Peter Weibel was born in Odessa in 1944, and grew up in a small town in Upper Austria. He studied film, medicine, comparative literature and mathematics with an emphasis on logic in Paris and Vienna before entering the Vienna literary scene in the mid 1960s. Having started out as a visual poet, in 1967 he was one of the first European artists (along with Valie Export, Ernst Schmidt Jr. and Hans Scheugl) to turn to ‘expanded cinema’, and went on to make essential contributions to several avant-garde movements including conceptual art, media art, and Vienna actionism. Starting from the 1970s Peter Weibel devoted an ever-increasing part of his time to curating and theory. Professor at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna since 1984, in the same year he succeeded Hollis Frampton as the head of the Digital Arts Lab at the University of New York at Buffalo, and in 1989 he founded the Institute of New Media at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, which he directed until 1995. Between 1986 and 1995, he was artistic director of Ars Electronica in Linz, and from 1993 to 1999 he commissioned the Austrian pavilion at the Venice Biennale. He was curator of the Seville Biennial (BIACS3) in 2008 and of the 4th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art in 2011. From 1993 to 2011 he was chief curator of Neue Galerie Graz, and since 1999 is the Chairman and CEO of ZKM (Center for Art and Media) in Karlsruhe.