Installations and interventions by eight artists addressed the interplay of semiotic marking, space formation, and language criticism. Writing and signs were picked up by different communication technologies and translated into a diversity of media so that the influx of visual and linguistic semantics enabled the developing of a feel for spatial and urban rhythm. At the same time, the artists levelled criticism at architectural, social and capitalist strategies as become manifest on Praterstern square in Vienna: the Praterstern is a railway station and a public square, the beginning and endpoint of a neighborhood of amusement park, festivals, trade shows, sports, tourism, public transportation, green and recreational areas, residential and office buildings, and as such is subject to the most diverse interests and activities.

Michael Gumhold: Untitled (Open Air: Stage: Rehearsal: Room #11)
Gumhold explored the status quo of installation or intervention art with his 5-meter sculpture in that he focused artistic economies, formally and structurally, on the urban situation outside the Fluc bar and restaurant. In an antimonumentalist gesture, he used building materials, constructing from crossbars a sculptural object that engaged the surroundings of the Praterstern square, like the Vienna Giant Ferris Wheel, the large construction site, or the Fluc event program. The installation thus tested out the full orchestration of urban public space occupation possibilities.

Sonia Leimer: Untitled
Rentable lettering, as is normally used for advertisements in the public realm, was assembled into a temporary sculpture on the square in front of the Vienna Nordbahnhof (Northern Railway Station). Reminiscent of a subheadline, the text “CONCRETE, STEEL, GLASS, 2008” referred to the reconstruction of the railway station which had only been completed in 2008. The text reduced the transparent architecture that now defines the railway station to ist basic elements, making them the center of attention.

Stefan Sandner: Untitled
In his painterly work, Stefan Sandner uses writing which is subjected to a formal and painterly analysis like any other motif. Aside from calligraphic ornaments, there are also handwritten notes that operate on recognition effects, as well as illegible notes and hardly decipherable writing. The fact that there are humans behind these quoted notes and that this establishes personal references and develops new forms of portrait painting emancipated Sander’s intervention into the urban space from merely narrative semantics.

David Moises: Volume Unit Meter
David Moises made an oversized (1 × 1.5 m) moving-coil VU meter, as is familiar from cassette decks, an indicator of visual signals in the public sphere. Translating musical notations, it sent out optical signals.

Christian Egger: nature as a genuine audience
The mural nature as a genuine audience showed one last possible picture of the shattering of collective subjective identity in the confrontation with a thoroughly rationalized dystopian landscape, contextualizing both the historical and the present-day treatment of nature.

Lucie Stahl: Structure Alloy
A poster was produced for a billboard facing the street. Vienna is the city with the highest density of posters worldwide. While commercial billboards are expanding, areas that are usable for culture are scarce and are continually cut back on. The deregulation of the public sphere in the course of major events and its infestation with commercial signs virtually calls for an expansion of cultural elbow room.

Anna Artaker: Personenalphabet
In a fly-posting manner, Anna Artaker installed an alphabet consisting of portrait photos of more or less wellknown people. Each sequence of portraits could be read like a word, provided that the reader knew or recognized the people shown and was able to identify them by name. Legibility thus turned out to be a matter of the reader’s memory for people and frame of reference. It showed that the composition of such a Personenalphabet (Alphabet of Persons) depended on the media use and interests of the person drawing it up. The legibility of the alphabet increases the more the media use and interests of the “author” coincide with those of the “readers.”

Boris Ondreicka: Ding Dong Band – Stand Under
The way how private and public zones in the urban space correlate with bodily aspects of intimacy and patterns of instinctual action was addressed by Boris Ondreicka in a sound installation conceived for the Fluc façade and drawing on situations of transition. The piece measured out the boundaries between the individual and the surrounding external space and explored, through playbacks of language collages, communicative and protective possibilities to mark off economic, political, private, and cultural territories.

Texts: Ursula Maria Probst