Margarete
Jahrmann has been awarded the Austrian Art Prize 2025
28.08.2025
Media artist and theorist Margarete Jahrmann will receive the Austrian Art Prize 2025. This was announced
by the Federal Ministry for Housing, Art, Culture, Media and Sport on 27 August. "Margarete Jahrmann has dedicated her life
to a serious examination of play, or a playful approach to serious topics in digital cultures, technopolitics, critical virtuosity,
and virtuality,’ according to the ministry's statement.
‘"Her practice ranges from manifestos
and academic writings on anarchic net art, self-built servers and experimental computer games to installations, performative
settings and interactive exhibition formats. Jahrmann combines art and activism with digital cultures and creates contemporary
forms of experimental game art. In doing so, she never ceases to question herself critically. Her work shows one thing above
all: we don't have to play against each other, but with each other."
Margarete Jahrmann has been a professor at
the University of Applied Arts Vienna since 2021, where she heads the Experimental Game Cultures department. She has initiated
and led numerous international and interdisciplinary artistic research projects, including the research project "ROBOPSY.
An artistic exploration of collective memory through role-playing games with AI language models‘ (2024-2027, WWTF Vienna Science
and Technology Fund), or the FWF-supported PEEK project ’The psycholudic approach. Exploring play for a sustainable future"
(2023-2026).
As an active artist and author, she regularly publishes and exhibits works of art that deal with play, playful
methods, AI and neuroscience. In 2024, she published a monograph on KOPFGELD and other LUDIC EXPERIMENTS (self-published/preprint)
and in 2025 she is organising a lecture series on LUDIC METHOD (public soirées and tea lectures).
In her
art, Margarete Jahrmann builds on drawings of unconventional game mechanics and explores experimental systems. Her themes
include games for/with non-human actants, AI, and the cognitive, emotional and political conditions for a compatible world.
Her awards include the prestigious prix ars electronica 2003, the Berlin transmediale software arts award 2004 and the Media
Art Prize of the City of Vienna 2020, as well as participation in exhibitions and conferences as an invited speaker (expanded
animation from electronica 2022 and Cubu University, Math, AI and Neuroscience 2023) on AI, facial recognition and neuro-interfaces
as LUDIC OBJECTS.
