Brunner, Norbert/Michael Schuster

Norbert Brunner was born in 1959 in Lienz, Austria, and also used the name "Norbert Brunner-Lienz". Since the 1970s, the artist worked mainly in the audiovisual field. In his text works he dealt with language and communication. In "Bundeshymne" (1978), for example, Brunner imprinted a tape recording of the Austrian national anthem with its text, creating a reciprocal influence of the media. He also wrote radio plays, including "Tontheater für einen Bahnhof" (1984), created performances such as "Psss" (with Peter Weibel and Herbert Brandl, 1985), radio plays such as "Nullmelodie" (with Wolfgang Mitterer, 1986), and videos, including "TV translate waiting" (Vancouver, 1982). His solo exhibitions include "King Laurin and his Rose Garden" at the Pakesch Gallery, Vienna (1982), and "In the Mirror of Psyche" at the Secession Vienna (2003). Norbert Brunner died unexpectedly in 2014 in Vienna.
Michael Schuster, born 1956 in Graz, deals in media-analytical works with the perception and reproduction of reality by means of the medium of photography. In "Autofocusfalle I und II" (1989 and 1991) he uses the new interactive possibility of autofocus. Only seemingly documentary, his works are broken by media-reflexive strategies, as in "America" (1993), where he incorporated Kodak color wedges into views of tourist sights, or in the installation "Dromberg" (2002), a representation of an early stone circle constructed as a holistic view by computer simulation. Michael Schuster lives and works in Graz.

The observation of linguistic variations and a critical approach to the characteristics of documentary forms of scientific research methods are also central to "Dokumentarische Dialektstudie vom Fersental bis Garmisch Partenkirchen" (1979), which Michael Schuster and Norbert Brunner jointly undertook, and which they repeated 20 years later. In the 1999 reiteration, they consciously introduced new digital techniques thus focusing on the issue of the changes in the media. (Monika Vykoukal)