Johannes Deutsch

was born in 1960 in Linz, Austria. He studied graphic art and media art from 1975 to 1980 at the Höheren Lehranstalt für Kunst und Design (College of Art and Design) in Linz and at the Postgraduate Institute for New Media, Städelschule, in Frankfurt from 1990 to 1992. As a painter, director and media artist, Deutsch has always combined media to form a whole. He was already committed to the subject of the total artwork during his time as curator at the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna from 1984 to 1989, which finally led him to interactive art.

For the 2002 Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Deutsch created an interactive CAVE installation titled Gesichtsraum (FaceSpace), and together with Ars Electronica Futurelab, he staged Wagner’s opera Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold) as an interactive virtual reality show for the Bruckner Festival in 2004. He continued in 2006 with Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony No. 2, commissioned by the West German Broadcasting Corporation (WDR) in Cologne, for which he produced an interactive visualisation and interactive live television format to mark the 50th anniversary of the broadcasting corporation. To commemorate Schumann’s anniversary in 2010, Deutsch staged a live cinema production of Manfred (Byron/Schumann) in Düsseldorf including a televised version for the Second German Broadcasting Corporation (ZDF), in 2011. From 2007 to 2012, Johannes Deutsch developed an interactive installation called Zeit Perlen for the House of Music in Vienna, for which he installed a 3-D camera as a natural user interface via which the public was able to change and interpret the music and the film images by moving like a conductor.

As a visual artist, Johannes Deutsch has presented his works in solo exhibitions, amongst others, at the Vienna Museum of Modern Art in 1992, at Bonn Museum of Modern Art in 1998, at Museo d’Arte Moderna Ugo Carà, in Muggia/Trieste in 2012, as well as in thematic exhibitions at Museum Ludwig, Cologne, in 2000, at Salzburg Museum der Moderne in 2006, at the Vienna Leopold Museum in 2010, at Admont Museum of Contemporary Art in 2012 and at Albertina Museum, Vienna in 2017. His works are found in leading private and public collections.