Robert Adrian X

Robert Adrian X was born in Toronto, Canada in 1945 and lived and worked in Vienna from 1972 until his passing in 2015. The Canadian-Austrian artist Robert Adrian X is considered a pioneer of telecommunications art. He began his artistic career in the 1970s with conceptual-analytical painting. From 1979 onwards he was intensively involved with telecommunication technologies such as radio, television, telephone, fax and computer networks. He participated in a variety of projects using slow-scan TV, amateur radio, mailbox systems, and later the Internet, and organized global communications projects. These included, for example, the event The World in 24 Hours, which took place in 1982 as part of the Ars Electronica Festival and during which artists around the world exchanged messages and artworks by fax, telephone and computer network. In 2009 he received the Nam June Paik Art Center Prize, one of the world's most important prizes for media art.

The versatile artist also worked in the fields of conceptual photography, light and sound installations, and three-dimensional art, sometimes in the form of wall sculptures. In these, he explored visual worlds from electronic space and media technology, as well as drawing attention to the manipulation of reporting by what is known as the media-military complex. (Jürgen Tabor)