Linz became the first European station of the
Sky Art Conference developed by Otto Piene at the
Centre for Advanced Visual Studies at the M.I.T..
The Sky Art Conference provided a forum for artists
and scientists meeting the challenge of space.
        Otto Piene

        SKY ART

        The Bible and Greek mythology can be considered handbooks for sky art and its expressive power and potential (and aspirations), particularly, and most colorfully, St. John's Relevations, Archeologists, historians, scientists are making great efforts to decode the ciphers of Nasca, Stonehenge and New Mexico. Observations of the sky and human reactions to them have been translated into art / science since humankind learned to manifest itself in intended traces.

        An essential belief pervading many religions ist that the human soul is ethereal and that it flies. The efforts made to regulate ethereal traffic, i. e., to permit but also restrict the travels of the soul, in ancient Egypt may have strained the national economy with pyramid-building more seriously than NASA weighs on the US. economy. We know about the absorbing medieval efforts to build Gothic cathedrals. We can lock at their results, such as the Soires of Chartres, Cologne, Ulm, as filigree mockups of space-penetrating rockets - an example of the dialectics ruling the relationship between physics and metaphysics. Angels are "model fliers". Icarus is a prince of accidental mytholog but his father, Daedalus, appears to be most fully incarnated by "the man of M.I.T."

        Clear examples of how artists use the results of scientific and engineering work in new media are to be found in such new artistic fields as holography, laser image projection (Rockne Krebs, Paul Earls), computer music (Berry Vercoe), computer graphics (Ron MacNeil) and computer programming for multimedia performance (Bernd Kracke). However, the artists' influence on the development of media is considerable: Harriet Casdin-Silver and white-light holography; the development of video synthesizers originating in part from the (Nam-June-) Paik / Abe Synthesizer.