Ingeborg Reichle
Ingeborg Reichle, PhD, is a contemporary art historian, cultural theorist, and sci-art curator. Her main research interests cover critical media studies, new media art history, computational aesthetics as well as the encounter of new media art with cutting-edge technologies such as biotechnology and synthetic biology, taking also into account artistic responses to systemic risks and global challenges such as climate change.
She is currently a Professor in Computational Media and Arts at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in Guangzhou, China.
She gained her M.A. in Art History, Sociology, and Classical Archaeology from the University of Hamburg, Germany, in 1998 and her Ph.D. from the Humboldt University Berlin, Germany, in 2004 with the dissertation Kunst aus dem Labor: Zum Verhältnis von Kunst und Wissenschaft im Zeitalter der Technoscience (Art Emerging from the Laboratory: On the Relationship of Art and Science in the Age of Technoscience), published in 2005 with Springer, where she also gained her habilitation Bilderwissen-Wissensbilder. Zur Gegenwart der Epistemologie der Bilder (Image knowledge — knowledge images: On the epistemology of images in the world of today) (2013). Her dissertation won a prestigious publication award from the Andrea von Braun Foundation. Before joining the CMA faculty, she was active as expert and co-curator of the 4th Resonances Initiative NaturArchy: Towards a Natural Contract which fostered the art–science policy nexus at the Centre for Advanced Studies at the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission in Ispra, Italy. She also served as an expert for the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia in Zurich, Switzerland, where she co-designed the NanoARTS program in collaboration with the Fribourg-based Adolphe Merkle Institute (AMI). Until 2024, she was a member of the Board of Trustees of the ZKM – Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, where she was involved in a number of research exhibitions, including BioMedia: The Age of Media with Life-like Behavior (2021).
In recent years Ingeborg Reichle served also as Full Professor in the Department of Media Theory at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria, the successor to the position formerly held by media artist and media theorist Peter Weibel. In Vienna she was also the founding chair of the Department of Cross-disciplinary Strategies (CDS), where she co-designed a new cross-disciplinary learning environment with an integrated BA study program on applied studies in art, science, philosophy, and global challenges. In Berlin, she held the position of a post-doctoral research fellow at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW) from 2005 until 2012 in the context of the interdisciplinary research groups Die Welt als Bild(The world as an image) and Bildkulturen (Image cultures). In 2005, she co-initiated a cross-disciplinary postgraduate program to promote emerging researchers from the humanities, the social sciences, as well as the natural sciences with a focus on visual studies, image science, and new research methodologies. Her students have won various awards including the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and the Future Emerging Art and Technology award from the European Commission.
While she was a faculty member and PhD student in the Art History Department of the Humboldt University Berlin, Germany, from 1998 until 2003 she was also co-initiator and Principal Investigator on the large-scale research project PROMETHEUS: The Distributed Digital Image Archive for Research and Teaching, which was extensively funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). For her work on designing and implementing PROMETHEUS as well as starting the student Web Team initiative, she received the Excellent Teaching Award from Humboldt University Berlin in 2002.
Ingeborg Reichle was a Visiting Professor at the Facultad de Filosofia y Letras Instituto de Investigaciones Esteticas, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM), Mexico, 2013–2014 and at the Centro da Filosofia das Ciências Faculdade de Ciências, University of Lisbon, Portugal, 2007, and a senior fellow at the Joint Research Centre (JRC), European Commission (working group: HUMAINT — Human behavior and machine intelligence), Seville, Spain, 2023, at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS), Potsdam, Germany, 2022, and at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, Wassenaar, The Netherlands, 2006. She was a visiting scholar at the Center for Genomics and Systems Biology, New York University Abu Dhabi, UAE, 2023; at the Lorentz Centre, University of Leiden, The Netherlands, 2013; at the Department of Communications and New Media, National University of Singapore, 2012; and at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China, 2006.
She is the author and co-editor of a number of books including Art in the Age of Technoscience: Genetic Engineering, Robotics, and Artificial Life in Contemporary Art, Springer: Vienna 2009; Plastic Ocean: Art and Science Responses to Marine Pollution, De Gruyter: Berlin, Boston 2021; IMAGE MATCH: Visueller Transfer, “Imagescapes” und Intervisualität in globalen Bildkulturen (Visual transfer, “imagescapes,” and intervisuality in global visual cultures), Fink Verlag, Munich, 2012; Atlas der Weltbilder (Atlas of images of the world), Akademie Verlag: Berlin, 2011; Maßlose Bilder: Visuelle Ästhetik der Transgression (Images that know no bounds: Visual aesthetics of transgression), Fink Verlag: Munich, 2009; Visuelle Modelle (Visual models), Fink Verlag: Munich, 2008; Verwandte Bilder: Die Fragen der Bildwissenschaft (Related images: The issues of image science), Kadmos Verlag: Berlin, 2007. She has published over 100 articles in internationally respected journals and contributed many book chapters with publishers such as MIT Press, Springer, Brill, University of Chicago Press, Herder, Suhrkamp, Fink, and other publisher.
Research Area(s): new media art history, critical media studies, arts-based research, visual studies, theory of biomedia and bioart, curating the art–science policy nexus, curating art and science collaboration, art in the age of technoscience, computational aesthetics, AI in human creativity, the origins of art.
Email: ingeborgr@hkust-gz.edu.cn