Philipp Schaerer is a Swiss artist and lecturer whose work critically engages with digital image production, examining the increasingly blurred boundaries between the virtual and the physical.

After studying architecture at EPFL and graduating in 2000 with distinction (Prix A3E2PL: highest overall average grade throughout the entire architecture program), Philipp Schaerer subsequently worked as an architect and knowledge manager at Herzog & de Meuron in Basel. He is the author of many well-known architectural visualizations for the same firm and has significantly contributed to new digital imagery standards in the architectural context through his work. Between 2003 and 2007, he directed the postgraduate program in CAAD under Prof. Dr. Ludger Hovestadt at the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich. Since 2010, alongside his artistic practice, Philipp Schaerer has lectured at various Swiss universities and, since 2014, has been a visiting professor at EPFL’s School of Architecture, where he teaches a series of courses grouped under the name “Constructing the View.”

Schaerer’s works are continuously published and exhibited, and represented in several private and public collections including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the National Museum of Norway in Oslo, the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP) in Chicago, the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (ZKM), and the Fotomuseum in Winterthur. In 2023, Schaerer was honored with the Art Prize of the City of Thun. He lives and works in Zurich and Steffisburg, Switzerland.

    > Download (pdf)

We live in a visual environment whose aesthetics are increasingly determined by digital media and we keep turning into users of predefined computer and software based processing technologies. The aesthetics created in this way have become more and more interchangeable. A rich variety of visual manifestations is on the verge of withering away. It is time to develop more specific and individual forms of expression with computers and to achieve a more creative approach to computer-based technologies. This means circumventing the program's clearly defined application scenarios and predefined settings and devising one's own and more unrestricted processing chains and aesthetics.