroux and Denis Dufour. His language is based on traditional music, which he heard and recorded during his many travels, as well as pop culture and contemporary Western music. He transposes its influences, diverts them and reframes them in a particular sonic context.
A composer with over 20 years of experience, his work is a rich repertoire of over 60 original creations to date and contains mixed, electro and instrumental pieces (from solo to large ensemble), multimedia documents or other forms of art ( dance, cinema, circus shows). Between 2000 and 2017, he carried out numerous national and international residencies, the most noteworthy being in GRM – Musical Research Group (FR) at the Royal Academy of Music in Paris; London (United Kingdom); Geneva (Switzerland); IRCAM – Centre Pompidou (FR); the ZKM in Karlsruhe (Germany); the Musical Research Centre of Rome (IT); the Zaragoza Conservatory (ES), etc.
Since 2012 he is artistic director of the Flashback ensemble, dedicated to contemporary music and new technologies. He created “Flashback Lab” and directs the musical season organised by the ensemble at the Contemporary Art Centre “A hundred metres from the centre of the world” in Perpignan. Since 2015, he has collaborated with Philippe Spiesser on the creative research project GeKiPe (gesture, Kinect and percussion). He also participates in seminars/symposiums on contemporary music and new technologies at the national and international level.