Creative Days @ Never At Home in FUNKHAUS

Never At Home has been promoting art and culture through the temporary activation and artistic use of vacant properties since 2021 and is now in its fourth location with the former ORF Funkhaus. There, they provide studios for over 100 visual artists, musicians and creatives. The former studios of Radio Wien now serve as event spaces where Never At Home curates a diverse programme. The thematic focus is on dealing with vacancies and the significance of the historic Funkhaus as a cultural centre.

Vera Grillmaier is an interdisciplinary cultural manager with a focus on the creative appropriation of space, networking with non-art sectors and community building. As co-founder of the Never At Home vacancy initiative, she is committed to the interim cultural utilisation of urban spaces and creates platforms for artistic experiments and space for collaboration. The aim is to strengthen interdisciplinarity not only within creative and artistic disciplines, but also beyond them. She finds a contrast to theoretical cultural studies in her work as a ceramicist, where she combines classical craftsmanship and design in her own objects.

Clara Grillmaier works as a curator and cultural practitioner at the interface of art, creative industries and communication. In recent years, she has realised exhibitions as part of her Never At Home project and for partners such as the museum in progress, Foto Wien and the Parallel Vienna art fair. As a founding member of the cultural initiative Never At Home, Clara Grillmaier's curatorial work specialises in exhibition concepts relating to the use of vacant spaces and contemporary visual art.

Juni-Nyusta Ruckendorfer is the director of Echo Correspondence and co-founder of Never At Home. Between 2017 and 2020, she lived and worked in Shanghai, worked at the 021 Art Fair and conducted research at the Guangdong Times Museum. She also founded 女書 NüShu with three collaborators, a platform for LGBTQ*, non-binary and female musicians with events in Basel, New York, Zurich, Paris and Hong Kong.

NODE Media Lab is a Vienna-based, non-profit and multidisciplinary creative centre founded in 2021 by Ozan Turkkan and Burcu Öztürkler. The focus is on research and production of interdisciplinary experiences at the intersection of media art, science and technology. NODE Media Lab integrates new media technologies into the creative process and builds a bridge between digital and physical reality. As an interdisciplinary and collaborative platform, NODE Media Lab focuses on the relationship between technology, visual culture and performance in contemporary art. The central focus is on the promotion of digitisation and digital archiving - in Vienna and beyond.

Mariya Vasilyeva is a video and performance artist whose work is located at the intersection of performance, digital collage and video installation. With a background in Fine Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, she has developed a unique artistic practice in which she inserts herself into multi-layered roles and scenarios. Her experiences as a Ukrainian migrant in Western Europe flow deeply into her artistic reflection and influence her investigation of female identity. She uses intercultural discourses to develop universal narratives that interweave individual and collective experiences.

Carmen Lael Hines’s recent work deals with AI-generated pornography, home automation, femtech, sextech and digital contraception. From 2020 to 2024 she taught critical theory in the Department of Visual Culture at the Vienna University of Technology and is currently pursuing a PhD at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is currently a curator at The Ryder Projects in Madrid. She has taught at the Department of Spatial Design (TU Vienna), at HEAD (Geneva) and at the Institute of Contemporary Art (TU Graz) and has presented her research at many international institutions. She is currently co-editor of the book Dissident Practices: Posthumanist Approaches to a Critique of Political Economy, which will be published by Bloomsbury.

Daniela Weiss / aka. Litto is a digital artist who examines the worlds of analogue and digital art. Having a background in visual and digital arts, as well as applied Business Administration, in 2017 she has been expanding her artistic research from interaction design and UX Design to the field of mixed reality. In 2020 , she co-founded the web-based AR platform "The Artificial Museum”.

Jascha Ehrenreich is a platform architect and programmer of virtual experiences. He has been programming homepages, games and community platforms for more than twenty years. Most of his clients were small companies and non-profit NGOs. In 2020, together with Litto, Jascha laid the foundation of the Artificial Museum, taking it from idea to international plattform, ready to envelope the globe.

Rebecca Merlić is a digital artist, architect and experimental filmmaker. Merlić's work is characterised by alternative societies and transgressions of socio-economic conventions as well as novel forms of artistic and architectural production using new technologies. She was awarded the Marianne.von.Willemer. 2020 - Prize for Digital Media, Ars Electronica Prix 2023 honorary mention and Content Vienna 2023. Merlić works as a Senior Scientist at the Institute for Art and Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. As part of the DOMUM Vienna project, which was awarded the 2023 Theodor Körner Prize, she is researching the disappearance of café and coffee house architecture as nourishing social spaces in the contemporary cityscape.

Bettina Katja Lange is a core member of SOAP, Some Online Architecture Practice, an artistic research collective that works at the intersection of new media and critical spatial practice. Lange is a German stage designer and visual media artist. SOAP has exhibited widely, including at Onassis Stegi in Athens, MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles, the New Media Art Museum La Gaîté Lyrique in Paris, Centre d'Art Santa Mònica in Barcelona, CPH:DOX – Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, ETH Zurich, the Goethe-Institut in Beijing, and The Segal Center in New York, among others.

SOAP has exhibited widely, including at Onassis Stegi in Athens, MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles, the New Media Art Museum La Gaîté Lyrique in Paris, Centre d'Art Santa Mònica in Barcelona, CPH:DOX – Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, ETH Zurich, the Goethe-Institut in Beijing, and The Segal Center in New York, among others.

Radu is an accomplished AI programmer and game developer. At modl.ai she leads teams in developing cutting-edge AI solutions for games.