Architect and interactive media artist, born in Vienna, Austria, Petra has received her master’s degree in architecture from the University of Stuttgart, Germany, and has completed her Master of Fine Arts at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory, University of Illinois at Chicago, IL, USA. In her virtual environments Petra explores the issues of presence and identity formation in relation to computer controlled systems. Her works have been exhibited internationally at venues such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria, the Siggraph 2002 art gallery in San Antonio, TX, and the InterCommunication Center in Tokyo, Japan and have been featured in magazines such as “Archis” and “Computer Graphics World”. Petra is a lecturer in Media Practice and Theory at the University of Sussex. Petra teaches a postgraduate (MA) course in Political Economy of the New Media and a postgraduate (MA) option in Science, Technology, and Culture. In addition she has a university teaching position for “Reactive Architecture” at the Vienna University of Technology.

Topics Petra will cover:

• Experience as a student in EVL: How and what was useful for her while in the MFA program at EVL
• Goals and accomplishments since graduating
• Major difficulties, if there were any, that she has faced in the professional world and eventually how she overcame these difficulites
• Critical analysis of the path that goes from being a “student” to becoming an active professional in the “real” world
• Petra’s virtual reality art works and research projects: Concepts, motivations, goals, production process, and implementation
• Difficulties in exposing her digital work in museum, galleries, and cultural institutions
• Position of the contemporary museums and galleries in Europe toward Electronic Art
• Opinions about the actual market tendency for Digital / Electronic Art

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