Peter Weibel — Expanded Cinema and early video practice

1969

Artists: Peter Weibel · Year: 1969 · Medium: Expanded-cinema performances, video installations, theoretical writing · Substrate: Film projection, early-video recording equipment, performance frameworks — combined into multimedia events · Place: Vienna, Austria · Institution: Independent; Austrian Filmmakers Cooperative; later ZKM director (from 1999) Peter Weibel was the most prolific figure in the Austrian new-media avant-garde of the late 1960s and 1970s. His Expanded Cinema performances (1967–70) combined film projection with live performance, audience participation, and deliberate technical disruptions; his early video work made him one of the first European artists to adopt portable video equipment in artistic practice; his theoretical writing — across dozens of books and hundreds of essays — framed the Austrian and broader European new-media discourse for five decades. Weibel was also one of the field's most important institutional figures. He directed the Ars Electronica Center in Linz in the 1980s; he founded the Institut für Neue Medien at the Städelschule Frankfurt in the early 1990s; and in 1999 he became director of ZKM — Zentrum für Kunst und Medien — in Karlsruhe, the most substantial institutional collection of computer and new-media art in the world. He remained at ZKM until 2023, shaping its acquisitions, exhibitions, and research programs for nearly a quarter-century. His late-career scholarly contributions — particularly the 2015 exhibition Global Activism and the 2019 Critical Zones exhibition with Bruno Latour — extended ZKM's programming into broader political and environmental territory. The ZKM corpus under Weibel is likely the single best-preserved collection of computer-art material in any institution. He died in March 2023. Lore Weibel was physically present at nearly every major European new-media event of the past five decades. His Austrian avant-garde credentials from the 1960s included collaborations with Valie Export, with whom he made experimental films and performances, and membership in the Vienna Actionist circle. His 1999 appointment to ZKM followed a competitive international search; his two-and-a-half decades at the institution reshaped European digital-art scholarship. His successor at ZKM is Alistair Hudson. Sources • Weibel, Peter — multiple authored and edited volumes (ZKM / MIT Press, various) • ZKM Karlsruhe institutional archive • Ars Electronica archive