Hannes Hoelzl
Hannes Hoelzl (1974, Bolzano) is a composer, sound installation artist and academic teacher.
His studies at Utrecht's Art Academy HKU (NL) were accompanied by an internship at the Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music (STEIM), Amsterdam. After his graduation as an MA, he held a fellowship in Sound Arts at Cologne's Media Arts Academy KHM.
A red line connecting his diverse artistic practice, most often manifested as installations with a sonic component, is his deep interest in languages and the translation processes between them. Such translations can re-occour at the boundaries between perceptual modalities as in visualisation, audification and sonification, in conceptual transferrals of site specific work, or by employing archives as artistic raw material, as manifested in his piece 'AudioVisual Anarchivism', jointly developed with composer Alberto de Campo and computer linguist Daniel Hromada.
His experimental musical practice is driven by a fascination to design interactive systems that delegate structural control to a degree where the performer is forced to become herself an observer, and his actions come to resemble navigation maneuvres at the borders of instability. This may be achieved by means of cybernetic circuitry and algorithms, but also in social settings supported by digital infrastructure for network music, or in more habitual contexts of free improvisation. These developments are also at the focus of his theoretical research that has been presented in academic conferences and festivals like NIME, Sonár+D, VIVO or ICLI.
In academic teaching, he has mainly investigated the conceptual integration of computational/algorithmic art with the analog/physical domain. After lecturing Hybrid Sound Composition at IMM Düsseldorf and Electronic Composition in Digital Media at HfK Bremen, he is currently assistant professor for Computational Arts/Generative Arts at UdK Berlin (D).
His main tool for developing ideas, sketches to finished compositions and installatons, is the Open Source programming language SuperCollider. An active member of the community, he has participated in numerous SuperCollider conferences with lectures and performances.
Hoelzl's Installations have been shown at Venice Biennale for Architecture (2001, 2006), Manifesta 7 (2008), and transmediale (2013). He has worked as an assistant for artists Paul DeMarinis, Andres Bosshard and Renée Green for pieces presented in Cologne, Greenwich, Yerba Buena Center/SF and MAK Center/LA.
He has performed live from the Far East over Europe to the USA and Mexico. Musical partners have been Zhang Jien (FM3), Frank Köllges, Martin Brandlmeyer, hans w koch, Frank Gratkowski, Michael Vorfeld, Andrew Sharpley, Mario de Vega, Atau Tanaka, Hans Tammen and Philip Zoubek, amongst many others.
Interdisciplinary artistic collaboration includes film, live visuals, dance, theatre, architecture, interior and fashion design. He has launched the joint student projects Varia Zoosystematica Profundorum (2010), The Ways Things May Go (2012) and DeepSea (2018) that have been showcased at media art festivals such as EMAF (Osnabrück/D), club transmediale (Berlin), and Ars Electronica (Linz/A).
Recently, Hannes has joined forces with Isak Han to develop an innovative musical instrument, the Airborne Instruments nUFO.
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