Klaus Obermaier

Klaus Obermaier is an Austrian media artist, performing-arts director, choreographer, composer and educator born in Linz in 1955. He studied guitar and visual art in Linz and Vienna, completing a concert diploma in 1984, and performed with Ensemble Modern during the late 1980s. His early background in composition and electronic music gave him a foundation in timing and structure that would shape his later work integrating live performance with technology.

During the 1990s, Obermaier began merging bodies, sound and projected images in ways that challenged the relationship between performer and screen. Rather than using video as static scenery, he employed image processing to alter a dancer's apparent anatomy and spatial location. Works such as *D.A.V.E.* (1998) and *VIVISECTOR* (2000) became reference points for a new mode of dance-media performance built around the live composite of physical and digital bodies, in which projection responded to movement in real time.

In 2004, Obermaier conceived and directed *Apparition* with Ars Electronica Futurelab. This work used sensing and tracking systems to integrate dancers with computer-generated imagery as it happened on stage, making interactive technology fundamental to the performance rather than an added effect. A later collaboration with Ars Electronica Futurelab, *Le Sacre du Printemps* (2006), featured dancer Julia Mach and was premiered with Bruckner Orchestra Linz under Dennis Russell Davies. The stereoscopic, real-time visual environment was driven by musical and bodily information, creating an intermedia interpretation distinct from the original 1913 ballet.

Obermaier expanded his investigations into audience participation through *(St)Age of Participation)* (2011), developed with Ars Electronica Futurelab, which explored how spectators could contribute input that generated environments with which dancers interact. This shifted viewers from passive observers into active participants in the system's conditions.

Throughout his career, Obermaier has taught interactive art, new media and performance at institutions including IUAV University of Venice and the Accademia Nazionale di Danza in Rome. His work established a practical and conceptual vocabulary for choreography made with responsive systems, demonstrating that tracking, projection and generative systems could respond with the speed and nuance required to function as genuine choreographic partners.