Along Tissue, a Leap, Passing, Voice
We are bodies of salty fluids, with hands that shook arms, legs, toes and breath, with nerves all plugged up, muddied by salt in every synapse […] bodies dismembered only perceptible as a minor smelly unruliness We are bodies of vast archives of toxic substances. [excerpt from Along Tissue, a Leap, Passing)
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Crushpad Climax, Voice over
"Why a Cyber Porn Club? Because we are sexy and smart, just like you. We know that fans like you are key to our cyber feasts. So when you join our Club (like you’re doing now), we give you everything we’ve got — attentive, silver-carpet treatment, all the way. You get it all. Because you make us feel like a STAR! — Gorgeous, glamorous goddesses! You’ve made our day. Now ‘Access’, so we can bring pleasure to yours!"
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Crushpad Climax
Net porn produces endless data streaming. Data dissipates, becomes lost, and fails because it is outside the spectrum of the usable, (the climax). Such data subtly refuses to be corralled into the confines of a hollowed-out, pre-cast sexual identity. The data of digital failure – the data which leaks out, which ducks under the fence and finds the unbounded space - taken as a whole, constitutes trans-corporeality, a fragile nucleus radiating a decomposing force, constantly breaking down and resurfacing elsewhere. The potential of digital failure as a refusal to submit to contemporary ‘dataveillance’ society.
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On Johanna Bruckner's work
Johanna Bruckner’s video works and performances inhabit a liminal realm, transgressing the outermost reaches of language to find new possibilities for human and posthuman affective relationships. Bodies are reconceived as affecting multiplicities that allow for more nuanced, queer, and speculative perspectives on the interactions between physical and more-than-human entities. Bruckner pushes the limits of the human sensorium and invents technological prostheses that allow us to reimagine and redistribute the relationships and patterns by which subjects comprehend their world.
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FLASH INTERNATIONAL ART MAGAZINE: Sex and Desire in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
The work of Austrian artist identifies in other species the starting point for a reconfiguration of desire centered on the performer. In works such as Molecular Sex (2020), Polymorphic Sensibilities (2020), and Atmospheric Drafts of Intimacy (2020) — audiovisual installations often accompanied by performances — the artist investigates complex sexual changes to the body encountered by advanced technologies.
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Review in Metropolis M: Open Studios, Jan Van Eyck Academie, 2021
Johanna Bruckner has put her video work in the workshop. A good choice, as the process of creation and making new connections are recurring themes in her colorful multimedia collages. The video screens, along with the tools, work tables and some props from the films, form a working circuit.Bruckner introduces the "xenotechnological prosthetics," which recur both in the videos and in the space as an object. The whole forms an impressive total installation, which uses data, quantum physics and trans-corporeality to create a new world with countless possibilities for the future.
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SCHIRN MAG: On the resistance of our Bodies
Hypnotic dances and hybrid beings in cyberspace: Video artist Johanna Bruckner transforms the human body into digital matter. With the psychedelic-seeming simultaneity of multiple exposure, the images flow one over the other: swirling textures, blurred shapes, patterns, points of light, and swooping images, accompanied by the ethereal tones of the soundtrack. Creatures that are more clearly recognizable in their form then become visible, with flowing, smooth, long limbs and a jellyfish-like head, performing a hypnotic dance...
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Atmospheric Escape
Celestial gases are black and have grey veins that know how to move. They are never still. Their waves have radioactive glare, no matter which atmosphere. The void of interstellar space a desert of polar energies and planet winds faces histories of distinct occupation, human and artificial settlement. The violences of political and technological aspiration and reimagination. Default politics of militarisation, and pollution. Turning to the occupied space beyond the Earth, and reclaim its implicit alien-ness, to recall the presence of these recent pasts, the objectification of indigenous knowledge. The here determined alignment with the molecular materialization of space signals a mode of decolonization, along with the strength, the fragility and the ephemerality of its macromolecular body formations.
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On Molecular Sex, Review by Annabel Lacroix
How can we redistribute relations and influence patterns in the making of technology to embody non-normative and non-binary perspectives? For me the subtle layering in Bruckner’s video and performance on screen provided an openness and sensitivity that performed a strong queering of the idealised vision of our technofuture. The video was accompanied by a scrolling text on a small side screen, a posthuman manifesto for interspecies sexuality from sexbots and every mutating techno-organisms with simultaneous co-habiting genres. Only then society would shift from binary sex to ‘quantum-sex’. The live performance embodied the choreographed elements in her video work (which are reminiscent of both music videos and contemporary dance) layered with short excerpts of found footage and 3D renderings of a three-legged dancing creature, with meditative watery sounds and an occasional chorus.
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Molecular Sex: A sym-poetic framework
"We have not found words for our existence. Assigned non-human at birth, our conscious mind does not remember a time in which the human world felt real. Our loves are not human loves. What are the loves we long for? What are the loves we need? What are the loves we want to feel without knowing they can yet exist"?
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Molecular Sex & Polymorphic Sensibilities
Johanna Bruckner’s text is a speculative proposal for new types of interspecies sexuality and subjectivity that could take us beyond oppressive binaries, based on her work Molecular Sex which is currently on view in the group exhibition The Eternal Network at Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Just as quantum computing promises a world of networks in which ones and zeroes simultaneously coexist with one another, Bruckner’s artwork describes a fictive future sexbot that is seemingly able to freely mutate from one state of being to another. Taking its cue from a sea creature called the “brittle star,” this bot is a portrait of social, technological, and bio-chemical entanglements, as they exist in (non)human networks, after the impact of phenomena such as micro-plastics. Following the writings of Karen Barad, the project asks how the molecularization and indeterminacy of being, today, might inform queer and hybrid futures better tooled to deal with current technological, political and ecological changes.
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Molecular Ghosts in Love
These reflections are propositions on how recent conceptions on the molecularization of the world and our bodies may crystallize in a redistribution of the sensible. How can today’s collapse of space and time enact particular situations of molecular revolutionary scenarios; ones which allow of the re-ordering of today’s biosurveillance regimes in favor of a micropolitics of the sensible? Which affectively diffracted temporalities are needed for bodies to align beyond the boundaries of language? And more precisely, which virtual body conceptions are needed, in which matter, energetic materials and volatile things coexist with humans in non-hierarchical intra-actions and entanglements? The starting premise for these reflections is that matter, be it material of affective, is having self-agential capacity, intrinsic self-transformative potential and is in constant metamorphosis within itself and toward the other with whom it is in a constant affinity; being a desirous and energizing dynamism of polymorphic sensible relationalities. In the following, when the molecular appears in relation to certain significations, let me underline that it is in general about abstract force of the molecular in as such, which is a floating synthesis of plural encounters.
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The art field as a multi-billion industry
The art field is now a more than 56 billion dollar industry, and is indivisible from the industry that surrounds and enables it. In the face of accelerated deregulation, culture increasingly serves to bring about economic development and art returns to life as an economic factor. But artistic value can also provide public experience extra to the market, and in so doing contribute importantly to cultural wealth. The term “Cultural wealth” is used by governments and cultural industries to describe the ameliorative benefits of the arts but has also a longer history in which wealth is understood not as a financial term but rather as one that names what is produced communally as a shared public asset. So, instead of normalizing the expectation of an artist’s free and underpaid labor, it is now incumbent to recognize the value of artists’ work as a public good and to support it as such. That means redefining the artist as a paid social-economic subject. Thus, cultural policy within the framework of the creative industries must reinvent itself.
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I too, Have Been Seduced by the Promise of Exposure
Podiumsdiskussion, Kunsthaus Hamburg. Diskussionspapier. Mit diesem Statement setzen wir uns für die Bedingungen künstlerischer Arbeit in und außerhalb Hamburgs ein. Das Ziel dieser beginnenden Debatte ist, in gemeinsamer Diskussion einer entstehenden Arbeitsgruppe Lösungsvorschläge zu den im Folgenden genannten Punkten zu besprechen. Die geplante Arbeitsgruppe erarbeitet Kurz- und Langzeitstrategien basierend auf Erfahrungen unserer Arbeitsbedingungen; und welche Infrastrukturen künstlerischer Produktion neu orientiert oder ausgebaut werden können. Einige gesammelte Anliegen wollen wir in Kürze umreisen.
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Publication: SCAFFOLD.
Publication: SCAFFOLD. The book's central concern is a discussion of the construction site scaffold in relation to the scaffold as object and method of an algorithmic operation. The point is to set the digital fabrication of public space by algorithmic infrastructures and architectures against the physical scaffold as a location for economic-political confrontation. The work, consisting of a publication and a sculpture, intends to sound out the capacity for agency for a praxis that organises itself politically to entwine work, space and infrastructure, and will refer to current architectural developments in Hamburgʼs HafenCity. The publication is arranged in two parts, while interconnections are key. Artistic and theoretical contributions from local and international positions address the subject in a variety of forms. The sculpture described later in the text will be realised in collaboration with Caro Baumann, architect.
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SCAFFOLD
THE BUILDING, A SCAFFOLD, A SCORE. Script for an Assemblage-Film. Short version. I recently wandered along Versmannstrasse in the Baaken Quarter in Hamburg, passing large areas of wasteland occupied by sea birds, with the river beds smelling of marsh drying out in Hamburgʼs early July heat, when the street ended abruptly in front of a block of pale green shelters. Some mothers and their children were in front of the buildings, on the playground between the blocks of shelters, their temporary homes. In immediate proximity to their living space, refugees are confronted with private corporations’ aspirational new luxury enclaves, the clime of redevelopment. Most of the land is being sold to private investors; new homes are rising up and will soon change the landscape entirely. Not far away from the refugeesʼ homes, workers live in specifically designated...
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The Future of Work: Scaffolds and Agencies in the post-work age
The substitution of human labour with robotic technologies is challenging European welfare systems, generating a complex debate about the policies that should be adopted to regulate this process. According to recent discussions between politicians and representatives of other positions in Europe, either robots or the companies using them should pay a tax, in order to lessen the social costs arising from automation’s displacement effect. And this ʻrobot taxʼ, some argue, should be used to finance a universal basic income. A robot can operate a machine for longer, more safely, in any weather and without any need for lunch breaks, holidays or sick pay.
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On my work
I have always been fascinated by the structures of movement, and the changing metamorphosic settings and patters of how bodies relate to, merge with, and dissolve from each other. I have been interested in chimeric bodily assemblages that invisibly and infinitely change their interwoven-ess. The bodies in my work perform in relation to one other, creating a physical language that remains temporarily autonomous because the scores, in their emerging structure, are temporarily foreign to the capitalist abstraction. The bodies’ movements are beyond the range and scope of contemporary surveillance mechanisms, as they interrupt and disrupt the algorithmic streams of data and finance. These bodily constellations perform as self-determined, self-composed durational social endeavours, rehearsing relational accountabilities.
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Sergio Ferro
Sergio Ferro: "The history I write, and that Rodrigo [Lefèvre] and Flávio [Império] wrote for years in Grenoble is always an upside down history. Usually we look down from the architect to the realization of the work, but we try to approach architecture from an upside down angle, from what happens down at the building site up to the architect’s drawings. First, why did this kind of problem emerge during the sixties? This was not extraordinary for my generation. At that time, in the sixties, there was a worldwide climate of euphoria and excitement and leftist movements of all kinds; guerillas, revolutions, and very important social movements in Europe".
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Tarra Vague / Text
In this text, which is based on my works Terra Vague: Against the Ghosts of Land and Total Algorithms of Partiality, I would like to discuss some of the Brazilian architect Sérgio Ferro’s key ideas, and consider his propositions as a critical response to the politics of urban renewal in Hamburg’s HafenCity. Sérgio Ferro was born in 1938 in Curitiba, Parana. He is a graduate of the University of São Paulo, where he also taught. His work focuses in particular on questions of labour and production conditions in the construction industry; his involvement in the planning of the new capital city Brasília during the 1960s played an important role in the development of his theories.
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The lecture performer's body
THE LECTURE PERFORMER'S BODY. Some thoughts on recent work. The lecture performer is a worker on the stage; he/she is the producer of content but also the producer of affectivity. The mediation of the content depends on the performance of affect; the capability to address and impress the other, the potential to attract and catch audiences - the love he or she performs with. The body’s engagement is a measure of evaluation. Performance, as we know, has surpassed the art genre and determines the contemporary subject: the market demands a body, which is continuously performing to optimise his/her desires and pleasures. Today, the discipline of human affect is central in anyone’s performance of daily life and work. Published by Andey Shental in "Penomenology of Lecture Performance".
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Total Algorithms of Partiality
Poem from three citizens - Poem from work in the military. The baseball field – in front of the house – as a shooting range surrounded by urban warfare, backlit by a military warzone. The software is tested and developed by Cisco through field trips in the Gaza strip. Our movemets serve the basic patterns for target data developement. We are those bodies that are feedbacking between Gaza and HafenCity. Each overlap - a new bodily constellation - confuses the sensory technology; by the fence we sense only our intimate, corporeal agency; embodied transport - the agency of social elevation.
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EMBODIED INQUIRY AND INSURGENT RESEARCH CREATION in Johanna Bruckner's Total Algorithms of Partiality. By Marius Henderson.
EMBODIED INQUIRY AND INSURGENT RESEARCH CREATION in Johanna Bruckner's Total Algorithms of Partiality. By Marius Henderson. In the dance movements of the performers one can witness the bodies’ potential to secede from forms to which they were relegated, and to assume other forms and formations. Options for alternative sensory arrangements suddenly arise since dance affects the entire body, with all its senses. Hence, Bruckner’s work also investigates the possibilities for a ‘(re)distribution’ of the sensible, and this marks the preeminent moment of the emergence of the political. Past and present investigations into the affective dimensions of (labor) struggles constitute starting points for transformations of established genres and linear narratives of life and survival in Bruckner’s practice. Inter- and intra-subjective calibrations are being reshaped and reformulated, and resistant tendencies are being unleashed. Thus, Bruckner’s practice is necessarily situated in a transdisciplinary, transmedial, and trans-generic field – in dance, as well as in performance art, video art, public art and installation art.
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Rebel Bodies: A few Scores, 2015-16
Rebel Bodies: A few Scores, 2015-16. Film script. SCORE for turning around. SCORE for body release. SCORE for dance development. The situation of moving. Make dance technique a preparation for (mass) movement!
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Contested Circuits of Production
Contested Circuits of Production: Report on the workshop I gave at the SARN Conference on Artistic Research, „we, the public“. Published by SARN. What could it mean to conceive of artistic research conferences as critical practices in the present? How do they activate a critical institutional context? What does it mean when producers become mediators of their own work? Asked to give a short report on the workshop I held at the SARN conference we, the public, this statement will briefly reflect upon the form I chose to connect work and audience, the arrangement of work/space, the role of research in the exploration of institutional presentation formats beyond exhibition and display, and the role of feedback in the presentation of artistic work on site.
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Rebel Bodies. Text by Marius Henderson
Rebel Bodies. Text by Marius Henderson. Johanna Bruckner continues her research on the organization of collective bodies with “Rebel Bodies”. This work picks up the Workers Dance League’s inquiry into the possibilities of forming subversive embodied collective subjects.
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Body Talks. Subjectivation, ‘emotional objects’ and the economy of desire
BODY CONVERSATIONS. Subjectivation, ‘emotional objects’ and the economy of desire. There has been a focus in the post- operaist tradition of thinking, which affirms that subjectivation takes place in the pre-symbolic state of perception. While the pre-symbolic or pre-individual (the affective) is paradoxically the dominant mode of production today, it may inhabit the conditions which offer escape from capitalist domination. My contribution with this text is to consider how subjectivity is produced by the experience of our feelings in relation to how they are attached to certain objects. The performers Hedda Parkkonen, Roberta Cepagglia, David Espinosa Angel, Eva Streit, Milena Stein, Isabell Suck and Karen Kan participating in the performance installation “Body Talks” play an important role in developing my arguments. The following paper is structured in the form of an essay which is built in response to my artistic work.
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REBEL BODIES: Publication
REBEL BODIES: Publication. During the 30s numerous workers’ dance groups emerged across the US and Europe and assembled under umbrella organization of artists with the founding aim of putting an end to exploitation and inequity in the workplace by calling dance a “weapon in the class struggleˮ. Left wing performers envisioned a revolutionary dance form that would allow blue-collar realities of oppression and marginalization to disappear. These early dance clubs were constitutive of the fractured politics of the depression, the economic crisis, and the influence of the fascist clime in Europe. The dance communities produced scores that everybody in the public audience could learn and repeat, in order to transform the physical experience of common movement into social agency and political consciousness. Simple movements aimed at evoking a sense of community in the group. Liberation and equality would not just occur during the revolution but through ongoing practice organising everyday life.
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AAR platform for critical aristic research
AAR is an umbrella term for a research platform, whose practices try to reconfigure and modulate what we conceive of „the Curatorial“ today: what are the models of collaboration between actors in the field today and who participates therein? Most of the work is collaborative... - these activities stopped being articulated within the framework of AAR, but subsumed under the general art practice by Johanna Bruckner.
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