Special

Special: Artificial Intelligence


It’s a mixture of curiosity, enthusiasm, and perhaps anxiety that can often arise when the talk turns to AI technologies’ deployment in our everyday private and professional lives. At home, it might be a robovac that’s supposed to save us work but—How could it be otherwise?—ends up repeatedly needing help. In academic and artistic contexts, on the other hand, it’s about things like questions of authorship, innovation, and inspiration.

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Research

Review: Die Politik des Kritischen Komponierens. Diskursive Verflechtungen um Helmut Lachenmann

The fact that Helmut Lachenmann now occupies an outstanding position in the contemporary music scene is owed not just to his compositions but also to the efficacy of his writings, which have stimulated the production of a considerable number of texts referring thereto.

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Music

Music

Searching the African Footprint

Starting with a concert in the Main Hall of the Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, the MIAGI Orchestra—led by David Christopher Panzl—will be presenting entirely self-composed and -arranged material that will go on to be heard at venues including the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg as well as Konzerthaus Berlin. Panzl has been working together with the South African organisation for several years.

Drama

Drama

SPOTLIGHT ON: The Max Reinhardt Seminar’s New Leading Team

Alexandra Althoff, dramaturge and former artistic director of the Burgtheater, assumed leadership of the mdw’s Max Reinhardt Seminar on 1 March 2024. She and Steffen Jäger, who serves as her deputy head, speak about these new responsibilities, the challenges and planned emphases during their term in office.

Drama

“It’s together that we can make more things happen.”

Director Christina Tscharyiski, born in Vienna in 1988, has been looking forward quite a bit to her involvement with the Max Reinhardt Seminar as a visiting director this summer semester. She’s now hard at work with the third-year acting class on a staged production of Elfriede Jelinek’s text Sonne, los jetzt!

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Drama

“How to do it well again and again?”

For the current academic year of 2023/24, director Sarantos-Georgios Zervoulakos is teaching as a visiting professor of drama directing at the Max Reinhardt Seminar—which is not the first time he’s returned to the institution where he originally studied. Then as now, what he values most of all about the Seminar is Max Reinhardt’s concept of an ensemble that allows actors and directors to “grow up” in an atmosphere of close interaction and mutual inspiration.

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Drama

The Foundation of Strong Acting Personalities

Just what is it that underpins the actor’s craft? Anja Thiemann, a professor at the Max Reinhardt Seminar since March 2023, provides mdw Magazine with some insights into her work with first-year acting students, her multifaceted career, and her efforts to put suppressed women authors back in the spotlight.

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1,492

Film

Film

Green Filming: How the Film Industry Helps Protect Our Climate

“Green filming” refers to measures taken as part of film production that aim to reduce CO2 output and conserve resources. The film industry’s environmental footprint is a large one: film teams travel to all kinds of locations, equipment needs to be transported, and set elements as well as costumes need to be made—all of which results in large amounts of waste as well as high energy consumption. Recent years, however, have seen a shift in attitudes.

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Film

From the Workshop

Barbara Albert, Jessica Hausner and Karina Ressler are the protagonists oft the first three volumes of the book series Aus der Werkstatt [From the Workshop], based on an ongoing oral history project of the Media and Film Studies chair at Film Academy Vienna. In wide-ranging workshop conversations, the filmmakers discuss their artistic work and provide insights into their cinematic thinking and the methods by which they proceed.

Film

Liminal Situations

Police officer Nancy is torn between her responsibility and her compassion for the family, who’ve been living in Austria for a long time and are blindsided when the police show up. For this stirring short film, Film Academy Vienna alumnus Mark Gerstorfer and his Film Academy team won a Student Academy Award in gold in the Narrative category.

Film

“As a director, I’m interested in everything that makes being human what it is.”

Barbara Albert studied directing as well as screenplay writing and dramaturgy at Film Academy Vienna during the 1990s. Her graduation film Nordrand (1999), simultaneously her debut feature film, celebrated its world première at the Venice Film Festival and went on to achieve international renown.

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Research

Research

“Sonic Dialogues” at the mdw Spring School

How do art and sound enter into dialogue with each other in the public realm? As part of KlangBildKlang, the three-day spring school “Sonic Dialogues: Intersections of Art and Sound in Public Spaces” offered a forum for early-stage researchers to explore precisely this question.

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Research

Releases in 2024: An mdwPress Preview

Ever since its establishment in 2021, mdwPress—our university’s own open-access academic publisher—has been working to make research at the mdw both more visible and openly accessible. An advisory board comprised of outstanding researchers and scholars from within and outside the mdw both guarantees academic independence and assures publication quality.

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574
Research

Applied/Experimental Sound Research Lab (ÆSR Lab)

The infrastructure research project Applied/Experimental Sound Research Laboratory (ÆSR Lab) (2023–2026) is a collaborative effort of the University of Applied Arts, the mdw (Artistic Research Center and Department of Composition Studies and Music Production), and the Phonogrammarchiv of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. This project embodies an initiative to develop a mobile and modular sound research lab.

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1,709
Research

Review: Handbuch Musikvermittlung. Studium, Lehre, Berufspraxis

The November 2023 release Handbuch Musikvermittlung [Music Mediation Handbook] has not only met but also far exceeded all expectations. Editors along with their 57 co-authors from the music mediation community and adjacent fields, succeed here in sketching out the contours of music mediation in all of its dimensions, colours, and nuances across this handbook’s easily digestible chapters.

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