Architecture as an "ecological" aesthetic encompasses both the construction of external architectural spaces and the design of internalized electronic image and sound spaces. Wolfgang Strauss. 2006  

Wolfgang Strauss builds architectures for thought — spatial, digital, and conceptual. His environments transform data into landscapes and interfaces into places of encounter. He works with the precision of an architect and the curiosity of a researcher, designing systems that reveal how knowledge moves, how perception unfolds, and how humans orient themselves in hybrid spaces. For him, media art is a terrain of transformation: a field where structures breathe, where information becomes form, and where thinking finds a place to inhabit.

Wolfgang Strauss (born 1951) is a German artist, architect, and digital art researcher known for creating architectural and electronic spaces that function as environments for thinking. His work bridges physical architecture, virtual reality, mixed reality, and semantic visualization, with a focus on how spatial design and interactive systems shape human perception and knowledge.

Educated and active across several German universities, Strauss has developed innovative interfaces and environments, including the Responsive Workbench, the patented touch‑free PointScreen, and large‑scale mixed‑reality systems such as the eCulture Factory. His research explores networked information spaces, knowledge visualization, and performative interfaces that make digital processes perceptible and meaningful.

Together with Monika Fleischmann, he co‑conceived the internationally recognized media art archive netzspannung.org and contributed to the development of research infrastructures at Fraunhofer Institutes (IAIS / IMK) and the ZKM Center for Art and Media. He is the author of more than 100 scientific and artistic publications and has held multiple academic and research positions.

Strauss’s work has received major international recognition, including the Golden Nica for Interactive Art, the iF Communication Design Award, the Medida‑Prix, the ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art (2018), and the 2023 eCulture Award.

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.