2018: “The global team – a worldwide cooperation”

As part of the “Art Meets Technology” series, the disparate partners are already working together for the eighth year. Artistic works, which this year revolve around the guiding theme “The global team – a worldwide cooperation”, were first presented by the AVL management in Regensburg – Anton Angermeier and Dr. Georg Schwab – at an internal vernissage. Now the exhibition is open to the general public in cooperation with the industrial park management. Until December 9, not only the approximately 6,000 employees of the 380 companies at the site, but also visitors from the region interested in art are invited to take a free tour.

The project manager on the exciting idea: “Year after year, new students join our collaboration and regularly the results prove that this exchange can be a stimulating source of previously unseen images,” says Josef Mittlmeier (University of Regensburg). “In the beginning, there was the idea that the innovative power of designers and engineers also needs connecting utopias beyond the pragmatic challenges of daily business.”

It makes sense to focus on “borderless” teamwork in 2018, since at AVL Software and Functions GmbH, with around 500 qualified jobs in the industrial park alone, people from many nations and denominations work together every day to develop solutions for the world of tomorrow. “In keeping with this spirit, the works – acrylic, oil, digital painting – also set skeptical and critical tones, consider the ambivalence of globalization, but also illustrate in a surprising way the hopes that are attached to it. After all, we will need not only political but also technical solutions for many global problems,” say the initiators.

Above all, then, is the conviction that intelligent innovation must be thought out in all directions – not just in technical terms. The community of all people, Mittlmeier argues, harbors both conflicts and opportunities on a global scale. “Only when we succeed in constructively developing potentials together will we find a future worth living. Our world has become small. We must protect and share it.”

All contributors in Regensburg are open to this approach. If Andy Warhol’s bon mot that “department stores become museums and museums become department stores” is true, then the presentation of the students of the Institute of Fine Arts and Aesthetic Education takes place in the right setting, Mittlmeier justifies the choice of venue: “With the Rotunda as a portal to the frequented location for services as well as research & development, an exhibition venue establishes itself where dialogue about creative forms of expression becomes possible in a pleasant way without the usual barriers.”