Karel Dudesek
Karel Dudesek (CZ/AT) is an ex-performance artist, TV activist, and professor.
photo: takeawayfestival.com
Karel Dudesek became first known with Minus Delta T: he transported a barrel crude oil to Bagdad during the oil crisis in the seventies. Subsequently, the artists hitchhiked to Poland with US American army uniforms. Minus Delta T acted in the public area, trying to disrupt the usual perspectives on things and stood in best actionistic tradition.
Later Dudesek a.o. changed their artistic practise from the public area to the virtual. The media as society-changing factors became the focus of their art. An omnibus served as a mobile media laboratory from 1985 and under the label "Ponton" the interactive television project "Van Gogh TV" developed. On the Documenta 1992 Dudesek realized with Van Gogh TV a 100 days long interactive television program Piazza Virtuale, which was a combination of telephone, fax, mailbox and live cameras at public places and the control of computer games over Touch-Tone and telephone.
Worlds Within for the Olympic Games 1996 in Atlanta was the largest of Dudesek's projects so far. Worlds Within is a graphically converted Chat Room. In 1999 Dudesek was the successor of Peter Weibel as a professor at the University fuer Angewandte Kunst in Vienna.
