The following pages reveal what makes science communication at an arts university special, the challenges that it entails, and the concrete projects and measures through which the mdw is shaping dialogue with various groups of people within and outside of the University.

The Vienna Philharmonic’s annual New Year’s Concert is an international fixture—seemingly always the same, with the Blue Danube Waltz and the Radetzky March as perennial highlights. But is that really true? Is it, as Miss Sophie puts it in Dinner for One, really just “the same procedure as every year”?

In the following conversation, Therese Kaufmann (head of the Office of Research Support), Anna Wukovits-Zethner (Office of Research Support), Ralf von Appen (professor of Theory and History of Popular Music), and Bianca Jasmina Rauch (film scholar and freelance journalist) provide mdw Magazine with some impressions from their experiences with science communication.

How to do good theatre in this day and age? How can a stage director structure the time from the first rehearsal to opening night such the production, the participants, and the audience all benefit? mdw Magazine learned from two 2026 graduates of the Max Reinhardt Seminar’s Stage Directing programme how a new generation views directorial work—and how they’re implementing this approach in their own projects.

Talking sheep are nothing new in cinema and television, one might think at first blush. And even so, the central animals in the new series by Alex Reinberg and Leni Gruber (who shared both screenwriting and directing) are more than just fluffy lead characters in an absurd story.

Science communication is often thought of as conveying scientific findings to others in an accessible way. And while that is true, it’s only part of the story. In actual fact, science communication doesn’t begin only once research has been completed, when it’s time to explain its outcomes to a wider public. It actually begins wherever and whenever scientific or scholarly knowledge relates to societal issues, experiences, and conflicts.

the mdw’s Long Night of Research activities, coordinated since their beginning in 2016 by the Office of Research Support, have by now developed into a permanent fixture of the University’s event calendar that motivates numerous colleagues to get involved.The mdw’s contributions to LNF2026 provided an impressive demonstration of just how diverse, accessible, and lively the ways are in which the arts and research can be combined.

TENOR 26 Vienna is part of the research project “Sound as Score”, elements of which are being funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and organised in Vienna by the mdw and the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW). Of the over 100 submissions that the conference received, 30 papers, nine workshops, four posters, and 18 sound-based works were ultimately presented.