Georg Eckmayr (Austrian, b. 1976) is a Vienna-based artist, researcher and lecturer whose work explores the entanglement of digital and physical space. Using animation, networked sculptures, prints on paper and film, he examines how human perception, cognition and behavior are shaped by technical protocols and infrastructures. He studied digital art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna under Peter Weibel, completing a doctoral thesis on digital images under his supervision.
In latent_me, he generated a video by repeatedly compressing and reconstructing his own portrait through pattern prediction, drawing a parallel between his father's dementia and the loss of control over digital identity in complex networks.For UNTITLED ME (2022) he fed personal documents, from his passport to family photographs, into an AI image generator, producing a series of ink-jet prints and an NFT that reimagine his identity as a statistical average drawn from other people's data.
His animation film Open Water, made with custom artificial intelligence software, recordings of the Mediterranean Sea, water simulations and a synthetic voice, narrates the origin of a “perceptive agent” designed to recognize borders. First screened at the Crossing Europe Film Festival in Linz and the Short Waves Film Festival in Poznań in 2022, it was included in “Patterns of Disillusion” at Galerie 5020 in Salzburg in 2024, where the critic Anita Hosseini wrote that it “interweaves behaviourism, territorial power, cartography, coding and demarcation”.
In 2008 he received the Saatchi Gallery's Showdown award for photography in London. His work has since been shown at institutions including the Liu Haisu Art Museum in Shanghai in 2016, Me Collectors Room in Berlin in 2017, and the Francisco Carolinum in Linz in 2026. He has lectured on media theory at the University of Vienna since 2018 and on communications and digital theory at the University of Applied Sciences St. Pölten since 2012.
He has also released work as NFTs on Tezos and Ethereum. gestures – songs of algorithm (2023–2026) is a modular networked sculpture of 13 audio-visual pieces bundled through a single smart contract. THE QUANTS is an ongoing series of one-of-one profile-picture pieces that reflect on identity and algorithmic self-presentation.
