Atmospheric escape is a phenomenon by which molecules cross the Earth’s atmosphere into outer space, where they can potentially merge and create new life forms. Johanna Bruckner’s video works and performances inhabit a similar liminal realm, transgressing the outermost reaches of language to find new possibilities for human and posthuman affective relationships. Her poems and texts reoccupy language to queer the rhetoric of space colonialization. Bruckner seeks and finds resistance within micromolecular and cosmic formations. 

In video works like Molecular Sex (2020), about a sexbot who mutates freely from one state to another, constellations of moving and falling bodies forge new spaces of indeterminacy. Animation and filmed performances are layered over one another in algorithmic and mechanical processes that allow new aesthetic entanglements and self-performativities to emerge. 

Bruckner’s latest work is a collage of Dark Room Sci-Fi, queer post-pornography, and extra-terrestrial social bonding. 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. She invents what she terms “xeno-technological prostheses” that allow us to reimagine and redistribute the relationships and patterns by which subjects comprehend their world.

Text by Amanda Sarroff.