The VALIE EXPORT Center Linz_ Research Center for Media and Performance Art appraises, studies, contextualises, and mediates the premature legacy of VALIE EXPORT. International in its orientation, the research center strives to promote the artistic and scientific exploration of Media and Performance Art. The VALIE EXPORT Center is a co-operation of the University of Art and Design Linz (Kunstuniversität Linz) and the City of Linz with LENTOS Kunstmuseum Linz.

The planned doctoral thesis is required to deal with one of these two subject areas:

(1) With the oeuvre of VALIE EXPORT serving as a starting point and in the context of a research focus on “art and language in artistic practice,” linguistic structuralist aspects of media works are to be examined. These include critical and reflexive approaches to media, such as “media anagrams,” as well as aspects of game, combinatorial analysis, of overdetermination, and, along with this, of multivalency and (poetic) surplus meaning. In the case of the artist VALIE EXPORT, anagrammatic shifts in context also stand for an exploration of media’s diverse languages and representations of “reality,” which entail specific ways of image generation. Putting special emphasis on the oeuvre of VALIE EXPORT, the research subject relates to the ways that structural linguistic and visual artistic practices intertwine.

(2) The implementation of new technologies into artistic practice and their manifold possible applications in the field of artistic-scientific research shall provide the basis for an examination of the relationship of art and science. VALIE EXPORT’s extensive oeuvre forms the starting point. It is her work in particular that analyses the use of the computer and the possibilities offered by digitisation in their function as critical approaches to media and society with regard to the transformation of the human image in the sciences and in social theories. The period to be studied should extend mainly from the late 1980s (experimental works by EXPORT on “digital photography” and works using the computer) to the 1990s (screenplays for unrealised film projects, such as The Virtual Body. From the Prosthetic to the Postbiological Body).

For more details please follow the direct link.