SKYDANCER

A body without a body. The skydancer has an orange head with a single eye and flame hair; its body consists of nothing but streaming air. The blower on the ground is its heart, the nylon tube its skin. When the pressure drops, the figure sinks; when it rises, it straightens, throws its arms, folds and comes back. Its choreography is made by weather, blower and chance.

Air as a medium. The AV translation takes the figure at its word: it exists only as movement. So the video works with movement as material – with motion vectors without a keyframe (datamosh), with rows of different ages, with pixels that rise and fall. The procedures of video compression, image processing and data visualisation become choreography.

1996, twice. In 1996 the University of Applied Sciences was founded in St. Pölten – today’s USTP. That same year the Trinidadian artist Peter Minshall designed his “Tall Boys” for the Atlanta Olympics: dancing inflatable tube figures, the ancestors of every skydancer. The university and the figure are the same age.

On its chest the skydancer wears the ray wreath, the signet of the Lucid Dreams festival – black and white rays converging on an empty centre, op art as logo. After happy Palace (May 2026) come ECHOES on 3 December 2026 at the House of Digitalisation in Tulln and EUTOPAI on 4–5 June 2027 at Bühne im Hof & Löwinnenhof* St. Pölten. The skydancer’s arm already reads: “Bühne im Hof”.

Its leg reads E³UDRES², the European University Alliance led by USTP: nine universities from Setúbal to Jyväskylä, “From Europe – For Europe”. The dance on campus is also a signal to this network – the map in chapter IV traces it.

The material: 141 photographs and 13 videos of 8 October 2026, with original sound. No generated images: all procedures are written specifically for this work in Python, NumPy, OpenCV and ffmpeg. The palette comes from the object: the red, orange and yellow of the tube, the black and white of the signet, the white of the concrete, the blue of the USTP mark.

* requested

The soundtrack runs on a 125 BPM grid: each beat lasts 0.48 s, a bar 1.92 s, and all cuts, I-frames, pixel sorts and disturbances sit on this grid. Beneath it the blower: a motor hum around 97 Hz with overtones that opens up through the chapters and stops in V.

In datamosh the original sound of each source is bit-reduced (bitcrush), every I-frame tears with a glitch. The flutter of the nylon is a sonification of the motion energy in the videos. The chorus delays the original sound like the colour channels. In the ray wreath 300 against 310.3 Hz beat: the moiré as a beating in the ear. The network map has a bell for each university. Air out slows the sound until the picture tube switches off with a sweep. Loudness −16 LUFS, true peak −2 dBFS.

The skydancer stood on the white concrete square in front of the campus – next to it the technology by Gabriel Engelhart: two blowers under the feet, a fog machine, four floodlights on floor stands. Behind it three flags – “St. Pölten Campus”, “University of Applied Sciences St. Pölten”, “Bertha von Suttner Privatuniversität” –, a remnant of track with buffer stop, grass gardens, the fence, the promenade; to the north a red-and-white industrial chimney.

Photographs were taken from 15:53 to 18:31: from the square, from the upper floor through window grid and dot frit (30 images in 30 seconds), as a pan across flags, track, gardens and chimney (40 images), as a panorama, and in the evening with the chimney behind. In the atrium a staircase full of life-size cardboard figures, at the Campus Experience a robot – and afterwards the empty skin lay in the studio.

Ceremony, 18:00, Great hall. Welcome by Hannes Raffaseder and Johann Haag (USTP management), keynote by Jens Schneider (Rector TU Wien), anniversary dialogue with Governor Johanna Mikl-Leitner, Section Head Elmar Pichl and Mayor Matthias Stadler, moderated by Conny Winiwarter; the Campus Experience showed immersive installations and media art.

USTP in figures 2026: 32 degree programmes, 4,200 students, 13,000 alumni, 500 staff. 1996 founded · 2003 over 1,000 students for the first time · 2020 leads the E³UDRES² alliance · 2021 opening of Campus St. Pölten · 2023 education campus Mostviertel in Mauer · 2025 renamed USTP · 2026 thirty years.

Engaged and Entrepreneurial European University as Driver for European Smart and Sustainable Regions. Nine universities from Austria, Germany, Portugal, Finland, Hungary (associated), the Netherlands, Belgium, Romania and Latvia, led by USTP – helping small and mid-sized cities and their surroundings become smart, sustainable regions with challenge-based formats such as hackathons, living labs and bootcamps.

St. Pölten (USTP) · Fulda (Hochschule Fulda) · Setúbal (Politécnico de Setúbal) · Jyväskylä (Jamk) · Gödöllő (MATE, associated) · Enschede (Saxion) · Leuven (UCLL) · Timișoara (Politehnica) · Valmiera (Vidzeme). E³UDRES² is a partner of Lucid Dreams; for EUTOPAI 2027 an Erasmus+ Blended Intensive Programme at PJATK Warsaw is in preparation.