Margarete Jahrmann (A/CH), artist and media epistemologist, born 1967 in Vienna, lives in Zurich. Her working focus are games arts and software scenes.
Research Topic: Software Scenes and Real Life. Formats of social gatherings in coded cultures as radical constructivist practice for the reshaping of social and technological frameworks in Open Source engine development and Game Arts. Her arts and research work was exhibited and presented internationally and was given several awards. In 1996, she established the independent art server konsum.net with the artist Max Moswitzer in Vienna. In 2004 they received at Software Arts Award transmediale Berlin the second price for the anti-war shooter installation nybble engine under the label climax.at. In 2003 the Prix Ars Electronica award of distinction in interactive arts and in 2004 a research award of the Artists in labs-Programm, artificial intelligence lab Zurich followed.
Public exhibitions of Game Arts works with a dimension of real life play were shown for example at DEAF, Dutch Electronic Arts Festival 2003, for which occasion the anti war shooter was developed in collaboration with the V2lab Rotterdam. In 2003 the show Games, Computerspiele von Künstlerinnen in Dortmund showed the retro-console style networked game with live ASCII video feed and databody displays, linX3D.konsum.net. Its first version was exhibited in 1999 at the net_consition show and is now in the permanent collection at the ZKM Karlsruhe. In 2004 also participations followed as for example at Game.Arts at the Weltkulturerebe Hütte Völklingen or at the Art In Motion Festival 04 in Los Angeles at the Armory Center for the Arts.
Jahrmann is lecturing internationally, as for example in 2004 at the transmediale Berlin together with Erik Davis on Spam Poetry, at the coded culture symposion at the Museums Quartier Vienna on the topic of machinima game-filmmaking scenes, on epistemological circular and causal feedback loops in code-based artsworks at the Basics-Festival Salzburg or at the art and science conference Fusion on open source game arts developments in Zurich.
She also was since 2000 internationally teaching, helt workshops on Game Arts, free hardware and Modding Cultures in Zurich, Vienna and at the MA Media Design Programm at the Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam.