Welcome at the Interface Culture program website.
Acting as creative artists and researchers, students learn how to advance the state of the art of current interface technologies and applications. Through interdisciplinary research and team work, they also develop new aspects of interface design including its cultural and social applications. The themes elaborated under the Master's programme in relation to interactive technologies include Interactive Environments, Interactive Art, Ubiquitous Computing, game design, VR and MR environments, Sound Art, Media Art, Web-Art, Software Art, HCI research and interaction design.
The Interface Culture program at the Linz University of Arts Department of Media was founded in 2004 by Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau. The program teaches students of human-machine interaction to develop innovative interfaces that harness new interface technologies at the confluence of art, research, application and design, and to investigate the cultural and social possibilities of implementing them.
The term "interface" is omnipresent nowadays. Basically, it describes an intersection or linkage between different computer systems that makes use of hardware components and software programs to enable the exchange and transmission of digital information via communications protocols.
However, an interface also describes the hook-up between human and machine, whereby the human qua user undertakes interaction as a means of operating and influencing the software and hardware components of a digital system. An interface thus enables human beings to communicate with digital technologies as well as to generate, receive and exchange data. Examples of interfaces in very widespread use are the mouse-keyboard interface and graphical user interfaces (i.e. desktop metaphors). In recent years, though, we have witnessed rapid developments in the direction of more intuitive and more seamless interface designs; the fields of research that have emerged include ubiquitous computing, intelligent environments, tangible user interfaces, auditory interfaces, VR-based and MR-based interaction, multi-modal interaction (camera-based interaction, voice-driven interaction, gesture-based interaction), robotic interfaces, natural interfaces and artistic and metaphoric interfaces.
Artists in the field of interactive art have been conducting research on human-machine interaction for a number of years now. By means of artistic, intuitive, conceptual, social and critical forms of interaction design, they have shown how digital processes can become essential elements of the artistic process.
Ars Electronica and in particular the Prix Ars Electronica's Interactive Art category launched in 1991 has had a powerful impact on this dialog and played an active role in promoting ongoing development in this field of research.
The Interface Cultures program is based upon this know-how. It is an artistic-scientific course of study to give budding media artists and media theoreticians solid training in creative and innovative interface design. Artistic design in these areas includes interactive art, netart, software art, robotic art, soundart, noiseart, games & storytelling and mobile art, as well as new hybrid fields like genetic art, bioart, spaceart and nanoart.
It is precisely this combination of technical know-how, interdisciplinary research and a creative artistic-scientific approach to a task that makes it possible to develop new, creative interfaces that engender progressive and innovative artistic-creative applications for media art, media design, media research and communication.
The digital age - a human rights perspective
15. Jänner 2025, 14.00 Uhr Kunstuniversität Linz, Domgasse 1, 3. OG, DO.03.27 (IC Lecture Room)
Interface Cultures lädt im Rahmen von Critical Data zum Gastvortrag von Walter Suntinger.
While the digital age holds the potential of offering opportunities for a better protection and promotion of human rights, datafication of society in the way that it is currently being used brings serious (risks of) violations of human rights. This lecture introduces students to a human rights-based approach to the challenges and possibilities that living in the digital age entails. It invites to explore which shape the basic functions of human rights – creating the conditions of a free, just and peaceful society, protecting persons’ dignity against abuse of power and discrimination – will take under the rapidly changing conditions of today. It looks into the broader structural issues that are of influence and asks how an interdisciplinary approach, composed of law, (social) sciences and the arts, can contribute to better understand the situation as well as to identify creative strategies for the better implementation of human rights.
Walter Suntinger is a human rights consultant, trainer and university lecturer. Since 2021, he is a Senior Lecturer and the Academic Programme Manager of the Vienna Master of Arts in Applied Human Rights at the University of Applied Arts. He holds a law degree from the University of Graz (1990), with a specialization in human rights law, and a certificate in systemic change management from the Steinbeis University/Berlin (2019). His areas of specialization of human rights work are: preventing monitoring of places of detention, human rights reform and training in the police and the criminal justice system, human rights and business, arts and human rights.
His training and consulting journey took him i.a. to South Africa, Kosovo, Armenia, Brazil, Turkey, Tunisia, Mauritania, Morocco and other countries. He is currently a lecturer at: University of Applied Arts, FH Campus Wien, the University of Vienna. Previous teaching assignments were at: the John Hopkins University – Bologna Center, the University of Oregon (study abroad program in Vienna), the European Peace University in Stadschlaining and the University of Applied Sciences Wiener Neustadt (Security Studies).
