Master's projects | summer semester 2025

The Art & Science Master's projects of the summer semester 2025 are being exhibited under the umbrella of AAA during the Angewandte Festival 2025 from 25-28 June, 11:00-21:00.

The Master's examinations are on 18 June 2025, at the following times:

09:00 | Rebecca Lucia Martínková | The Burial of My Own

2025, Digital collage

Exhibition: Vordere Zollamtsstrasse 7, 1st floor "Brücke", 1030 Vienna

 

The Burial of My Own is a work inspired by the struggle present in archaeological research ofpreserving the deceased person's identity and humanity after death. It discusses the problematics of the limited information archaeologists often have to work with.
The artist used X-ray photography of their own body and personal belongings to create a picture of their body, depicting what future archaeologists might uncover. This method highlights the gaps and limitations in archaeological interpretation and raises questions about what truly remains of a person’s life, rather than what is present after death.
The materials visible in the X-rays are often the same ones most likely to survive in a burial context—yet they rarely represent the full reality of a person’s life.

09:30 | Rebeka Csombordi | The Simulacrum of Anthropomorphic Performance: An Interdisciplinary Enquiry into Digital Algorithms

2025, Interactive Multimedia-Installation

Exhibition: Main building at Oskar-Kokoschka-Platz 2, 4th floor, Room B2, 1010 Vienna (Schwanzer-Trakt)

 

The Simulacrum of Anthropomorphic Performance explores the intersection of human agency and algorithmic reliance through an interdisciplinary artwork combining speculative fiction, sculpture, and interactive design.

Centered on Aegis, a biomechanical AI in a post-apocalyptic future, the project critiques present-day dependence on digital algorithms by inviting participants to engage with a grotesque survival quiz, where machine logic clashes with human intuition. Presented as an immersive installation, the work frames visitors as survivors negotiating trust in AI, mirroring contemporary tensions between convenience and autonomy. Through playful absurdity and sci-fi dystopia, the project prompts reflection on the erosion of human agency in an increasingly algorithmic world.
@beccabordi
 

 

10:00 | Nicholas Matranga | Speculative collaboration as a practice in the appraisal of time 

2025, Installation

Exhibition: Georg-Coch-Platz 2 (former Postsparkasse), Tiefparterre/Lower Mezzanine, Room Star 11

 

Unfolding as a drift between presence and absence, tracing an unfinished dialogue with I. Rice Pereira. Seeking not to recover, to fix or to resolve, but to inhabit the fissures where meaning defers, and relations remain unsettled. Collaboration is approached not as a fusion, but as a practice of spacing — an encounter with what withdraws even as it insists. Voices are neither preserved nor erased; they scatter, refract, and echo across disjunctive temporalities. The work becomes a field where writing, listening, and absence touch without closure, where gesture reaches and recedes. Through this, the project gestures toward another mode of relational drifts: one that welcomes separation, resists completion, and remains open to what cannot be fully gathered.

10:30 | Flora Safar | Charrada - Moments of Understanding

2025, Installation

Exhibition: Georg-Coch-Platz 2 (former Postsparkasse), Hochparterre/Mezzanine, Room 044, 1010 Vienna

 

How do we understand each other even when we don’t understand each other? A modified game of charades, called Charrada, becomes an artistic experimental method to experience, observe and discuss communication between people of multilingual backgrounds. The name Charrada was made up in reference to other names for charade games, from which this version varies only in the aspect that the use of different languages is a central mechanism of the gameplay. Different modalities like movement, drawing or translation are utilized, playfully showcasing the resourcefulness and creativity of human communicators. Ultimately, mutual understanding is always attainable through collaborative social effort.

11:15 | Gabriela Gažová | Coming-of-(R)age: A Vandalistic Box

Guerilla Installation, Participative Project

Exhibition: Guerrilla Installation at University premises

 

Can rebellion be prompted? And by whom? What does teenage rage look like? What formscan resistance take? The project A Vandalistic Box is a playful exploration of guerrilla artivism, and ways of rebelling (not) just against school-enforced dress codes, gender roles, and institutional hierarchies – all while debating how one can challenge patriarchal societal structures while growing up in them.
As a reaction to the newly enforced gendered dress code at my old high school in Slovakia, I got in touch with its students and designed fu*cute shirts which turn the rules on their head – and in collaboration with the teenagers, I have offered these as prompts for conversation, rebellion, and unboxing of their reactions to all of this BS.

11:45 | Lilian Kaufmann | On the Entanglement of Topology and Perception

2025, Experimental Sculpture

Exhibition: Georg-Coch-Platz 2 (former Postsparkasse), Hochparterre/Mezzanine, Room 037, 1010 Vienna

 

The project „O – On the Entangelement of Topology and Perception“ is a selfexperiment in which I want to evaluate how much of our surrounding is shaped by the emphasize we put on specific objects. The object of my choosing is not of fixed shape but rather an idea brought to us by the creativeness of mathematic’s topology. The torus becomes the object of my desire. A torus can be any item that has exactly one hole going through some part of it.
This thesis is a very metaphorical work with an emphasize on looking at the world searching for same-ness rather than looking through an individualistic lense. For months I have been collecting tori that I have found lying around on the ground and in the exhibition I am going to invite the audience to par-take in my collection to gather a sense of equivalence through the way of the torus.

12:15 | Theresa Hajek | I think it was Nervous too: Moving with Robots

2025, Performative Installation

Exhibition: Georg-Coch-Platz 2 (former Postsparkasse), Hochparterre/Mezzanine, Room 044, 1010 Vienna

 

The objective of the following work is the making of a human-robot experience, with a focus on the bodily connection to robots in a movement scenario. I propose an artistic exploration of the dynamic between humans and machines; to investigate bodily sensations in human-robot interactions. The artistic research project was realized in cooperation with the Creative Robotics Lab, Linz to produce a movement experiment. Bodily sensation mapping (BSM) was used as a self-reporting tool to assess physical and emotional experiences humans have when engaging with robots. In a first step, experiments were carried out, in which participants were invited to interact with a robot and afterwards they were asked to draw their bodily sensations in a body silhouette. Through BSM data was collected and translated by dancers into a movement score, which resulted in a choreography and installation.

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All students have been supervised by Univ.-Prof. Virgil Widrich.

Members of the Jury:
Ass. Prof. Dr.phil. Monika Halkort
Univ.-Prof. Julienne Lorz
a.o.Univ.-Prof. i.R. Dr.phil. Ernst Strouhal
Univ.-Prof. Virgil Widrich (Chair)