Heidi Grundmann

During the past thirty years, Heidi Grundmann has participated in countless telematic art projects, and organised and curated large-scale symposiums and international exhibits related to artistic practices using electronic media – particularly radio, television, and Internet. She gives papers and writes on the arts and new media and has edited publications such as Art & Telecommunication, (Vienna/Vancouver, 1984); The Geometry of Silence (Vienna, 1991); On the Air (Innsbruck, 1993); ZEITGLEICH (Triton Verlag, Vienna, 1994) and Sound Drifting (Triton Verlag, Vienna, 2000). At the moment, she’s involved as curator in several new projects, and is currently developing archival methods for radio art projects from the 90s.

Inspired by the Fluxus movement and by the ideas of the Eternal Network, she was the founder, in 1987, and the producer until 2000, of the radio art program Kunstradio, on the Austrian State radio ORF. By 1995, Kunstradio had become one of the first online audio art galleries, launched with the support of The Thing in Vienna. Originally referred to as “colour radio”, Kunstradio has since become a hub of international telematic projects involving various media such as radio (FM, AM, short wave), the telephone, and the Net.

Formidable guardian of artistic diversity on the electromagnetic waves, Grundmann has devised ways to build bridges between public institutions and underground artistic circles – serving as much as an infiltrator as a producer. Although she has never called herself an “artist” per se, Heidi Grundmann is, in our minds, a great networking artist, as much for being the enabler who makes vital, creative meetings possible between individuals and collectives around the world, as for everything that she has facilitated among independent artists in terms of access to the technical resources needed for production and dissemination.