Claus Diwisch, creative technologist

About

2026-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

By day I produce and direct videos, podcasts and shows. By night I create, video workflows, animations and machines that almost work, and notes about all of it.

I studied at the Universität für Angewandte Kunst in Wien, I'm most interested in the intersection of technology and culture, I keep too much retro video equipment, and I believe the best ideas arrive slightly out of sync.

Bussi Bla Bla

2026-02-19T00:00:00+00:00

I'm producing this Podcast for Radio FM4.

Tom Neuwirth, aka Conchita Wurst, and JJ — two Eurovision winners, one podcast. Every week they talk about pop, queerness, performance and personal chaos: between stage lights and backstage mess, fashion excesses and jet lag. Entertainment with an attitude, every week as a video podcast on FM4.

Listen on Spotify ↗

FM4 Radio Sessions

2024-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

The big ones: full concerts recorded for Radio FM4, several of them with the ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien. Where the FM4 Sessions are one song in a studio, these are whole evenings - special events with international artists.

Der Professor und der Wolf

2022-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

I'm producing this Podcast together with Rudi Ortner.

Political scientist Peter Filzmaier and ZIB2 anchor Armin Wolf take more time than the news ever allows, in the relaxed setting of the FM4 studios, to talk about how politics in Austria actually works — far from the day's headlines. Who really writes the laws? What is the biggest misunderstanding about the Federal President?

FM4 Sessions

2022-04-18T00:00:00+00:00

I directed and produced the videos of these series for Radio FM4.

The FM4 Sessions started small: a few remote-controlled PTZ cameras in Studio 2 of the ORF Funkhaus in Vienna, and not much else. Limited resources, but a good room.

The artists who come through are about as different as it gets, so there was never going to be one house style. Each session gets a look of its own — one that fits the artist, or adds something to them they didn't have yet.

The form has kept changing ever since. Lately the stage design is mostly light: low-resolution images projected into the room.

Here is a selection of the sessions I worked on.

Impressum

2022-03-07T00:00:00+00:00

Claus Diwisch Vienna, Austria, EU

claus@anyhow.at

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2022-03-07T00:00:00+00:00

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Je komplexer, desto hä

2022-01-23T00:00:00+00:00

The Cloud of Unknowing

In 1999, David Bowie told the BBC: "I don't think we have even seen the tip of the iceberg. The potential of what the internet is going to do to society — both good and bad — is unimaginable." The interviewer objected: "It's just a tool though, isn't it?" Bowie: "No, it's not. It's an alien lifeform."

The internet has stayed about that approachable. Words like "understanding" or "control" sound almost anachronistic while the tech giants extend their cloud capacity. James Bridle writes in the preface to New Dark Age: "The ability to think without claiming, or even seeking, to fully understand is key to survival in a new dark age because, as we shall see, it is often impossible to understand." The advantage goes to those who no longer expect to understand. That is sobering.

Something has fogged up between us and the digital world. The promise of "personal computing" has quietly decayed into unknown computing — while control over one's own tools is a precondition for an open and free society. This animation asks whether the fog can lift again: can technology become simple and verifiable enough to be a natural tool for everyone?

Cloud

"Cloud" used to be weather. Over the past decades it also became a place — an undefined, technical elsewhere. Whatever is too complex to explain gets folded into the symbol of the cloud: out of sight, out of mind. The cloud suggests simplicity and transparency, and can by definition deliver neither. As a metaphor, it is a capitulation to technical complexity.

It is also a bad metaphor. Nothing about the cloud is weightless or amorphous: it is physical infrastructure — world-spanning cables and giant halls full of computers, under specific jurisdictions, consuming enormous amounts of energy, operated by the most valuable companies in the world. The digital lives of billions — communication, finances, medical records, wishes, preferences, votes — sit behind the picture of a fluffy little cloud. Bridle again: "The cloud is a power relationship, and most people are not on top of it."

About the title

The Cloud of Unknowing is a text written in the 14th century by an unknown monk. It argues that God is best experienced once you stop questioning and accept your unknowing — between man and the divine hangs the cloud of unknowing, and accepting it is what makes the experience possible. The parallel is hard to miss: tech companies guard their secrets inside the cloud and have an interest in unquestioned faith in their products. Scrutiny — by users or by regulators — is not welcome.

There is also a Tocotronic song with the same title. It describes an uprising and, at the same time, the resignation before the feeling of not knowing. In Tocotronic's usual ambiguity, it can also be heard as a love song, in which two people only find each other through the ever-present cloud of unknowing.

The need for verifiability

3D animation can show events that otherwise stay invisible. Here, the electricity that flows through a chip becomes light: you can watch the simulated chip work, and anyone who can count in binary can read and decode the data stored on it. Decoded, the signals spell out the principles of the hacker ethic — openness and freedom in technology.

At the same time, the animation stages the very problem it is about. The data lies open before your eyes, but only actually decoding it gives certainty; until then, it is a claim. Even at this seemingly absolute transparency there is a gap between the data and yourself — and that gap is what motivated this project.

Whoever wants to find their way in a networked, digitized world has to accept that not everything can be understood. But without the wish to understand anyway, you become a plaything of the systems. Or, as Tocotronic put it: "Die Wolke der Unwissenheit wird für immer bei uns sein."

This text is a shortened excerpt from "Je komplexer, desto hä" (German, PDF).

Thanks

Thanks to Rainer Wölzl for years of joyful support, Michael Troll for generous help with the sound design, Brent Patterson for sharing his knowledge of cloud shaders, Ian Hubert for the best tutorials, and the whole Blender community.

Schatten werfen keine Schatten

2021-10-24T00:00:00+00:00

I wanted to build worlds inside my computer, one technique after another. Stacking every atom by hand. How many waves does the sea have — and how many sub-waves and refractions in each of them? What does dust actually look like, and how much of it do I need? Everything in 3D is clean and exact. So I read about techniques that reproduce real errors virtually — nothing looks real until it has flaws — and decided to make more mistakes in my virtual rooms.

"It allows people to see things, which only mathematicians could see before."

A Bell Laboratories researcher on the first graphics computer

The researcher in the white coat presses buttons on his graphics machine — in 1968, the first one in the world. "This will let people see things only mathematicians could see before," he says, and draws a picture in my head full of things I cannot see. That is the part that gets me: technologies everyone can look at, whose insides stay invisible behind their complexity — a second world next to the visible one, an extension of reality.

Background

In 2015 I built an installation out of old television machines — a tower of technology that assembled its own TV program on professional videotape recorders from the 1980s. I had a lot of fun with that project, but it carried the burden of the physical: the room set the limits, and kept the otherwise fairly unleashed machinery from inviting anyone to dream.

Six years later, this is the digital version. In the video, the TV tower stands in changing computer-animated landscapes, the center of both function and dramaturgy. It plays excerpts from "The Incredible Machine", a Bell Laboratories film from 1968 — shot in the same labs where the first computer that could produce graphics had just been built. The beginning of a promise of a new visual communication.

The same film contains a piece of computer-generated music, "Daisy Bell", which Stanley Kubrick borrowed for "2001 — A Space Odyssey": it is the last song the dying HAL 9000 sings. So while the computers of 1968 were just waking up, Kubrick was already killing them off in his films. Fifty years later, computers render photorealistic images and the illusion has few limits left — what limits it is less the machine than our patience for all the detail reality provides. And still we live with mystical machines that know how to keep their secrets, and dream ourselves into science-fiction worlds because they carry the promise of one day becoming real.

Credits

Thanks to my colleagues Rudi Ortner and Michael Troll for their help with the sound design, to Ian Hubert for inspiration and craft, and to Rainer Wölzl for his precise and generous artistic guidance. The title is borrowed from the Tocotronic song of the same name, written by Dirk von Lowtzow.

– The Incredible Machine
– Tocotronic
– Ian Hubert
– Rainer Wölzl

Chat Cube

2021-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

This is a cube that receives text messages and answers them. It is cast in concrete and epoxy, has a mobile number you can text, and an e-ink display that shows the answers it has sent. The electronics are hidden inside — no visible connections to the outside. How the cube works is kept secret.

As I wrote in more depth here, this project is about trust in electronics and services. How and why can we trust the machines around us? How are their workings verifiable? The short general answer: they are not.

Imagine texting with this cube. If its answers were complex and lively — would you conclude that the connection is wiretapped, or that the cube runs an advanced AI?

I showed the project to a group of people and let them interact with it. To my surprise, nobody questioned its function. They took it for granted that the claimed operation was the only way this device could work — with no proof whatsoever, and with an experience that clearly diverged from any usual chat bot. And that is the normal case with the devices around us: we rarely question whether our phones work the way we expect them to. We trust them blindly.

So this is a device built to be distrusted — a chance to experience how little you can see behind the curtain of your devices' workings. The feeling of lost control only appears where expectation and perception diverge.

Photos of 2020

2021-01-04T00:00:00+00:00

TV Shows

2019-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Between 2017 and 2019 I directed TV shows for ORF III and ORF 1 — studio shows with a live audience in the room. Each setup mixed remote-controlled PTZ cameras, regular broadcast cameras and DSLRs.

To me, directing mostly means calm. My job is to create the room in which everyone else can be creative: camera operators who are free to offer the shots they like. My part is to make it all fit together and to steer the team in one direction.

Die Tafelrunde · ORF III

A cabaret round table at the ORF RadioKulturhaus, hosted by Gerald Fleischhacker.

Denk mit Kultur · ORF III

A talk show at a bar counter, with a house band and the audience right next to it.

Schluss mit lustig · ORF 1

The satirical review of the year 2019. The screens on stage grew out of an old project of mine, Zeitzeichen.

Zeitzeichen

2015-05-10T00:00:00+00:00

I've always liked huge displays. For this project I built a big numerical display out of neon tubes, driven by an ATmega328P, showing the seconds of the current minute. A Sisyphean task: the tubes need about a second to light up, so the display was permanently catching up with the time it was trying to tell — less a clock than a light show, switching on and off in the endless rhythm of the seconds.

Update 2019

This long-forgotten project got a new life in a different context. While planning the stage design for a new TV show on ORF eins, I used the displays as a template for big screens as a backdrop. The stage was then built by the awesome people at Consequences.

The separate screens were mounted on wires and could move up and down, which gave the set another layer of movement. I like that this project evolved into something different.

Sendeanstalt

2014-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

A TV station is an invisible, tightly woven web of technology and editorial routine — the audience never gets to see it. Sendeanstalt ("broadcasting organization") gives that web a body.

A tower of retired broadcast machines works around the clock, assembling its own TV program from archive material. Professional videotape recorders from the 1980s cue, spool and play, always at the edge of technical failure, hurrying to get the next segment on air in time. The scaffolding that holds the tower together doubles as its antenna.

On the way to the fully digital universal machine, something got lost piece by piece — first the work with materials, mechanical or electronic, then the machines themselves, replaced by interfaces to distant, virtual computing. What remains are obsolete machines, relics of past decades. But obsolete also means freed from the duty to function. The old machines are open books, telling of the promises they once made.

Permutation

2013-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Permutation is a microcontroller that counts. It computes and displays every possible combination of black and white pixels on a monitor — fifty new images per second, one permutation after the next.

The number of possible images on a display is finite. So when the count is done, every picture will have appeared on this screen: every object, every place, every person, in every imaginable variation.

Until then, the monitor shows what looks like noise — and somewhere in it, with mathematical certainty, every photograph ever taken and all the ones that never will be. The machine keeps its promise. It just needs longer than the universe has existed so far: at fifty images per second, about 7 × 10⁶⁷ years.

Harddisk Sounds

2012-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

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One song, played back on 32 repurposed hard drives. Their read/write heads act as loudspeakers, twitching along to the music at the frequencies they can follow — some notes they hit, some they refuse.