Level 2025 completed! What is our score and was our story for this year? This post summarizes our year from the perspective of Ingrid and Leo Brunner-Sauermann. We start with where we touch the global and end with the local.
Thank you, dear family, friends, co-workers, living beings! The year had a lot for us. Going through it together with you makes it better.
Work
Ingrid had a productive year managing the Chemical Faculty of the University of Vienna. We thank Christian Friedrich Wilhelm Becker for the first year leading the Chemie faculty as dean. New professors appointed were Elisa Tomat for Institute for Inorganic Chemistry and Elisabeth Hofer for Institut für Didaktik der Chemie . The government change to Christoph Wiederkehr also had an impact on policy and budget at the University – Ingrid has to find ways to save money, as every public department in the country.
Leo had a productive year at portatour. He leads the IT department for marketing, sales and support. In 2025, we redesigned portatour.com to reflect both Territory Optimization and Route Planner. Creative Flo and Leobard added Kirby CMS to our toolset, in addition to WordPress and PHP. Andreas Lackner and Markus Bernel from marketing are happy, Kirby enables them to swiftly publish press releases or success stories. Veronika Donner-Farkas continued writing helpful help center articles and leveled up her video-making expertise to tell stories about territory optimization in 3 minutes. More videos are being added to our pages. In September Michael Sedlacek joined Leo’s team bringing in vast experience from enterprise and his photography website. Leo continued being part of the sales steering board. Under the leadership of Matthias Grünberger, this all supported the growth of portatour.
Participatory Culture
Leo and Ingrid joined Schönburn 2025, the annual gathering of the BurningMan community in Austria. We started the participatory Austrian Burner Community with Erntefestival in cooperation with Monochrom in 2011. Our community is still live and kicking.
Leo performed a reading of his Mantra “für das Leben” on stage there, together with Snowwhite.
Salon Leobard traveled to Borderland in a smaller group. If you haven’t seen yet, Leobard’s photos of the Hammock Reactor and performance art videos from Borderland 2024 are fancy.
Leobard supported other members of Salon to build the Cosmic Portal together, a hippie trap of colorful lights bringing joy.
Climate Activism
Leo’s role as climate activist for FridaysForFuture Austria intensified. He is one of the webmasters of fridaysforfuture.at . In 2025, Fridays Austria made the organizational structure more effective by defining new Bundesteam roles. Leo finally got the Kirby 3 to 4 update done for the website in December. As part of the team, Leo enjoyed contributing to the photo upload page we did for Fridays For Future remembering 10 years of Paris Climate Agreement across Austria (fb, insta). Christiana Figueres, who led negotiations of the Paris Agreement, published this emotional video looking back 10 years. She also pointed to a Guardian Article observing that the Paris Agreement changed the world course from “+4 degrees” to a better “+2.5 degrees” by 2025. If you appreciate a livable planet, say thanks to Christiana, here is Leo’s thank-you. Leo attended the national activist strategy gatherings in Linz and Innsbruck.
A cut into Leo’s life
Leo cut into three fingers of his left hand exactly a year ago when working on an art piece for last year’s new year celebration. It was a big cut into his life. Recovery went well, the AKH doctors did magic, no infections. The fingers are writing these lines, but not like before. Life is short. Lesson learned: always take care when operating heavy machinery and diligently follow security protocols. Here is a picture of the artwork that Leo worked on, a model for a Torii Gate for a future burn. It cites the Japanese temple gates separating the mundane from the holy, and the gates Leo made and burned for Erntefestival.
Our flat
Ingrid and Leo continued working on our flat. In January, we finally published our 26 minute time-lapse video of our 16 months roof renovation project made from 389172 photos . The Canon SLR died shortly after this project, cameras are consumables.
21 years of marriage
In May, Leo and Ingrid celebrated 21st Wedding Anniversary.
ME/CFS activism with Burners.at and BlackFerkStudio
In June we remembered our friend Judy Schossböck whose life ended because of ME/CFS. Leo contributed to the ArtForME fundraiser by organizing a live stream and interviews with attendees. Part of it can be seen in this video by Matthias Mollner about Judy in the Sky – Art for ME.
Sailing in Croatia
Our love for the ocean and sustainable holidays brought us again to sailing in Croatia. We spent a week on the ocean, driven by the wind and powered by photovoltaics and the sun. As responsible owners of a fake business, we visited our Do It Yourself Yoga Studio on Tramerka, an uninhabited island and set up a new sign. The goats kept the business running in our absence.
Ars Electronica
In September, we visited Ars Electronica 2025 in Linz.
MEUTE
We attended MEUTE live in Vienna and enjoyed their energetic live marching band meets electronic music rythms style.
Styria
In autumn we went on vacation. A relaxing stay in Styria. Finally visiting Austria Skulpturenpark, Herberstein animal habitat, while staying first in lovely exquisit Hotel Muhr Pöllau and then one night in affordable Haus am See Stubenberg.
This blog is now on the fediverse
Leo found out how to combine the W3C ActivityPub with WordPress using ActivityPub Plugin. Joy and fun followed! Hello Friends, FOAF, RSS, Mastodon, Fediverse all in one. It was great to see how to reply from WordPress to activitypub/mastodon and mention people? More to come in 2026. This blog is now part of the federated social network based on open standards. As Cory Doctorow pointedly expressed it in the end of the year at 39c3 in his call for a post-american enshittification-free internet, we need to tell the Billionaire Bros to fuck off and take the future into our own hands.
Tenet: a very clever movie by Christopher Nolan … about world peace?
In Oktober, Leo finally watched Tenet by Christopher Nolan. It was recommended to us by our friend and post-production movie artist Ebo Rose. After some re-thinking, Leo found a new interpretation of the movie. On first sight it is dark, but when you see through how the protagonists trick the system, a future of peace is possible. Leo was the first viewer on the internet to write it up in detail, and long-time redditer doloros_mccracken wrote I’m astounded that you got all of this out of two viewings. I’ve been thinking about and decoding this movie for years and watched it 20+ times straight through …No one wants to believe Nolan is lying. Think of it like he respects you so highly he’s gifted you an incredibly hard puzzle to solve.
Stubborn optimism
We learned from Tom Rivett-Carnac from his TED talk on How to shift your mindset and choose your future: during negotiations for the Paris Agreement Christiana Figueres passed him a note:
Painful!!!
But let’s approach with love! ♥️
Christiana Figueres
We are thankful for 2025 and wish everyone a good 2026!
Leo & Ingrid