Alexander J. Groiss

A project with the student union of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

In Collaboration with the student union of the University of Applied Arts and the student union of the University of Music and Performing Arts

Viennas art students organise the first Academyball

As chair of the student union of the Academy, i was fortunate to bring together an unprecedented collaboration between the student unions of all public art universities in Vienna, the Academy, the Angewandte and the MDW, to organise a first of its kind event and begin a beloved tradition.

Large cultural and educational institutions have an emancipatory social mandate. The society we want to live in has to be created by us, it is not enough to be against something, we have to seize social space and shape it in all possible ways. We inherit institutions, circumstances, cultures. It is our task to use them to create the Vienna of the 21st century. We are building our future from the ruins and fragments, in the palaces of our past. Especially in these times, it is important to be political and to utilise the joy and community-building quality of events of this kind. Culture, celebration and the joy of the good life are an integral part of a healthy civil society. We want to make a contribution to all those who are interested in optimism and free, open, progressive life. We illustrate a world in which there is no longer an academy ball, only an academy ball. Our responsibility is to help shape a common reality and invite the people of Vienna to join us.

The first Academy Ball took place on 14 March 2025 in the Atelierhaus at Lehargasse 6-8.

Photos by Anna Skuratovski and Lea Mair
Poster featuring Photos by Benjamin Laabmayr

A Studio project at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

Countertourism. Temporary Hospitality. Enjoying the simple things. A culture of experience.

In the economic off-season, the island of Hydra is found in a state of amplified localism and a self-preservative hibernation. As defining touristic machineries and protocols appear shut down, they are merely experienceable as traces and hints at the importance of the long gone summer. The studio arrived in Hydra at the end of November 2022. Kivotos was selected as the event island for the following reasons: With more than four people aboard the vessel, the weak motor allowed a significantly slower movement than expected. Westernmost islands such as Disaki and Trikeri weren't reachable. Thus, we had to settle for an island closer to Hydra port, to transport collaborators back and forth effectively. The inevitable problem of landing (meaning literal, naval landing) could be challenged most effectively on Kivotos, as the island featured a small bay, with the remnant of a deserted concrete jetty. In other cases, the shores, unexpectedly alternating between deep and shallow water and larger and hardly climbable rocks, allowed no safe (or dry) disembarkation. On our first journey to Kivotos we found a handful of small piles of rubble that contained many of the imagined elements of the feast, such as poles for a roof, firewood, barrels etc. On top of the island we found the ruin of a house. It provided a number of traces of architectural features which we could conveniently repurpose for the event - we liked the aesthetics of it. Event: After a few investigative journeys with a little boat, the studio had established an understanding of the characteristics of the desert islands surrounding Hydra, its geographical relations, geology, flora and fauna (sometimes; goats). Through our feast on the deserted island Kivotos we were inhabiting it temporarily, materialising the network through a ritual of actions, an event that consisted of elements we brought with us, such as a tarp to form a roof, a tablecloth, the Speis (a self-constructed hanging cloth element to store utensils in), and food - bread, oil, salt and meat to grill on the open fire. We were also using found objects for construction of the scenery, such as long white tubes and a leftover metal bed frame as a table. The event lasted only three hours. After the food had been eaten, and retsina bottles had been finished, the weather changed unexpectedly. The anchored vessel was in danger, as strong gusts of wind blew from the west. Quickly, all utensils and belongings were packed, and the group reached the vessel swimming, circling and by skilfully throwing backpacks and dry bags. People got wet but most things remained dry.

A project around the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

Colloquial Lunch for everyone

A weekly lunch menu in the courtyard of the university, bringing together teachers, students and general staff.
Together with Roxane Seckauer, Paul Schurich and Marie Teufel, we organised an always different, very cheap lunch menu as an alternative to a subpar mensa, making sure that gastronomic delight can be experienced by everyone, for very little money.

A Studio project at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

Temporay unattached living

s_t_a is a work of speculative architecture, a fictional corporation trying to sell a sedentary lifestyle that contains little property but maximum flexibility paired with constant benevolent surveillance and 24/7service. From the start, the question arises what kind of outer conditions would make such a lifestyle not only useful but even desirable and what kind of person would be the focus of such a venture. The obvious choice became the precarious, median earning cognitive worker, able to to their job from anywhere, jumping from temporary job to project to gig, with no prospects of home ownership or substantial savings but able to spend on small substitute-luxuries like service from the even more precarious class below them, a person with both the illusion of large upward mobility and a Damocles sword of replacement through automation looming above them. The life in urban environments is generally becoming denser, their living spaces are getting smaller and many are already living in shared spaces for longer periods of their life. Living in a minimal space with only a bed and some basic necessities, together with a lot other people in similar situations is under these circumstances not an odd, but a rational choice. The final design takes the building of the Hilton Park in Vienna and repurposes it to house the aforementioned target group. All non-loadbearing walls are removed and replaced by a dynamic landscape of floor panels and removable walls. Every resident can book as many floor panels and close or open the walls to their own private space as they like. Bathrooms, Kitchens, co-working areas etc. are included. The residents are nudged to conduct all their internet activity through the network of the hotel, thumbing watched not only in real life but online while machine learning algorithms advance to replace them at their jobs.

A Studio project at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

An artificial landscape that must never change

In the year 2000, the Curonian Spit was awarded the seal of Outstanding Universal Value by the UNESCO. Since then, the question of how to preserve a landscape in a world that is changing around it and the paradox of protecting a specific form of artificial environment from more human intervention has been the topic of a multitude of interactions between various stakeholders in the landscape. The procedural nature of democracy and the specific form that arguments over the future of the spit take are the material of this film. The research aims to confront the question what the nature of the Outstanding Universal Value is and how the artificial stasis that constitutes conservation of past terraforming projects on the spit correlates with the interests of the adjacent population and their government.

A Studio project at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

The Orchid and the Wasp. A Hotel that takes you offline and a digital replica online. Enjoy your vacation in a primal scenario while your employers write emails to a bot.

The off grid hotel is an attempt to formulate a new hedonism, new pleasures and a contemporary form of bespoke leisure experience. It observes a strain of desire for escapism, for the unfulfilled fantasy of self reliance, the wish to turn ones back to an obviously flawed society and start anew somewhere, perhaps even the wish for a more pure form of being.

Luxury is to be offline and unreachable. You want to disappear. The off grid hotel facilitates this escapism, first by it replacing the guest with a digital replica that continues to work, post, have online meetings, be present and available, while the guest receives a total reduction of input, a temporary isolation and a both uncomfortable and delightful introduction. As much of our lives, from interaction with the government, to entertainment to working happen in the digital realm, the possibility of architecture to speak meaningfully about the present is in question. That the nonmaterial is replacing the material is not a new insight, nevertheless, the world of architecture is still struggling to adapt to a world in which the gifts it can offer are of little importance compared to what happens behind a screen.

The Off grid hotel aims flip this dynamic and recenter the physical experience of architecture. A series of rooms or experiences, themselves references to architectural history, reaffirm the potential of corporeal existence. The hotel centers the primal and archaic, the direct touch. It aestheticises the infrastructure, the labor and the organic processes that are the closest to our physical form. It forces the guest with a gentle but firm hand to partake in these procedures. The Orchid and the Wasp is a metaphor from The Thousand Plateaus . Several species of orchids create visual and sensory images of a wasp in order to attract other wasps that, through this illusion, transport the orchids pollen and ensure its reproduction. This mechanism is replicated by the hotel. The guest, of course, is the wasp, both the target and the source of what is simulated so that it can become a part of the hotels functioning. The network can not be broken but it can be confused, it can be overloaded with large amounts of information, none of which is reliable, so that you, the human,can slip through its wires unnoticed. Thinking one is not superfluous, one can not be replaced is clinging to a desperate vision of ones own importance. The intelligent have made themselves redundant already. The fake image exists in both ways, the off grid hotel is simulating in two directions. It creates two fake worlds, one in wich it replaces you, the guest in front of your previous responsibilities and another in which it lures you into its flowery bed. What actually exists behind its doors remains unverifiable, unless you are chosen to enter.

A Studio project at the University of Hong Kong

Hedonism in impermeable environments. Decentralized scenes that localize at will

CANDE, the Culture And Nightlife Deterritorialization Engine, is two things. On one side it is what Deleuze and Guattari called a “desire producing machine”, delivered through the medium of a web application. It facilitates the growth of a longing for the future by giving participants something to look forward to. It works not through one person promising something, but through the collected input of a group of people. Swarm intelligence creates an event in the future, a feedback loop between the ideas of today and the happenings of tomorrow is established. The abstraction that was mentioned before is happening on a city- wide level. The initiated receive a password and can log in the application where they will see a map, a page with sliders and a dynamically generated page that rep- resents the coming event. People can choose locations on a map that they deem fit for a party, an art exhibition, a concert etc. They input their interests and wishes through the sliders and this input feeds the prediction of the event. They are then tasked with making it become real, roles are given and individual people handle individual aspects to create what they have promised themselves. The entire thing works without a central coordinator, through a platform that can be fully decentralised. Interactions are not predefined but different every time, held together by a very simple system of rules. On the other side, CANDE is an investigation into what architecture discourse can offer to the world in a time when it is becoming more and more clear that traditional construction can not solve our problems in any way. The world is already very full, and it seems like a more intelligent approach to manipulate and appropriate what is already here instead of continuously trying to add. This project is trying to create a previously unfelt longing for new uses of physical space besides profit generation in a city with the most expensive real estate market in the world, a place that could use some playful misappropriation and a spark of hedonism in an otherwise rather strict and capitalistic environment.

A Workshop at the European Architecture Student Assembly, EASA Shanzhai

A floating Viennese Coffeehouse close to the spanish coast

The workshop focuses on the construction of a vessel, not a boat but a floating object. Anchored and adrift in the Mediterranean sea, once its physics are established, it forms our physical, communal and theoretical platform, to formulate contemporary island-like positions of urbanism, hospitality and the flows of materials, marine currents, people, politics and of wine. The first half of the workshop is dedicated to the construction of the raft, subsequently its program and performance becomes essential. We imagine a cafe-like usage of its platform, navigating over consumption, social systems and the possibilities connected to an island-like isolated state. How to make the water hot, can we catch a fish and who is the guest here? In this exaggerated yet honest exercise, pressing questions of the present are subconsciously approached.

A Studio project at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

A rolling ball, cool inside. War against cars in cities. Chaotic Urbanism

The project is a 3x3m temperature isolated Ball that is filled with plants. It serves several purposes: Technically the ball deals with essential functions of the human body: Breathing, Moving and the experience of Temperature. The „atmosphere“ inside is finetuned to the requirements of a body worn out by heat and hectic city life. Oxygen levels, temperature and light are optimised and adaptable. Socially, it creates a new program to use the city. It cracks it open. It influences the rhythm, the vibration of street activity. And in doing so, only through persistent existence, it recalibrates the power balance that has for a century worked so much in favour of car traffic. The behaviour it encourages is not oriented towards the most efficient transport of people from point a to point b but takes into account the joy of movement and the sensation of free flow. A society that has shown how easily it can transport everything into the digital is not forced to be a slave to the dogma of efficiency in the physical space and can understand the public space as something more than a tunnel to push people through as smoothly as possible. It redistributes space towards the common person, towards everyone, towards public interest.

A Studio project at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

A CONFLICT ABOUT DESIGN. AI VS THE MYTH OF THE ARTIST. MACHINE LEARNING DESIGNS A BUILDING?

Prompted by a studio task of creating an architectural development that emerges from a precedent building, in this case Ishigamis Kanagawa IT Plaza, without reason or aim, the project forfeits all pretence of design and submits totally to precedent. Rather than designing for human needs or invented goals, the project deals with „pure form“ through feeding a custom dataset of 3D building models into an adapted generative adversarial network. The system generated a continuous stream of new architectural images, creating a "fortbau" derived solely from the precedent structure through algorithmic transformation. The final output consists of these machine-generated images, which represent an architectural object rooted purely in its predecessor and processed through computational methods. Originally intended for translation into conventional architectural drawings, the work remained in its raw digital form as a play on traditional design methodologies and imaginations around architectural creativity.

A Studio project at the University of Hong Kong

Redistribute and offload meteorological risks from the producer to the customer. Gamify wine.

For a wine farmer, every year is a fresh bet. A good year with rich harvest and perfect wine that can be sold for a good price can be followed by three disastrous years, ruined grapes, undesired taste and economical uncertainty. Bad weather can literally ruin existences. The project wine friends was created to strengthen the position of the wine farmer, and bring the risk but also the excitement and the directness of weather uncertainty to wine aficionados who may otherwise be very removed from the conditions in which the wine they enjoy comes to be. The goal is to distribute the risk the farmer faces to the end customer while at the same time connect them to their drink in a way that has been exclusive to the very privileged few that live in an area of wine production. Winefriends is a website that lets people choose participating wine farms they are interested in, buy a share of the harvest and updates them continuously on the conditions in situ and the process of the production of their wine. A wine customer in Hong Kong wouldn’t care about the weather in Bordeaux unless they had some skin in the game. By letting them own a share of the harvest in advance, every drop of rain and every ray of sunshine in an area on the other side of the world determines what kind of product they will receive in the next year. They buy in beforehand, the farmer knows that his product will be sold and what the customers drink in the end is something they have waited for for a long time.

A Studio project at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

Fund the constant reconstruction of a gothic cathedral. Sell its stones digitally. Algorithm to recreate numeral logic of gothic architecture.

The magnificent Bischofstor on the North West Side of the Stephansdom, once the entrance for women and now overed by a vestibule and merely the exit to the gift shop, is a striking example of gothic artistry. Amid all the Saints, it also depicts Rudolph IV., a man whose dedication has been elementary in the construction of the Stephansdom. As other beneficiaries of his time, he eternalised himself in the built structure that he helped to crate and that, in turn, is an important pillar of his mythology to this day. This web of mutual advantages has and will forever be an essential part of public architecture, always changing its form as it adapts to changing times and societies.As much a methodology as a physical product, gothic architecture will forever remain unfinished, not in the sense that something is missing but rather like a snake that sheds its skin to reveal a slightly different one. As it flows forward, it reveals infinite variations of a known theme, replicating itself like fractals to an obvious and yet not fully understood code. Everything relates to each other. The number and form of ornaments, the measurements of pillars and openings, the size and the floorpan follow an interconnected system, guided by numerology, mythology and geometric principles. This project aims to replicate that code, to translate the language of the gothic architects into a digital environment and create an interrelated system that can work with different parameters and build up on itself with very limited guided input. With a set of a few points, a height and some ratios, it creates a vestibule that is in its form similar to the one found in front of the Bischofstor. The theme of eternalisation of benefactors, once chiseled into stone can be digitalised like everything else. A catalogue of stones, put online and sold to the public leads to the sort of imaginary symbolic ownership that the church has often used to its own benefit. The stones of Stephansdom get tokenised and can be traded like other digital assets, every owner becoming part of a long chain and openly visible to everyone, forever.