Peter Weibel, the Austrian conceptual artist, curator, thinker, and tireless champion of new media art, has died at age 78.

Germany’s ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, where Weibel served as director for 24 years, announced his death, which came after a short illness.

“The ZKM’s worldwide reputation and its constant development and opening up to topics and social issues are due to [Weibel’s] uncompromising commitment,” Petra Olschowski, the minister of science, research and the arts of the German state of Baden-Württemberg, said in a statement.

Weibel was fascinated by the role of media and technology in shaping both reality and art-making. His multimedia experiments probed the intersections of science and aesthetics; his teaching at institutions sought to shape the discourse around new media; and his curatorial efforts advocated for digital artists including Lynn Hershman Leeson and Olafur Eliasson.

“With the advent of personal computers in everyday life, even the art world is forced to recognize that we are living not in a painted environment but a mediated environment,” he told Clot Magazine in 2021. “Even the art world cannot close its eyes and refuse to see the world as a product of science and technology.”

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