lichterloh is a multimedia artist collective founded in 2005 by Christoph Schmid and Clemens Gürtler, working across light installations, video works, live audiovisual performance and interactive installations. Based in Vienna, the studio operates as creative director and curator for the “Lighthouse Festival”, an outgrowth of its early work at the Pratersauna club between 2009 and 2015.
As MIST, lichterloh collaborated with the painter Andrew M. Mezvinsky on digital artworks and interactive installations. Video works from this collaboration are held in the permanent collections of the Dorotheum and the Jewish Museum in Vienna.lichterloh's own works have also entered the permanent collection of the Francisco Carolinum Linz and been shown at institutions including the Austrian Cultural Forum New York and the Ars Electronica Center Linz.In 2024, lichterloh's work was included in the group exhibition “Meta.space. Raumvisionen (Visions of Space)” at the Francisco Carolinum Linz.
In 2011 lichterloh made Anna.eins with unlicht – unheilbar architektur for the “sound:frame” festival in Vienna, an anamorphic sculpture that resolves into a recognisable form only from a single vantage point viewers must search for by walking around it.The collective returned to the format in 2021 with Anna.zwei, a wood and steel sculpture whose surface doubles as a screen for projections that extend the same illusion.From 2019 to 2024 lichterloh served as a research partner to FH St. Pölten on VRinMotion, a project combining stop motion, motion capture and virtual reality that involved four invited artists.lichterloh has also released generative works as NFT collections, including Midfile Crisis, a real-time animation made in JavaScript and WebGL in October 2022.Samsa is a 211-edition NFT collection paired with prints and physical installations, its forms driven by linear algebra and boolean operations in a continuous search for equilibrium. A unique edition of Samsa was shown at the “Lighthouse Festival” in Bad Gastein in January 2024, displayed across three screens in the entrance hall of the Grand Europe Hotel.In Bad Gastein, lichterloh installed Eclipse from December 2024 to January 2025, a circular light sculpture in aluminium, steel and LED suspended above the waterfalls and built as two-thirds of a full arc that the rushing water symbolically completes. On two dates during the installation's run, lichterloh performed the accompanying audiovisual show Saros live with Dominik Traun of Austrian Apparel, pairing the arc's shifting light with synthesizer sound.
