Peter Weibel was born in 1944 in Odessa, and lives and works in Karlsruhe, Germany and Vienna, Austria. Since 1966, Weibel has created conceptual photo-literature as well as audio pieces, - texts, -objects and -actions. At the end of the 1960s, he worked in the field of Expanded Cinema, action art, performances and film together with his partner Valie Export. His interdisciplinary activities comprise scientific, artistic as well as literary, photographic, graphic, plastic, and digital works. Weibel was, and continues to be, an early and eloquent champion of a theory of communication responding to the rise of new media. Beginning with work in the tradition of visual poetry, Weibel produced «media-based literature» in the form of paper, photographic and object poems, body texts and material poetry, text objects and video texts.

Conceptual works and actions followed, together with media analyses employing the media under scrutiny, initial TV experiments on Austria's ORF, and later numerous installations deploying film and video. The publication of candid sexual representations in a black book on Viennese Actionism led to a lawsuit against its publishers Valie Export and Peter Weibel in 1970. Both artists continued to support each other's projects into the late 1970s. His subjects are less body-oriented, however, and deliver from a media-specific and semiological viewpoint. His works question the cult of the artist through socially critical analyses of media and systems including film, television, and the visual arts.

Weibel considers his theoretical and curatorial work to be a facet of his artistic practice. He is the Chief Curator of the Neue Galerie, Graz, and since 1999, chairman of the ZKM Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe. For more information: http://on1.zkm.de/zkm/e/

His many exhibitions curated and publications edited include Making Things Public (with Bruno Latour, 2005) and Future Cinema (with Jeffrey Shaw, 2002). He has also been the artistic director of Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria, Professor at the University for Applied Art, Vienna, commissioner for the Austrian pavilion of the Venice Biennale, and director of the Institut für Neue Medien, Frankfurt (1989-94).