Author: fiona.bartl

(Museum Visit – High-Fidelity / Interactive Learning)

If the Schlossberg Museum and Graz Museum showed me how visible framing can still communicate, then the CoSA (Center of Science Activities) showed me something completely different:
What happens when the frame doesn’t just present the content, but replaces it?

CoSA is not a museum in any traditional sense. It’s more like a playground disguised as an exhibition. A high-fidelity, immersive environment designed for kids, teens, and curious adults who want to touch, play, try, fail, experiment. Everything is screaming interaction. Lights, buttons, projections, puzzles, sounds, even the architecture itself feels like part of the performance. And somehow, in the middle of all this spectacle, I found myself thinking about my thesis again. Especially the question of whether art needs a frame to communicate or whether, in spaces like CoSA, the frame becomes so thick that the content becomes secondary.

The Superpower of High-Fidelity Framing

Everything is polished, exaggerated, designed for engagement. There’s no moment of “Is this intentional?” it obviously is. Even the walls communicate. Even the floor feels curated. In some rooms, you’re invited to look at a dead cat and a movie plays in front of it. In others, you’re challenged to be the doctor to an ill man or child, build a car yourself, drive with your very own car, force, sound, perspective. It’s all very game-like. And because it’s game-like, it also shifts how people behave. At Schlossberg Museum, people slowed down, read text, observed.
At CoSA, people jump in. There’s no hesitation, because the space gives permission. It guides you. It demands participation. And that’s exactly where it becomes relevant for my research:

High-fidelity framing dictates behaviour.

When people know the rules, they relax. When people know they are supposed to interact, they interact. When people know the space will guide them, they let go. This is almost the opposite of my everyday installations, where uncertainty is the whole point.

The Contrast: What My Research Isn’t About (but Helps Clarify)

One thing I noticed at CoSa: nothing here could ever be mistaken for an everyday installation. The framing is too strong, too theatrical. There’s no ambiguity. The frame is not just present  it’s hyper-present. And that helps me understand my thesis by contrast. If I want to explore how art communicates without a frame – then CoSA shows me the extremity of what happens with a frame. Here the meaning comes from the design, not from the object. The space tells you what to do, how to behave, and how to interpret what you see.

My photos of accidental compositions function in the opposite way. They rely on your curiosity, your willingness to look, your active interpretation. CoSA relies on instructions. So a strange question formed in my head:

Can art without a frame only function if people are trained by spaces like CoSA to trust their instincts or does it make them too dependent on explanation?

I don’t know the answer yet.
But I love that this place forces me to ask the question.

How Children React vs. Adults

Children don’t need frames the way adults do. Kids immediately start touching, playing, pushing, exploring. They don’t care what things “mean,” only what they “do.” They don’t ask for permission they assume everything is meant to be interacted with. Adults, however, hesitate. They wait for someone else to engage first. They need the frame to feel safe. This ties directly back to my earlier experiments with staging reactions to the celery stalk. Maybe adults look for social proof because they learned it in high-fidelity contexts like CoSA, museums, galleries, spaces that tell them what is allowed. Kids, meanwhile, operate naturally in low-fidelity environments. They accept randomness without fear. Maybe art without a frame communicates more easily with children than with adults. Maybe adults have to unlearn framing before they can perceive openly again.

What CoSA Taught Me About My MA Question

My thesis question still feels fresh, shifting, not quite ready. But this visit helped me refine something important:

For art to communicate without a frame, the viewer must bring their own interpretive tools. High-fidelity spaces, like CoSA, give you the tools but they also take away the freedom.

CoSA is wonderful. It’s smart, engaging, well-designed. But it also shows what happens when context becomes so strong that the content becomes inseparable from it. If everyday installations are the whisper, CoSA is the megaphone. And somewhere between whisper and megaphone lies the answer to my thesis.

Links

https://www.museum-joanneum.at/cosa-graz/unser-programm/ausstellungen/event/flip-im-cosa
https://www.museum-joanneum.at/cosa-graz/unser-programm/ausstellungen/event/der-schein-truegt
https://www.museum-joanneum.at/cosa-graz

AI Disclaimer

This blog post was written with the assistance of AI.

When I walked into the Schlossberg Museum, I wasn’t expecting anything. It´s just a part of a course. I assumed it would be a classic museum visit: walking through rooms, reading plaques, observing objects arranged in rehearsed formations. But the longer I stayed, the more I realized that this museum, in its own quiet way, is a fascinating study of how staged environments communicate and how they sometimes don’t.
My master thesis still circles around the question:
“What does it take for art to communicate without a frame?”
And oddly enough, this museum (a highly framed environment) helped me understand the opposite: What happens when the frame is visibly present, and how that visible framing sometimes works, sometimes fails, and sometimes becomes the entire message.

Staged Installations Without Pretending Not to Be Staged
What I realized was how intentionally “set up” everything looked. The Schlossberg Museum uses low-fidelity installations, meaning the staging is visible, almost transparent. You’re never tricked into believing that you entered an immersive world. You know that things are placed here for you.
And yet, people interact with these low-fidelity setups in surprisingly attentive ways.
Why?
Because the museum doesn’t try to hide its own construction. There’s a kind of honesty in that. It reminded me of my celery experiments, the difference between placing something deliberately yet pretending it’s accidental versus owning the arrangement. The Schlossberg Museum doesn’t pretend. The frame is obvious. The stage is visible. And weirdly enough, that visibility communicates.

How People Behave Around Framed Meaning
One of the most interesting things during my visit wasn’t the exhibition itself but the people inside it. I observed how visitors (including my friends being visitors as well) behaved:
• They slowed down near installations that had lighting around them.
• They spent more time near objects that had a certain spatial importance (center of the room, elevated platform, glass vitrtrine).
• They trusted anything behind a glass box more than anything placed openly.
• And they ignored objects that lacked a clear contextual cue, even when those objects were historically interesting.

So what does that say about meaning?
People read context faster than they read content.
They decide something is important before they understand why it is important.
This fits perfectly into my MA question.
Maybe art communicates without a frame only when people are trained to trust their own perception more than the environment around them. But museums do the opposite, they reinforce the frame as the reliable source of truth.

Low-Fidelity ≠ Low Communication
What stayed with me most were the humble, almost simple arrangements. Placed with intention, but without spectacle.
It reminded me of my everyday installations, accidental compositions I find on the street, a banana peel on a pizza carton, a toy scooter locked among adult bikes. Those moments also communicate something, despite lacking a label, despite lacking institutional permission.
At the Graz Museum, the objects have permission, yet they feel almost as unassuming as the found installations I’ve been documenting.
This made me wonder:
• Does an object need a high-fidelity frame to speak clearly?
• Or is a minimal frame enough, as long as viewers trust the context?
• And crucially: what happens when you take away the frame entirely?
The museum helped me see that “communicating without a frame” isn’t just about removing borders, it’s about cultivating perception.

Links
https://www.grazmuseum.at/graz-museum-schlossberg/
https://www.grazmuseum.at/ausstellung/demokratie-heast/
https://www.grazmuseum.at

AI Disclaimer
This blog post was polished with the assistance of AI.

Writing these blogposts this semester was unexpectedly fun.
Way more fun than last semester, if I’m honest.

I loved the freedom of it. That I could run with an idea, no matter how weird it seemed at first. All I had to do was document, observe, and reflect and that opened up a space for me to really experiment, both in content and in tone.

This time around, I let myself loosen up. I stepped out of my usual corporate-sounding language and leaned into something more poetic. (Sometimes pathetic. But you get it.)

And I honestly enjoyed it. So thank you to everyone who actually read these blogposts and didn’t cringe.

If you want to keep following along, you know where to find me:
@notsosureifart
(feeling like a real influencer hihi)

Bussi BabaFiona

After spending the semester observing, experimenting, and occasionally placing celery around cities, it’s time for the next logical step: talking to people.

I already conducted a handful of interviews last semester, conversations with outsiders, insiders, and fellow students about how they perceive art. But I want to expand that dialogue.
Over the summer and into the coming months, I plan to carry out a more extensive series of interviews: around 10 to 15 people, spanning different age groups, professions, and backgrounds. Some of them will be from creative fields, some won’t. Some will be my age, others much older. The goal is to create a broad, loosely representative set of perspectives, and see how the concept of “art” shifts across generations and cultures.

The Plan

My interviews will follow two main threads:

1. General Questions About Art

Simple, open-ended questions like:

• What is art to you?
• What makes something “worthy” of being called art?
• Have you ever been moved by something unexpected?
• Do you think art needs to be intentional?

The goal here is not to find the “right” answers, but to map different assumptions, values, and emotional reactions. I want to understand how people’s personal experiences shape their sense of what art is and isn’t.

2. Image-Based Reactions

Here’s where it gets really interesting: I plan to show each person a selection of my everyday installation photos the ones I plan to share on Instagram. I’ll ask them to interpret the image freely, without knowing anything about it.

Then, I’ll show them the explanation I wrote. And I’ll ask:

• Did your opinion change?
• Do you see something different now?
• Does a title influence your reading?
• What happens when there’s no label at all?

And finally I’ll throw in a few completely random images. Photos I took without any deeper meaning. Just banal, normal street scenes. Things I didn’t consider “artistic” at all.

I want to see if people still assign meaning to those too.
Will they interpret anything if I ask the right question?
Can we create significance just by suggesting there might be some?

The Placebo of Interpretation

This experiment touches something I’ve been circling all semester:
How much of art is about the work and how much is about the context we give it? If I tell someone, “This is art,” will they start seeing it that way even if it’s just a photo of a trash can? And if someone finds meaning in something I didn’t plan, is that less valid? Or is that the whole point? These are the questions I want to explore not just in my own reflections, but by borrowing other people’s eyes for a while.

If I’m lucky, I’ll manage to interview 1 or 2 known artists, too.
I’d especially love to speak to Paulus Goerden, whose work has inspired so much of my thinking. It honestly feels like a dream goal, but who knows? Maybe I’ll manifest it.

As I continue documenting these small scenes, these frozen moments of unplanned composition, I’m realizing how much they mirror the act of photography itself: a moment held in place, briefly meaningful, before it disappears. Some installations I find are funny. Some feel tragic. Some are just confusing. But all of them whisper something, even if I don’t always know what.

Here are two recent finds. Both from the same day in Graz, one in the morning on my way to university, and one in the evening, just outside my apartment.

Observation 1:

Graz – near university

A small child’s scooter, lime green, plastic, low to the ground. It’s locked with a heavy-duty adult bike lock to a thick black metal railing, surrounded by full-sized bicycles. At first glance, it’s funny. Almost absurd. Who’s going to steal a toddler’s scooter? Is it really necessary to protect it like a prized vehicle? But then I paused, and the image changed.

There’s a tension here. Between play and control.
The scooter is a symbol of freedom, of chaotic childhood energy. Something designed to move, to glide, to roll fast and fall hard. But here, it’s immobilized, chained to the structure of grown-up life surrounded by gears, spokes, regulations. It’s being treated like a real object, forced into the system of locks and fears. On one hand, the lock says “I care about this.” But on the other, it says “You can’t go anywhere.” Is this about safety or control? It’s like the scooter knows it was meant to move, and now it waits. A toy, arrested in motion. Childhood, on hold. Or maybe I’m projecting. Maybe it’s just locked up so a kid doesn’t scream about their missing scooter. That’s the thing about these moments: they leave just enough room for you to wonder.

Observation 2:

Graz – evening, outside my apartment

Two bottles on a scratched-up electricity box on a sidewalk. One Bronchostop, a cough syrup. The other Jägermeister, a dark herbal liqueur that’s usually anything but medicinal. The arrangement is almost too good. So perfectly misplaced that it feels staged. Was it a coincidence? Or a statement?

It’s one of my favorite finds so far because it’s so loaded with contradiction and yet it’s silent. It doesn’t explain itself. But the metaphors are loud. There’s something incredibly human about these two bottles standing next to each other. One is meant to heal, the other to numb. One comes from the pharmacy, the other from the bar. But both get poured into your body when something doesn’t feel right.

It made me wonder:
Was this someone trying to take care of themselves, but giving up halfway through the effort?
Or someone who mixed both on purpose, convinced that health and hedonism don’t have to cancel each other out?

Maybe the Jäger came after the Bronchostop. Maybe it came before. Maybe they belonged to two different people, and this is just the city making art while no one’s watching. But there’s also a strange sense of sadness here. Like someone meant to fix something, but didn’t get there. The bottles feel abandoned, like forgotten decisions.

In my last blogpost, I reflected on authorship and the fine line between staging something and simply witnessing it. I came to the conclusion that maybe it doesn’t really matter whether something is planned or found what matters is whether we see it. Whether we stop long enough to ask: what is this doing here?

With that in mind, I’ve been thinking more and more about the things I don’t stage. The ones I don’t plant, but stumble across. For almost a year now, I’ve been documenting these accidental arrangements, small moments of unintentional beauty, absurdity or tension in public space.

I wasn’t planning on doing anything with them. But lately, the thought of making them visible of sharing my lens kept resurfacing. So I created an Instagram account. @notsosureifart

It was the first name that came to my mind, I didn’t overthink it. But after I sent the first few follow requests to friends, one of them texted me and said:

“Wait… does that say Not so sure I fart?”

Oopsie, I maybe should’ve thought about it more. If you read it too quickly or without spacing it, it becomes an entirely different kind of expression.

Not so sure I fart.

Honestly, quite funny. The more I thought about it, the more I started to love it. The accidental comedy, the embarrassing randomness of it all, it fits. It’s exactly what everyday installations are.
They’re moments that aren’t quite right, but also kind of perfect. So I’m keeping the name. And I’m starting to post.

First Observation: Pizza Meets Banana

Let’s start with one I captured in Vienna’s 10th district, at the base of a long, grey staircase. The space itself is cold, textured, structured. Concrete blocks. Worn yellow line. Functional. Urban. But then there’s the placement: A pizza carton flattened out. And on top of it, almost centered: A dark, wrinkled banana peel. I didn’t touch it. I didn’t adjust it. I didn’t even pause for long. I just saw it, lifted my phone, and walked on. But even in that moment, something clicked. There’s a kind of accidental balance here between nourishment and neglect, fast food and fruit, indulgence and decay. Between the printed, branded flatness of the pizza carton, and the organic curve of the banana skin. One is processed. The other is natural. One has color, text, identity. The other is just… a leftover. But together, they feel like a quiet comment on how we consume, discard, and overlap things in the city. There’s also a weird kind of irony in how the banana, typically seen as the “healthy option,” looks so much more dead than the pizza bag does. And the placement right next to the last step of a descending staircase adds an unspoken tension. It’s not centered, not theatrical, but it has just enough presence to stop you if you’re paying attention.

This is what I love about these kinds of moments:
They aren’t trying to say anything.
But if you choose to listen, there’s often something to hear.

By documenting them, I’m not claiming authorship. I’m just noticing.
And now, I’m sharing, on the web.

If you stage it, is it still real?

Over the past few weeks, I’ve placed stalks of: painted, raw, standing alone, staged with people. Each time, I tried to do as little as possible, to gently nudge an object into public space and observe how the world would respond. Sometimes people noticed. Sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes they cleaned it up. Sometimes they let it be.

But one question kept hovering in the background:

“If you place it there yourself, is it still an everyday installation?”

This tension between spontaneity and authorship is where things get complicated. Can something still be considered accidental if I deliberately construct the illusion of accident? Or does that act of construction cancel out the magic?

The Charm of the Unplanned

Part of what makes everyday installations so captivating is that they’re unintentional. They feel found, not made. They are, by nature, unscripted like pizza carton, an empty bottle of broncho stop of a childs toy. No one planned them. No one curated them. And yet they resonate. They offer beauty without trying. That’s their entire point. So when I place a celery stalk on a ledge, even if it looks like a found object, it’s not. I put it there. It’s performance dressed as randomness.

This brings me to a quote I’ve kept coming back to throughout this process:

“Art is what you can get away with.” – Andy Warhol.

In other words: if I can make you believe that a piece of celery has somehow ended up in the perfect spot, framed by shadows, echoed by textures, charged with unspoken questions then maybe the illusion is enough.

But is that honest? Does the viewer deserve to know that what they’re seeing is staged?
Or is the not-knowing part of the experience? The audience becomes part of the scene without realizing it. Their reaction or lack of one completes the piece. Which means: even if the object is placed with intention, the experience remains authentic for those who encounter it unknowingly. Maybe it doesn’t matter who placed it. Maybe what matters is whether someone paused to ask, “What is this doing here?”

Between Found and Made

I think the answer lies somewhere in-between. Yes, I staged it. But I also let it go. Once it was placed, I didn’t control the story anymore. I didn’t explain it, label it, or guide the viewer. I just watched. In that sense, the work sits in a liminal zone:
Not quite found, but not fully imposed.
Not completely real, but not fake either.

What I’ve Learned So Far

If this experiment series has taught me anything, it’s that every gesture carries weight, even the quiet ones. Especially the quiet ones. People might not always notice. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t work.

Sometimes, the art isn’t in the object, it’s in the act:
Placing. Waiting. Watching. Wondering.

After the staged group performance at FH Joanneum, I wanted to try something else:
What happens when you don’t stage anything? When you let the celery fend for itself, with no curated audience, no fake note-takers, and no performative hype?

Originally, my next plan was to place it at Graz Hauptplatz—a public, central, neutral space not wrapped in art-school context. But vecause of the recent tragic events, it didn’t feel appropriate. The Hauptplatz is covered in candles, photos, and flowers. I didn’t want to insert something playful into that space.
Art needs awareness of timing, not just space. So when the weekend took me to Vienna, I had new ground to explore.

MuseumsQuartier, Vienna

Despite the name, the MuseumsQuartier isn’t a museum. It’s more of a cultural hangout zone: cafés, restaurants, and chill-out steps. There’s art in the area, yes but it’s not a gallery space. It’s normal/neutral ground. People are here to eat, talk, flirt, scroll, argue, read. Not necessarily to interpret what’s leaning against a wall. Which made it the perfect place. I chose a spot just next to a café, leaned the celery against a low ledge, and took a seat a few meters away. Funny thing was I was on a date and it was actually a great conversation starter (or red flag, depending on your perspective).  Maybe my celery actions is a solid warning label for what to expect lol.

Over the course of about an hour, nothing happened. People passed. People sipped coffee. Dogs trotted by. A few kids played on scooters. It wasn’t touched it wasn’t thrown away. It was just invisible. And that, in itself, said something.

This experiment reminded me a lot of the first attempt at the Hornig Gelände Graz. That time, the celery was also unannounced and unguarded but it was removed by staff who saw it as misplaced waste. Here in Vienna, it wasn’t removed. It wasn’t even acknowledged.
No one “cleaned it up,” because no one saw it as something out of place. Or it just didn’t matter enough to trigger a response. In Graz, the space was highly structured everything there was supposed to have meaning. So something like celery broke the code. In the MuseumsQuartier, everything is casual and chaotic. A bit of randomness blends in.

In other words:
In Graz, the celery stood out just enough to be erased.
In Vienna, it blended in so well it disappeared without needing to go anywhere.

Rampenlicht oder kein Rampenlicht

This made me think about how visibility isn’t just about contrast, it’s about context. Sometimes, trying to stand out in a chaotic environment only makes you blend in more.  Maybe the celery was too quiet for the MuseumsQuartier. Even without a reaction, I still count this as a successful attempt. Sometimes, indifference is louder than critique. This celery had its moment. It stood in a city that didn’t care.
And maybe that’s not failure. Maybe that’s freedom.

After my previous two celery interventions I wondered:
What if the problem wasn’t the object at all, but the audience? What if the celery didn’t need to change we did?

So for this third experiment, I shifted my focus away from the vegetable itself and toward the reaction. Not natural reactions. Staged ones. Because in the end, most of us look to others when deciding how to respond to something unfamiliar. Curiosity is contagious. Confusion, too. You probably know that classic social experiment: Place a few people on a busy street and have them look up.
Before long, passersby will start doing the same, searching the sky for meaning, even if there’s nothing there. There’s a term for that: social proof, the idea that we take cues from others to determine what’s valuable, interesting or worth paying attention to.

The Setup

The location: FH Joanneum campus, in the space between buildings 152 and 154. It’s a place where students and lecturers pass through regularly. I leaned a regular (unpainted ) celery stalk against a wall. Then, I recruited three classmates who were in on the plan.

Phase 1: They simply stood around the celery, staring at it.
Phase 2: They had notebooks and pretended to take notes.
Phase 3: They began discussing it out loud, commenting, theorizing, asking questions 

Nothing much happened. Some students walked by without a second glance. A few others looked over, maybe puzzled, but didn’t stop. One person slowed down, looked for a few seconds, and kept going. That was it. We didn’t draw a crowd. We didn’t cause a scene. And that was kind of fascinating.

Design School as a Buffer Zone

Here’s my theory: because we were standing on a design campus, the entire act was already halfway normalized. If three students are gathered around a wall, admiring something random, could just be another weird student project, right? We’re in Communication Design. We’re supposed to be odd. In another context, a shopping mall, a corporate place, maybe we would’ve drawn more attention. Maybe people would’ve been curious. But in this setting art is expected.

Afterward, I asked my classmates how they felt during the performance. And to no surprise: awkward They felt awkward, almost embarrassed.
Pretending to be fascinated by a vegetable even as a joke made them feel weird. Honestly, I love that. It meant the experiment didn’t just act on others, it acted on us.

We were simulating awe, but still feeling something real: discomfort, playfulness, curiosity. Maybe that’s the fascinating part of performance art, it turns everyone involved into both subject and audience. This experiment made me think about how often we borrow meaning from others. How much of our interest is truly self-generated? If a crowd forms, we assume something important is happening. If no one reacts, we move on. So what happens when we manufacture the crowd?
Does the art become more “real”? Or more absurd?

The first celery experiment was subtle, almost invisible. It disappeared quietly, without leaving a trace, except for the one it left in my thoughts. So I started wondering: What if I made it less subtle? What if I made it scream and shout? My idea: use acrylic paint to cover the celery in white. Not to disguise it, but to emphasize it. To make it feel intentional. A deliberate object. Not something you’d accidentally drop but something you’d place with a purpose. If the raw celery was too “real” to be noticed as art, maybe painting it would help it cross that threshold.

The Second Intervention

A few days after the first experiment, I returned to the Hornig Gelände. This time, I placed a celery stalk painted entirely in white on the same platform. It stood out a bit more. Not dramatically, but enough to catch the eye if you were even half paying attention. It looked altered. Like it had been part of something. A prop, maybe? An object waiting for a role? And then I waited again. This time, the celery stayed in place longer (nearly two hours) before disappearing. But unlike the first time, I couldn’t find it in any nearby trash bin. I looked. I checked multiple locations. It wasn’t there.

Art, Theft, or Cleaning Duty?

Where did it go? Was it thrown away again, but elsewhere? Did someone find it interesting and take it home? Was it considered more valuable now that it was visibly “modified”? Or had it become just another strange object that didn’t belong? Guess I’ll never know. There’s something symbolic about painting an object white. It cleans it, purifies it, turns it into a blank canvas. The celery wasn’t edible anymore. It wasn’t just organic waste. It had been separated from its origin. It had become something else even if no one knew what that something was. In a way, painting it felt like a quiet attempt to legitimize it. A way of saying: “This is not trash. This is something.”
But who was I trying to convince?

Does Intention Matter If No One Knows?

That’s the question that kept returning. If no one knows the backstory, if no one sees the act of transformation, can intention still carry weight? Maybe the white paint worked. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe someone admired it. Maybe someone laughed. Or maybe, again, someone just wanted to clean the space and threw it out without a second thought. Either way, I had changed something. Not the world but the celery.