Daniel Egg

Smoke – the medium for earlier forms of communication – has been degraded over time from an intellectual gesture of the 1920s, and a sign of youthful immortality of the 1960s, to the present-day trigger of social frowning-upon. This development is reflected by Daniel Egg (born in Vienna in 1973, lives in Vienna), who has employed cigarette smoke in his project Information Stream as a means of communication, developing a semantic vocabulary of form that is manifested in smoke. In the performative self-experiment, he fills his lungs with smoke so as to generate a visual alphabet of the spoken language. 

A catalogue is published together with the project, with texts by Veit Loers, Franz Thalmair, Thomas Mießgang, Günther Holler-Schuster, and a discussion between Daniel Egg and Katrin Bucher Trantow as well as illustrations of the whole series, consisting of film, photographs and light installations.  

11.12.2017-11.04.2018

18.11.-31.12.2014:

To mark his new work on the BIX facade of the Kunsthaus, Katrin Bucher Trantow conducts a discussion with Daniel Egg and the Viennese philosopher Robert Pfaller, who in his book ‘Wofür es sich zu leben lohnt’ (What Makes Life Worth Living) turns against a social and political trend which ‘thrusts nothing but easily digestible things under people’s noses’. As a result of this way of thinking, one part of the Kunsthaus has been turned into a smoking room, and not only in a conceptual sense.  

18.11.2014, 7pm, Luise im Kunsthaus

Robert Pfaller is professor of philosophy at the University of Applied Art in Vienna and founding member of the Viennese research group for psychoanalysis, stuzzicadenti. Publications (selection): ‘Wofür es sich zu leben lohnt. Elemente materialistischer Philosophie’ (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2011); Ästhetik der Interpassivität (Hamburg: philo fine arts, 2008); Das schmutzige Heilige und die reine Vernunft. Symptome der Gegenwartskultur (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2008).