About

Making knowledge feel alive.

I'm Clemens Baumann — a researcher, lecturer, writer, and filmmaker near Vienna. I work on how media and technology can help people understand the world, and feel something while they do.

The short version

By day I’m a junior researcher and lecturer in the Media Creation group at USTP, the University of Applied Sciences St. Pölten, where I work on interactive and immersive storytelling — VR, AR, 360° video — for knowledge transfer in museums, archives, and cultural heritage. I teach animated dramaturgy, game design, and visual communication, and I make films, from documentaries to a TV pilot about fortune cookies that come true.

I’m also preparing a doctoral project, planned to start in 2027, on how digital storytelling can become a low-threshold, sustainable, and reusable way of sharing knowledge in small and medium-sized GLAM institutions — galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. In other words: how the village museum with one part-time curator and a shoebox of photographs can tell its stories as well as the big houses do.

The longer version

As a child, I was convinced I would never learn to read. What the adults did with those scribbles seemed impossible — and frankly a bit suspicious. When my parents tried to read to me, I left the room. Had I owned a driving licence, I would have taken the car keys.

Then school happened, reading finally clicked, and I couldn’t stop. The first book I read entirely on my own was Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, aged six. I was confused but intrigued. (Reading the first two volumes afterwards helped.) One conviction has stuck with me ever since: storytelling is the most fascinating thing humans do.

At thirteen I was watching an episode of Tatort when something clicked again: suddenly I didn’t see a crime show, I saw shots — someone had put a camera there, and there, for a reason. From then on it was film. And I collected every classic failure a young filmmaker is supposed to collect. Acting lessons, followed by the discovery that I cannot act? Check. Applying to the Film Academy Vienna and not getting in? Check. Shooting a feature film at eighteen with no budget and no experience, and failing spectacularly? Check.

So I took the long way round: four semesters of studying English and German in Vienna (idly), a few years in live television, plenty of film sets in every junior position there is, and then a bachelor’s in Media Technology and a master’s in Digital Media Production at St. Pölten. Somewhere along the way I took an internship in a VR lab — and found out that research is just storytelling with footnotes. I’ve been there since 2018.

The thread running through all of it is simple: storytelling in the service of knowledge — what older traditions called Aufklärung. I’m drawn to digital humanism, media literacy, and the questions that new tools, especially AI, are forcing us to ask about culture and understanding.

I try to take ideas seriously without taking myself too seriously. This site is the portfolio. The thinking in public happens at clembaum.com: essays, notes, and field reports from research, film, and teaching — and the occasional experiment.