For a jointly submitted summer academy of the Center for Image Science and the Belvedere, the Getty Foundation is providing a fund in the amount of EUR 99,000. Beside this success, Oliver Grau, image scientist, also chaired one of the main sections during the largest conference in art history "Migration, Climate, Surveillance - What does Media Arts Complexity want?“ which was held in São Paulo.

The renowned Getty Foundation is supporting with a EUR 99,000 grant a summer school both Prof Oliver Grau, Center for Image Sciences, and Dr. Christian Huemer, Belvedere Research Center, submitted. So far, universities such as UCLA, Harvard, and Duke in the USA or, in Europe, ETH Zurich have been awarded a Getty Grant.

Together with the Belvedere, the Center for Image Science has drawn up a concept for a summer academy on the digital future of the museum. A packed two-week event entitled "The Museum in a Digital World: Strategies - Methods - Tools", focuses on the digital transformation and the rapidly changing requirements staff is facing.  International experts are invited to present and discuss for one week in Krems and one week in Vienna. The application and program are based on the pioneering programs "Digital Collection Management" and "MediaArtHistories," which have been established and continuously developed at the Center for Image Science since 2005/06. The latter laid the foundation of the penultimate Research Summit of the University for Continuing Education Krems to bring students from more than 50 countries to Krems.

Grau chaired main section at CIHA conference

Image scientist Oliver Grau chaired one of the two-day main sections titled "Migration, Climate, Surveillance - What does Media Arts Complexity want?" at the hybrid international art history conference CIHA (Comité international d'histoire de l'art) in São Paulo, which was postponed several times. For the first time, several variables were negotiated at a CIHA conference in this section. Indeed, the most fundamental issues of our time are the rapidly growing numbers of people and the continued growth of carbon-based societies, as well as migration, climate, and surveillance all of which are caused by the digital revolution. In recent decades, these issues have been addressed primarily by media art in exhibitions and entire festivals. As museums are not yet prepared for the art of our time, so far it is primarily the 200 or so festivals worldwide that represent "the medium of digital media art."

Linking CIHA and MediaArtHistory

For the first time, the World Conference on MediaArtHistory, founded by Grau in 2005 and since then held every two years on a different continent, could be linked in terms of scientific policy with CIHA, which was constituted in Vienna in 1873. This enables a thematic and personnel renewal thrust that hardly seemed imaginable years ago. The CIHA is the world's largest conference in art history, which is held every three years and has already gathered more than 10,000 attendees in the northern hemisphere, for example in London or Berlin. São Paulo managed to draw the attention of several thousand visitors from all over the world who attended the week-long conference via zoom. As part of its support for the global South, the Getty Foundation flew in art and image scientists.

Furthermore, during his stay in Brazil, University Professor Grau succeeded in negotiating a takeover of the MediaArtHistories conference for 2025 in Rio de Janeiro. The next edition of the world conference, which already took place in Krems, Göttweig and the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 2017, will be held in Venice in 2023.