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Gerhard Bachfischer  PhD Student, FIT

I was born as a visual designer, although the industry didn't appreciate my talent much until I was grown up. Up till now, I have gathered around 17 years of experience in visual communication practice.

Growing up on the countryside, I moved from my hometown (with its 7,000 residents) in Styria (Austria), to Vienna (1M residents). There I spent most of my professional life bringing text and pictures into a certain order. Creative roles included Graphic Design and Art Direction in international advertising agencies (JWT and Grey) and publishing (Page Verlag). I have also worked as Senior Designer and Creative Director in two design studios that I founded with partners in Vienna (D-Sign and Fischbüro Wien).

After several years of design work, I made the move to Sydney, Australia (a multicultural, multilanguage city; population around 4M). Here, I finished a Masters of Interactive Multimedia at the Institute of Multimedia and Learning (UTS) in 2002.

During my years as a graphic designer, education has been an additional field, I have been working in. For six years, I was part of the teaching staff at the Design Centre in Pöchlarn (Lower Austria) and at several design institutes in Vienna. I taught layout techniques, design thinking and typography. I am currently teaching and coordinating my own subject here at UTS called Introduction to Interactive Media and Advanced Interactive Media both in Visual Communication at the Faculty of Design Architecture and Building. I'm also involved in the teaching team for Visible Language and Motion Graphics.

I wrote a Typography compendium for my students in 1994. Looking back and comparing it to the work I do now – still within typography – I realised how much technological change has shaped my profession.

We are not mere technicians.
We are not throwing words around
for our health. We are not out
here to make a buck, because there
are surely easier ways to do it.
We came here looking for something.
Will you find it? Or will you build it?

from Cohen S. and "A List Apart", (2000); Why are you here?,
available at http://www.alistapart.com/stories/why/

I've learned to communicate and think in a foreign language. I've accomodated to a strange climate and to the fact, that Christmas is the hottest (instead of the coldest) time of the year.

The last couple of years have brought a lot of changes to my professional life too. I have expanded my visual design method into the area of moving images, user/viewer interactions and the visual representations of dynamic content. I am currently trying to bring additional focus to the processes and structures behind the visible surface of design to create visual systems, which are more than ever, centred around user needs, rather than selfish creations without sense and purpose.

M A S T E R S   P R O J E C T   ( U T S )

My 2002 Masters of Interactive Multimedia project describes the idea of a platform for New Media Art. The prototype/proof of concept should describe a common ground for viewing and distributing New Media Art to people wherever they want to experience it, whether it is in their living rooms, in lounge areas of clubs or in public spaces.

The inspiration for the art-platform, as well as the artworks themselves came from different sources. In particular, the juxtaposition between sharp calculated computer images, the randomness of computer errors and system crashes, nurtured the plan to develop works of art based on these two parameters. A third component was the user, who was participating in the artwork itself as curious viewer (active art), initializing and nurturing the creation process (reactive art) or interacting with other viewers/users via a network (connective art).

The content shown here depicts the notion of an ever changing city. The abstraction of urban forms and their slowly pased random generation should make the viewer wonder, if the artwork they saw some minutes ago is actually the same one they see right now? The generative process, based on parameters set by the artist, forms an always changing work of art, an urban coastline which is based on my notion of Sydney as my new home.

The colour variation shown below is the online version of the interactive piece called "cityscape".

The research component of the project included the development of User Scenarios to describe intended use as well as a series of interviews to develop an understanding of the user's concept of New Media Art, their willingness to accept a technology as the one proposed and their requirements to actually interact with the art platform and modular content. This research lead me to my current research interest in HCI and towards collaborative work practice and a user centred design approach.

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21 July 2004, authorised by: Toni Robertson
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