Almut Schilling

Almut Schilling is a conservator and researcher, educated at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and various international institutions. 
Based in Vienna, her studio is specified in preservation of electronic and digital art.
As analog native she is highly interested in pushing her boundaries while working through challenging projects and thinking TRANSdisciplinarily.
Framed by a practical and scientific context of art collections, artists, technologists and information scientists she sharpens her skills continuously in documenting, installing and archiving time-based media art; implementing migration and emulation as strategy; researching the obsolescence in all the various appearances and existence;
developing alternative concepts, discussing and evaluating those novel specific demands for preservation purposes.
She is passionate about the NEW digital and addicted to the obsolete MATERIAL.

Rotting sounds.

“Rotting sounds – Embracing the temporal deterioration of digital audio” is a 3-year project of artistic research funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and hosted by the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. The core project team consists of Thomas Grill (principal investigator and project manager), Till Bovermann (University of Applied Arts Vienna) and Almut Schilling (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna).

Most of today’s media output, be it audio or video, is produced and stored in the digital domain. Although digital data are adorned by the myth of lossless transmission and migration, everyday experience does prove the existence of degradation and, ultimately, data loss in various forms. This pertains to the physical nature of storage media and playback devicesas well as to media formats and software in the context of their technological infrastructure. The project strives to elaborate on the causes, mechanisms and effects of such deterioration, specifically in the context of digital audio.

Since degradation cannot be avoided on principle, it is our general aim to unearth latent degrees of freedom pertaining to the artistic practice in the omnipresence of decay.