My name is Wolfgang Bittner. I was born N 47 48.308, E 13 2.284 at 5:32 a.m. in November 1981. Since then, I have moved around quite a lot, living in different places such as Salzburg, Linz, Rotterdam and Vienna. Currently I am living in Den Haag.

When I was still very young, one of my favorite hobbies was to paint and draw. I am not sure if I was really good at it, but my family and my environment told me so, and supported me as good as they could. Just after finishing the Gymnasium and after one year of civil service, which is still obligatory in Austria as the alternative to the army, I signed up at the Kunstuniversitaet Linz and joined the class for Experimentelle Visuelle Gestaltung. I also studied Interactive Media Design at the WdKA in Rotterdam (half year student exchange), Theatre, Film- and Media Science as well as Media Informatics in Vienna, before I permanently moved to Holland to finish off my studies with a Master at the ArtScience Interfaculty in Den Haag.

At the moment I am working on a freelance basis as a new media designer and founded my own company pixelbypixel and also do my own art projects as an autonomous media artist.

My artistic life always had two sides. I am an artist, and exhibit my work at galleries and festivals. But I also enjoy applying my skills and collaborating with others, doing websites, interactive programming, graphic design and time based work such as video projections. I don’t share this romantic self-conception with artists who like to always breed their ideas in a lonely room [although I sometimes do this, too]. I like to work together with people, and get very enthusiastic about interesting projects and ideas.

I just can’t stop doing things. Maybe Sigmund Freud would call it something like escapism, but after a few days of lying at the beach or hiking in the mountains, I am getting terribly ‘nervous’. I like to make connections between the things I see. In a way, everything has a meaning, even if it is only symbolic, and once this way of thinking has started in your head, it is impossible to switch it off. My goals are to be able to continue what I am doing at the moment, that is, being creative. Work together with nice people, express my ideas and share them with others.

I try to be very open for the things happening in my environment or in society in general. Art allows me to integrate a wide range of events from completely different fields in my work. I am especially interested in the relation between human beings and the tools that they create. I can get very excited by thinking about how people lived in different ages when visiting ruins or looking at old etchings or maps, for example. Maybe out of the same fascination, I get a lot of inspiration from thinking about how the things, especially technological things, influence our lives nowadays, and our perception of the world around us. I have a quite ambiguous attitude towards technology. On the one hand side technology offers us all these possibilities and makes a lot possible. On the other hand it happens very often that we just use technical tools, and these tools become a filter through which we look at reality, and forget about to think about the real world instead. It is this field of tension that inspires me. My idea about this is to think about different ways of working with technology creatively, and make something surprising and beautiful with it.

I think each artwork or artistic product is created in a process. Having a good idea is great, but the result you have in mind initially very often changes while working on its manifestation. Conceptual art tried to end with this by stating that there is no need for actually making the physical work, the idea is the art. I don’t agree with this. I appreciate conceptual works a lot, but sometimes sticking to a too tight corset can also narrow down and lead to quite dry and hermetic results. The process of making leads to surprising and new aspects of the initial idea. The artistic process is to find a form for an idea, and the idea grows and changes in this process. Nevertheless, I think works which are based on some kind of concept are very often much more interesting than others which are just a personal expression. Just making things that look good is not making art. Art is communicating an idea. I try to find a balance between concept and aesthetics in my work.