Ubermorgen


UBERMORGEN.COM is a Swiss-Austrian-American artist duo founded in 1995 and consisting of lizvlx and Hans Bernhard. They live and work in Vienna, Basel and S-chanf near St. Moritz in the alpine Engadina valley in Switzerland.

Work

Their main body of work consists of internet art/net.art, installation, video art, photography, software art, performance and uses the convergence of digital media to produce and publish online and offline.
Their early works were media hacking projects using low-tech tools to reach very large audiences. During the work on their best known project Voteauction CNN.com called them "Maverick Austrian Businessmen".
In 2001, they started a collaboration with Christoph Schlingensief for the development and staging of a Hamlet project in Zurich: NAZI~LINE, a bigger than life fake neo-Nazi helpline and exit strategy finding agency.
In 2005 they started the EKMRZ Trilogy, a series of conceptual hacks.
Between 2007–2011 their focus went into research-based productions and Rock Art productions such as TORTURE CLASSICS and CLICKISTAN. They started to work extensively with video during this period.
Since 1999 their work has been shown in museums and galleries in Europe, America, Africa, Australia and Asia and include venues such as SFMOMA, Centre Pompidou, Konsthall Malmoe, NTT ICC Museum Tokyo, Gwangju Design Biennale, ZKM Karlsruhe, MUMOK Vienna, Ars Electronica Linz, WRO Media Art Biennale Wroclaw, MoCA Taipei, Witte de With Rotterdam, Lentos Art Museum Linz, Biennale of Sydney, ARCO Madrid and the New Museum New York.
They have been represented by Fabio Paris Brescia, Berlin and Carroll / Fletcher London.

Life and career

Lizvlx and Hans Bernhard are an artist duo but also a couple in private life. They are engaged and have two children, Billie-Ada and Lola Mae.
Lizvlx was born in Linz and grew up in Wels, Salzburg and Elmira. Hans Bernhard was born at the Yale University Hospital in New Haven, grew up in New Haven and Basel and moved to Vienna to study with Prof. Peter Weibel, and later on with Prof. Lev Manovich, Prof. Peter Lunenfeld Pasadena and Prof. Bazon Brock :de:Bazon Brock and completed his studies in 1999.
Due to his drug abuse and a manic episode in Cape Town 2002, Hans Bernhard was diagnosed bipolar.
Their earliest works were part of the avantgarde Net.art movement and were exclusively shown online. This work became part of the Internet art and Digital art history and is researched at universities and taught in.
The collaboration with both their children, the inclusion of Hans's mental illness and the merger of private and public life led some critics and academics to consider UBERMORGEN.COM as a Gesamtkunstwerk.
Important personal and artistic influences were early meetings with Jean Tinguely, Joseph Beuys, Daniel Spoerri and Eberhard W. Kornfeld in the Basel art scene of the 1980s and with Niki de Saint Phalle in St. Moritz, and the long-time relationship with the Giacometti family in the nearby mountain valleys Val Bregaglia and Engadin in the canton Grisons in Switzerland.

Network

Over the last 15 years UBERMORGEN.COM has been part of the global contemporary technology art scene. Some mentionable connections and collaborations from this period: Net.Artists Alexei Shulgin, Heath Bunting, Olia Lialina, Vuk Ćosić and with contemporary artists Aram Bartholl, Paolo Cirio, James Powderly and Evan Roth from Free Art and Technology Lab and Graffiti Research Lab, Franco and Eva Mattes, IRWIN, Franz West, Janez Janša, Johannes Grenzfurthner, Carsten Nicolai, Minerva Cuevas, The Yes Men, Zhang Peili, Jodi, Miltos Manetas, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Trevor Paglen, Douglas Rushkoff, Lev Manovich, Olga Goriunova and Nicolas Bourriaud.

Publications