Iris Kienzl (b. 2002) is a Vienna-based media artist. She holds an MFA in Digital Art from the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
Her practice explores how places can be documented, examined and preserved, and what is lost or altered in the process. Abandoned sites often serve as a starting point for these investigations. She works with what remains there: objects, written notes, dust, smells, surfaces, spatial structures and other traces. Using 3D scans, video, digital systems and samples collected on site, she translates these places into different forms of documentation and archive.
Archiving itself plays an important role in her work. She is interested in why certain things are preserved while others are overlooked, and what happens when seemingly insignificant or worthless materials are suddenly examined, categorized and kept with care. Ephemeral or difficult-to-capture traces such as dust, smells or sounds also raise the question of what can actually be archived, and where attempts to preserve a place reach their limits.
Rather than trying to reconstruct a place as completely as possible, her work focuses on the gaps, contradictions and transformations that appear in the process of recording and translating it.
More recently, interactivity has become an increasingly important part of her practice, allowing visitors to search, navigate and find their own ways of accessing the collected traces. Her work moves between documentation, archiving, digital reconstruction and artistic investigation.