THX Centre for Sound, Image and Digital Culture

Education is one of THX’s core tasks. By offering training for the education sectors, THX contributes to the advancement of expertise and media education. THX has much to offer in the areas of elementary and secondary education, as well as academic and professional training. THX participates in scientific research and stimulates debate.

We believe that our role is to seek out and promote new education and training practice in the cultural and creative professions to enhance knowledge and skills, and thus employability in rewarding careers.

We believe that all of our activity should be underpinned where possible by research in areas of both culture and education to foster sustainability in the cultural area.

To bridge the – perceived – gap between education, training, research and professional practice in cultural management.

To embrace the diversity of its partners, promoting good practice, stimulating high-quality education and training, and encouraging cooperation and partnerships.

To build creative partnerships with arts and media organisations, and major stakeholders in the area of culture and education.

THX has developed structural educational programs for all three of its core tasks (presentation, collection and research). These offer a varied selection of activities for different target audiences, such as the general public, secondary schools, professional art education and specialists (artists, art historians and curators). The programs consist of workshops, expert meetings, awards, lectures, activities on the internet and internships.

Research Institute focuses first on professional specialists, but students can also approach it with problems they may encounter. With the aid of the open source and open content principle, as much knowledge and expertise as possible is made available by the internet.

As a result of these projects, the Research Institute will generate a relevant number of publications in magazines, journals and conferences, testbeds, prototypes and field trials.

Visual Media Lab is a forum for the creative and critical discussion of the constantly changing media culture.

It is one of the leading international labs for research and production at the intersection of digital art and information technology.

A center of competence for visual digital technologies, the VML provides an innovative environment for research, development and production in the fields of multi-media art works and information technologies of socio-cultural, scientific and economic significance.

Besides pursuing its own development activities, the collaboration with international guest artists as well as with cultural and research institutions worldwide is a central constituent of the Lab’s activities.

The spectrum of productions ranges from digital video, DVD-production and 3D animation to interactive installations and environments to Augmented and Virtual Reality, from software systems for the real-time generation of natural and architectural environments to audio-visual applications for performance contexts.

The studio for electro-instrumental music is the only independent live electronic music centre in the world that is exclusively dedicated to the performing arts.
Studio supports an international community of performers and musicians, and a growing group of visual artists, to develop unique instruments for their work.

STEIM invites these people for residencies and provides them with an artistic and technical environment in which concepts can be given concrete form. It catalyzes their ideas by providing critical feedback grounded in professional experience. These new creations are then exposed to a receptive responsive niche public at STEIM before being groomed for a larger audience.

AA combines artistic work with research and development and is therefore an international forum for international discourse and exchange. By holding concerts, symposia and festivals on a regular basis it brings together composers, musicians, musicologists, music software developers and listeners interested in contemporary music.

Artists in Residence and software developers work on their productions in studios at the lab. With digital sound synthesis, algorithmic composition, live-electronics up to radio plays, interactive sound installations and audiovisual productions their creations cover a broad range of what digital technology can inspire the musical fantasy to.

Despite the technical orientation, musical and artistic work is always put first at the lab for Music and Acoustics, which is one of the reasons it is so widely appreciated in the musical world. The aesthetic spectrum of projects realised at the lab is not only limited to the paradigm of >New Music< in the sense of the twentieth century. Even if the roots of many projects lay there, the lab views itself as a base for all musical approaches which pursuit with open ears towards new tendencies and technologies in music.

For many productions, the lab of Audio and Acoustics cooperates with related institutions, festivals, ensembles and broadcasting. The Labs own artist-in-residency program often additionally supported by foundations or by collective commissions with other institutions.

The Montveideo Preservation Lab is the unique research facility in Europe. Here methods are developed to restore decades old videotape and rare tape cassette formats which are largely no longer playable. With equipment consisting of more than 300 devices, the laboratory is in the position to convert almost 50 various video formats into high-quality digital form and so secure them for the long-term.

The goal of the laboratory is the scientific restoration, preservation and archival storage of the Institutes singular holdings with the help of equipment from private and public sources: a digital Noah’s Arch that saves media art from vanishing.

Works of video art that in many cases have not been showable for more than 30 years, or only in bad copies, can now be seen again in their original quality. The same is true of rare video documentation of art events from the 1960s and 70s. The rescued audio-visual material is made available to the public at exhibitions, in DVD editions and in the collections of the Institute.

Creative Engineering is a group of technology-enthusiastic software and web developers which play a considerable role in the conceptualization and realization of the labs and research projects. The tasks revolve around the center of human-machine-communication, i. e. the areas of computer graphics, computer vision and the integration of forward-looking and/or experimental hardware.

Between technology enthusiasm and engineering discipline, a creative engineer’s motive force consists of enthusiasm for a creative environment and the constant communication within the team.

The Artist in Residence (AiR) programme supports the exploration and development of new work in digital/interactive/network media and technology based arts practice. The residency provides time and resources to artists in a supportive environment to facilitate the creation of new work. We encourage a cross disciplinary and experimental approach. This is a practice based residency designed to enable the development and completion of a new work.

The Center offers an open environment with technical assistance and an active advisory board which will give feedback and support in technical, conceptual and presentation issues. There is access to studio and exhibition equipment, technical support from the Center’s staff and production help from interns. We expect the artist to have knowledge and insight in the technical realization of the concept.