"Monika Fleischmann is one of the leading pioneers in applications of virtual, mixed, and augmented reality to art and culture. With her partner, Wolfgang Strauss, she founded Netzspannung.org ...", Kim Veltman, 2005, Virtual Maastricht McLuhan Institute   

Monika Fleischmann moves between worlds — between gesture and code, body and image, intuition and interface.

Her work opens spaces where perception becomes a form of thinking and where knowledge emerges not as information but as experience. She treats media art as a living sensorium: a place where reflection takes shape in the body, where the digital becomes tactile, and where the act of seeing becomes a choreography of attention. Her installations invite visitors to pause, to sense, to question — to stay awake within the accelerating currents of digital culture.

Monika Fleischmann (born 1950 in Karlsruhe) is a pioneering media artist and researcher whose work has shaped the field of virtual, mixed, and augmented reality in art and culture. Trained in fashion design, art, and performing arts in Zurich and Berlin, she entered digital media in the mid‑1980s and quickly became one of its most influential voices.

She co‑founded ART+COM in 1987, the first German research institute dedicated to digital media, art, and technology, and later established major research departments such as the MARS Lab at the German National Research Center for Information Technology (GMD) and the eCulture Factory at Fraunhofer AI. Her groundbreaking works — including Berlin‑Cyber City, Home of the Brain, Liquid Views, Semantic Map, and Energy Passages — introduced new forms of interactive and performative interfaces that reveal how perception, reflection, and decision‑making unfold in digital environments.

Fleischmann’s contributions have been recognized with numerous international awards, among them the Golden Nica for Interactive Art (1992), the SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art (2018), the Female Inventor Award (2017), and the 2023 eCulture Award. In 2024, she and Wolfgang Strauss were inducted into the AWE XR Hall of Fame as pioneers of virtual, mixed, and augmented reality.

Today, she continues to develop new works and to reconstruct early media art pieces from the duo’s extensive archive, preparing both a comprehensive publication and a film on their four decades of artistic research.

Duo Biography

"Our work asks not what technology can do, but what it allows us to understand."

Fleischmann and Strauss create spaces in which thinking becomes an experience. They treat digital media art as a Denkraum — a place where knowledge emerges through encounters between body and image, gesture and code, and architecture and imagination. Together, they create environments that reveal the act of seeing, the moment of decision, and the interplay between human presence and digital processes. Their installations transform data into atmosphere, interfaces into places of reflection, and technology into a medium through which to experience the world anew. Fleischmann and Strauss bring different skills to their work: Fleischmann is an artist, fashion designer, and researcher, while Strauss is an architect, craftsman, and researcher. In dialogue, their work becomes a hybrid terrain: part laboratory, part stage, and part landscape of thought. Here, visitors encounter themselves and each other in the shifting light of a culture transformed by digital systems. Over the past four decades, Fleischmann and Strauss have explored how humans inhabit virtual, mixed, and networked realities. Rather than encouraging us to escape the digital world, their art invites us to engage with it consciously — awake, attentive, and ready to think.