Ulf Langheinrich

Ulf Langheinrich is an audiovisual artist, painter and music composer, born in Wolfen, Germany, in 1960. He studied industrial design before moving to West Germany in 1984, where he started to develop the basics of his language in painting, photography and electronic music. He moved to Austria in 1988. There he co-founded the new media duo Granular-Synthesis with Austrian artist Kurt Hentschlaeger in Vienna, Austria in 1991. During more than a decade, the artists applied and extended the technique of "granular synthesis" (sampling) to both the video and sound material in a theatrical approach and marked a new step in the aesthetic of perception with their audiovisual installations and performances. From 2003 they decided to work on their own projects. After the Granular-Synthesis period, Ulf Langheinrich created various large-scale solo projects, cinematic live shows, installations and videos including Drift (2005), Waveform A (2005), Hemisphere (2006) - hemispheric film on a suspended dome granted by the Federal Culture Foundation of Germany, his first stereoscopic film Land (2008), commissioned by Liverpool Biennial '08 and OSC-L (2018) on the fly tower of the London National Theatre in Lumiere London festival in 2018. He co-directed the short film Spintex (2008) with British artist Gina Czarnecki, created images for the opera Solaris (2015) by Dai Fujikura and Saburo Teshigawara and also directed various dance performance with video projects, such as Full Zero (2017) and the Movement series (2008-2012). He composed the music scores of Sinken (1999) - with Granular-Synthesis -, for symphonic orchestra and electronics as part of Dangerous Visions, a project commissioned and performed by Orchestre National de Lille and Art Zoyd, Minus (2002) with Granular-Synthesis, and under his own name, Syntony (2005) for the Festival d'Art Lyrique of Aix-en-Provence, Drift Live (2006) and Ku (2010). Recently, he composed Re-Time (2015) and Sinken II (2015) for orchestra and 3D video. His works were presented among others in Barcelona (MACBA - Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona), Berlin (Martin-Gropius-Bau), Dresden (Hellerau European Center for the Arts), Eindhoven (STRP Festival), Gent (Film Festival), Hong Kong (Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre), Madrid (ARCO), Karlsruhe (ZKM), Leipzig (Institut fuer Zukunft, Leipzig Oper), London (Lumiere London at National Theatre), Melbourne (ACMI), Montreal (MAC and SAT), Moscow (Red October and Platforma Winzavod Art Centre), New York (MoMA PS1), Perth (PICA), Roma (Romaeuropa, Palladium, MACRO Testaccio - La Pelanda, Palazzo delle Esposizioni), Rotterdam (DEAF), San Francisco (Recombinant Festival), Seoul (Museum of Contemporary Art, Incheon Digital Arts Festival), Shanghai (Zendai MoMA, Shanghai Sculpture Space, Science and Technology Museum, Chronus Art Center and Power Station of Art), Taipei (Fine Arts Museum), Tokyo (ICC-NTT), Vienna (Wien Modern), Washington (Hirshhorn Museum and National Air and Space Museum, both parts of the Smithsonian Institute). As member of Granular-Synthesis, he won the Austrian prize for new media art (1993), the Grand Prix Open Competition ARTEC in Japan (1995), a PS1 Residency Grant in New York City and the Austrian State Grant for Fine Arts (1999). In 2005, he got a Siemens grant and was "Featured artist" at Ars Electronica Festival in Linz. His solo works between 2002-2010 were published on the DVD Visionaries 21: The Aesthetic of Sensory ([error], 2013). Besides his artistic activities, Ulf Langheinrich taught in universities and high schools in Europe, Australia and China. Since 2016, he is the Artistic Director of CynetArt Festival, Dresden.