Cultural Collisions

What do art and technology have in common? How can they be used to find creative solutions for sustainable energy systems? What is energy? How does it work? And how can the topic of energy be translated into a work of art?

These are precisely the questions we are exploring in the Cultural Collisions cooperation project together with the Vienna University of Technology and around 400 students, with whom we have been working since autumn 2023. The mumok will be presenting the results together with the students from 22 to 25 May 2024 as part of the exhibition Cultural Collisions - Energy Sources of Inspiration.

The mumok, with its key area of expertise in the art, cultural and intellectual history of the 20th and 21st century, has a substantial responsibility to address and reduce the discrepancy between everyday life and increasingly specialised and largely abstract professional and social demands. Modern and contemporary art questions existing rules and conventions. It often follows a transdisciplinary approach, which we also pursue in our educational work focussing on creative learning.

Transdisciplinarity is also the connecting thread of the Cultural Collisions project. Together with the Vienna University of Technology, the Technisches Museum Wien, the PH Wien, the Future Learning Lab Wien and the Kirchliche Pädagogische Hochschule Wien/Krems, we have invited the students to realise their creative ideas and present them in our museum.

What does that look like in real life?

For the project kick-off in autumn 2023, the pupils visited an interactive exhibition at TU Wien and took an in-depth look at the topic of energy and, in particular, how to save resources. They then travelled to mumok and the Vienna Museum of Technology for workshops lasting several hours. All these experiences will be framed by a final exhibition at the mumok, which opens in May 2024.

In our series of workshops, the pupils got to experience an in-depth programme through the entire museum building. The programme began with a hands-on lecture on the topic of ‘What is art, what does energy have to do with art and how does technology inspire art and art inspire technology?’ Afterwards they visited the solo exhibition ‘Blackness, White, and Light’ by Adam Pendleton and our collection exhibition ‘ON STAGE - Art as Stage’. In the exhibition conception workshop, "What Art Can Do," we engaged in a detailed discussion of the process of creating one's own artwork and produced preliminary sketches of the class artwork. In the second workshop ‘The mobile as an artistic analogy of energy conversion’, the students had the opportunity to design a mobile themselves and thus develop an understanding of the balance and symmetry of energy conversion and distribution in our universe through art. They were inspired by the American artist Alexander Calder and our collection work ‘The Stallion’, who is considered the inventor of the mobile and was a formative artist of kinetic art.

Furthermore, in the spirit of digital literacy, we offer an extracurricular learning framework in the form of individual additional workshops on the topic of creative coding to everyone. Here, the combination of art and algorithms enables students to expand their own art projects using innovative computer programming. It is important to us, especially in these times of social upheaval and digital transformation, that we convey the potential of science, artistic strategies and digital technologies in

a way that is true to life, ensure cultural participation and, by interweaving art and innovation, enter into dialogue with people and contribute to individual empowerment.

Our final exhibition will therefore be conceived and realised in the spirit of co-creation with a team of class curators on the mumok premises. It will be accompanied by a comprehensive supporting programme of guided tours and publications.

Together with the students, we turn the mumok into a dialogue-based educational venue that brings together complex topics, thinks about science and art collaboratively and also makes jointly developed results visible.

Registration
As the exhibition is still running during our closing time, please make sure you book your timeslot.

Registration via creative-learning@mumok.at

The following dates are available: 

• Wednesday, 22 May 2024, 4:45–6 p.m. 
• Thursday, 23 May 2024, 4:45–6 p.m. 
• Friday, 24 May 2024, 4:45–6 p.m. 
• Saturday, 25 May 2024, 10 am, 12 pm, 2 pm or 4 pm 

Duration of each tour 1 hour 15 minutes.
 

Cultural Collisions is a cooperation between mumok, the Vienna University of Technology, the Vienna Museum of Technology, the Vienna/Krems University of Teacher Education, the Vienna University of Teacher Education, the Future Learning Lab Vienna and the Vienna Education Server.