Johanna Bruckner

Generous Bodies, HD Video installation, 2014, installation view, Museum Bärengasse Zürich

In this work I question „digital citizenship“ in relation to how individuals erase individual disadvan- tages by mobilizing „new equalities“ in the digital space. The questions I put forward to the public audience focus on how digital technologies influence people’s imagination of subjectivity today; and secondly; how citizens link equality, freedom and digital space. Public opinion is integrated in the performers’ scores and transformed into physical movement. This inquiry challenges the transformation of passive into active citizenship by questioning spectacle citizenship. The formation of the body in response to how new technologies (with emphasis on the phone) operate on the economiziation of affect, desire and attentiveness is put into question. I moreover question the formation of the body in response to how new digital technologies operate on the basis of affect, impression and attentiveness.

Workshop with the performers prior to the performance in the public space:

Asking dancers how the performance of pleasure and desire is a point of control for admission to a company: the performers’s performance of their affective bodies is the starting point for developing choreogra- phies, in which emotionality as a technology is put into question. The dancers decide to perform machines (for a example a phone); yet in their movements they deconstruct the machinic. Their argument is that emotionality is too undisciplined and unstructured: an “emo- tional motor“ can only destruct a machine but not feed it. They consider ways of using the “fuel“ which is freed by the “subject of pleasure“.

On stage they perform their arguments, which they build in response to three sentences: „What makes me as a dancer a machine; what makes me as a dancer a human? How makes the machine a dancer of me?“ The festival itself was conceived of a production space.

Usually screened in vertical version. Proportion: 320 × 568 pixels. See the link here: 63rd77thsteps.com/a-mystical-staircase-Johanna-Bruckner.html