I am an Austrian researcher and curator currently based in Dundee, Scotland, where I work as Reader in Computational Media at Abertay University. My work focuses on artistic and activist experiments with emerging technologies (primarily blockchain and AI), intellectual property issues in contemporary art, and aspects of experimental videogame culture.
In 2021, I published the monograph Tactical Entanglements: AI Art, Creative Agency, and the Limits of Intellectual Property with meson press, which is freely available under an Open Access license. More recently, I released Structures of Belonging as part of Aksioma’s Postscriptum Series (2023), to begin re-imagining blockchain technologies beyond digital property enclosures. I co-curated Vector Festival (Toronto) from 2014 to 2020, and was lead organiser of the 2018 MoneyLab symposium (London). My writing about art and technology has been featured in books including Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain and the MoneyLab Reader 2, in journals such as Leonardo, Philosophy & Technology, Culture Machine, and Media Theory, and in art magazines including Spike Art Magazine and Outland.
I can be reached on Twitter, through this contact form, or at my institutional email: m [.] zeilinger [@] abertay.ac.uk.
After many years in Vienna, Toronto, and London, I am currently based in Dundee, Scotland, where I hold a research and teaching position as Reader in Computational Media at Abertay University.
Much of my work focuses on artistic and activist experiments with emerging technologies – specifically artificial intelligence and distributed ledger technologies (aka, the blockchain). This frames a broader interest in digital art, appropriation-based art practices, theories of cultural ownership and intellectual property, political economies of new media, and aspects of experimental videogame culture. Most recently, my research also focuses on non-human and more-than-human agency.
A common thread running through many of my activities is the exploration of how concepts such as authorship, creativity, originality, agency, and ownership are reconfigured in emerging tech contexts; how these concepts become legally and/or algorithmically encoded in service of capital; and how digital artist/activist communities respond critically to these developments.
My monograph Tactical Entanglements: AI Art, Creative Agency, and the Limits of Intellectual Property (published in 2021 with meson press, and freely available under an Open Access license) brings many of these interests and topics together. Since publication of that book, I continue to contribute to emerging discourse on non-human agency and ‘creative AI,’ for example in the encyclopedic anthology Chimeras: Inventory of Synthetic Cognition (Onassis Foundation 2022). My most recent contribution to discourse on blockchain art and decentralised computing is Structures of Belonging, an effort to begin re-imagining blockchain technologies beyond digital property enclosures (Aksioma Postscriptum Series 2023). On the broader topic of copyright issues in digital culture, I co-edited the interdisciplinary collection Dynamic Fair Dealing with Rosemary J. Coombe and Darren Wershler (Univ. of Toronto Press 2014).
Over the years, my writing on art and technology has been published widely in books such as Meta.space – Visions of Space from the Middle Ages to the Digital Age (Distanz Verlag 2022), the MoneyLab Reader Vol. 2 (Institute of Network Culture 2018), Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain (Torque Editions 2017), or Sampling Media (Oxford Univ. Press 2014). My work also apepars in key journals including Leonardo (2023), Culture Machine (2021), Media Theory (2019), and Philosophy & Technology (2018), and has been featured in contemporary art publications such as Spike Art Magazine and Outland.
I frequently speak at international art organisations and festivals that focus on new media and technology, such as Aksioma (Ljubljana, Slovenia), the Bergen Center for Electronic Art (BEK) (Bergen, Norway), Uroboros Festival (Prague, Czech Republic), or Zentrum für Netzkunst (Berlin, Germany).
In addition to research and teaching, I am involved in various curatorial activities. The most long-running of these was the Toronto-based Vector Festival, which I co-directed and/or co-curated from 2014 to 2020.
I also advise artists and creative practitioners on intellectual property questions – most commonly around issues related to fair dealing/fair use. In this capacity, I have served as consultant and/or expert witness on a number of legal cases.
This website is quasi-permanently under construction, and built with various open source tools (Jekyll, Ruby, Liquid, YAML, Sass, Git). In the not unlikely event that the site might be misbehaving, here is an external link to downloadable copies of most of my publications. Last updated 01 June 2024)