AUSTRIAN audio installation artist David Hochgatterer has won the £1,000 student prize in the Aesthetica Art Prize swards, and no-one will be more delighted than his tutor in Linz.

"He's been telling me it's time I did a new piece, but I couldn't afford it, but now I can. This prize allows me to make future works, so it's a big step," said David after the prize announcement and exhibition opening at York St Mary's in Castlegate, York, as his work Time To X continued its successful progress across Europe.

"Actually I'm out of words," he said, as he accepted his prize from sponsors Hiscox, but he later told What's On: "I'm a second-year student of art and design in Linz, where Aesthetica Magazine is one of the most read contemporary art publications, and as a student you should seek to enter competitions, so I applied to the Aesthetica one.

York Press:

Artist David Hochgatterer: "manipulating the mechanisms of perception". Picture: Jim Poyner Photography

"I'd worked at the Linz opera house and theatre in sound, lighting and set design, but I wanted to realise my own creativity, make my own things, so that's why I wanted to study and go with my technical skills.

"In my work, I aim to manipulate the mechanisms of perception, and choose my medium depending on the kind of experience I wish to convey. Thematically my work is focused on scientific concepts, but communicated in an aesthetic way in order to trigger comprehension, as well as provoke philosophic deliberations."

Competition entrants were asked to submit works that commented on the way we inhabit the Earth, and David duly entered Time To X (2013-2014), an audio installation that considered the fourth dimension, time, transforming it into a geometrical expanse. Already it has been exhibited at the Ars Electronica Centre in Linz and Lab 30 in Augsburg and won the Sonic Art Award at the Festival Arte Sonoro in Rome, and now it has been equally well received in York.

"It's based on Einstein's theory of four-dimensional hyper space," said David. "This is the fourth dimension, and I wanted to make it more understandable by transferring the fourth dimension of time to a physical dimension."

York Press:

David Hochgatterer's Time To X, winner of the Aesthetica Student Art Prize

To do so, a short audio file has been sliced into short fragments, mapped on a horizontal array of 96 loudspeakers and played back simultaneously, so that every acoustic element of the sound is continuously audible. "The listener experiences a still picture of a period of time," says David.

"Five seconds of time are expanded on five metres of physical space...and when you move very closely along the installation, you are – proverbially – moving in time."

There is still time aplenty to see Time To X: the Aesthetica Art Prize Exhibition continues until May 29 at York St Mary's, open Wednesdays to Sundays, noon to 4pm; free admission.