Christa Sommerer studied Biology and Botany (1982-85), followed by Art Education and Art Study in Modern Sculpture (1985-90) in Vienna, Austria. She concluded her post graduate study at the Staedelschule Institut for New Media, Frankfurt (1993-94). Subsequently, Christa Sommerer was an artist-in-resident at the NCSA National Center for Supercomputing Application, Beckman Institute (US) and at the InterCommunication Center ICC-NTT (JP).
Since 1992, she has been collaborating with Laurent Mignonneau. Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau are internationally renowned media artists. They are researchers and artistic directors at the ATR Media Integration and Communications Research Lab in Kyoto, Japan and associate professors at the IAMAS International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences in Gifu, Japan. Their interactive artworks have been called “epoch making” for pioneering the use of natural interfaces to create a new language of interactivity based on artificial life and evolutionary image processes. They have won many major international media awards, for example the Golden Nica Ars Electronica Award for Interactive Art 1994 (Linz, Austria), the Ovation Award of the Interactive Media Festival 1995 (Los Angeles, USA), and the Multi Media Award ’95 of the Multimedia Association Japan. In 1997, they edited the Art @ Science book, Springer, Vienna/New York.
