about

Conny Zenk is a media artist working at the intersection of performance, video, and sound in the context of urban architecture and the city. Her working method is transdisciplinary and artistically explorative using digital and analog interfaces, vehicles, and media. Since 2017 she curates the participatory event series RAD Performance.

Conny Zenk has been organizing Night Rides since 2014, which took place for the first time as part of CITY OF NOISE with Record Labels from Vienna. Entitled Dance your Bike! she is developing a new composition format for the bicycle, as part of an Artistic Research Pilot Project at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. In 2019, RAD Performance will take place in Upper Austria at the Festival of Regions as part of Creative Europe project Centriphery, named RADschen Wanderungen.

Conny Zenk has been working as an artist in the field of visual music since 2007. Numerous national and international festivals including REAL DEAL, Donaufestival Krems, sound:frame, Meteo Festival, unlimited, Konfrontationen, Mapping Festival, Ars Electronica Festival, Sonic Territories, WoW! Signal and many many more). She is a visual member of the band VENTIL and a synth-bike musician with Cyberheikel/ Hypercycle. Further ongoing AV projects are VELODROME /w Veronika Mayer, Scanning Dimensions /w Martina Claussen, QUANTUM NOISE /w Mia Zabelka, PIANIMAL /w Katharina Klement and the collaboration /w GISCHT aka. Ursula Winterauer.
Furthermore, she is working with Ensembles in the context of contemporary and new music such as NAMES – New Music Ensemble Salzburg, REFLEKTOR Ensemble Hamburg, and Schallfeld Ensemble Graz /w Alexandra Bajde.

What poses do digital devices and gadgets tempt us to? As part of her 2015 master’s thesis, Conny Zenk develops ongoing research and performance that relates to the cultural practice of selfies taken with mobile phones. While filming, she not only looks at herself but also at the image projected onto her. Through this shortcut, the smartphone in her hand becomes a digital mirror that not only closes off the world but also encloses and includes a world of its own.

In the field of performance and dance, she leads numerous projects together with Daniel Aschwanden (Aschwanden/ Zenk 2010-2017) that deal with the urban city and physical and media interaction through social networks and migration. (bastard looping – Tanzquartier Wien, bastard crowd mobile (angewandte innovation lab), smartphone migration (Tanzquartier Wien), stories on the run (Impulstanz Festival), mobile stories (WUK Wien).

From 2008 to 2012 she founded a performance collective in the field of New Circus and Media, using the wheel as an audio-visual juggling instrument and developing it further in 2017-2020 as part of the performance and experimental film entitled selfieDREAMER.

Conny Zenk studied at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, in the class Digital Art of Ruth Schnell, Virgil Widrich, and Peter Weibel; stage and film design of Bernhard Kleber, and as part of a bilateral study program in Shanghai in the field of Design & Innovation at Tongji University. Further studies: Gender Studies at the University of Vienna and the postgraduate course in Experimental and Electroacoustic Music at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna.