Nationality Austrian Role Artist Name Johannes Grenzfurthner | Signature Citizenship Austria Period Contemporary art | |
Occupation artist, writer, curator, theatre director, film director Movies The Gstetten Saga: The Rise of Echsenfriedl | ||
Tedxvienna johannes grenzfurthner sierra zulu
Johannes Grenzfurthner ( [joˈhanəs ˈgrɛntsfʊrtnə]; born 1975 in Vienna) is an award-winning Austrian artist, filmmaker, writer, actor, curator, theatre director and lecturer. He is known as the founder, conceptualist and artistic director of monochrom, an international art and theory group. Most of his artworks are labelled monochrom.
Contents
- Tedxvienna johannes grenzfurthner sierra zulu
- Tedxvienna johannes grenzfurthner on how to subvert subversion
- monochrom
- Conferences and festivals
- Director film producer
- Academia writing lecturing
- Entertainment and acting
- Community work
- Commercial work
- Personal life
- Awards
- Filmography Features
- Theater examples
- Publications
- References
He is one of the most outspoken researchers in the field of sexuality and technology, and one of the founders of 'techno-hedonism' (see also: barbots).
Recurring topics in Grenzfurthner's art and writing are film, technology, political activism, contemporary art, performance art, humour, philosophy, sexuality, critical theory, robotics, postmodernism, media theory, cultural studies, popular culture studies, science fiction, and the debate about intellectual property.
Boing Boing magazine refers to him as leitnerd, a wordplay with the German term Leitkultur that ironically hints at Grenzfurthner's role in nerd/hacker/art culture.
Tedxvienna johannes grenzfurthner on how to subvert subversion
monochrom
In the early 1990s, Johannes Grenzfurthner was an active member of several BBS message boards. He used his online connections to create a zine or alternative magazine that dealt with art, technology and subversive cultures, and was influenced by US magazines like Mondo 2000. Grenzfurthner's motivation was to react to the emerging conservativism in cyber-cultures of the early 1990s, and to combine his political background in the Austrian punk and antifa movement with discussion of new technologies and the cultures they create. The publication featured many interviews and essays, for example by Bruce Sterling, HR Giger, Richard Kadrey, Arthur Kroker, Negativland, Kathy Acker, Michael Marrak, DJ Spooky, Geert Lovink, Lars Gustafsson, Tony Serra, Friedrich Kittler, Jörg Buttgereit, Eric Drexler, Terry Pratchett, Jack Sargeant and Bob Black, in its specific experimental layout style. In 1995 the group decided to cover new artistic practices and started experimenting with different media: computer games, robots, puppet theater, musical, short films, pranks, conferences, online activism, which Grenzfurthner calls 'Urban Hacking' or more specific: 'Context hacking', a term that Grenzfurthner coined.
Context hacking transfers the hackers' objectives and methods to the network of social relationships in which artistic production occurs, and upon which it is dependent. In a metaphoric sense, these relationships also have a source code. Programs run in them, and our interaction with them is structured by a user interface. When we know how a space, a niche, a scene, a subculture or a media or political practice functions, we can change it and "recode" it, deconstructing its power relationships and emancipating ourselves from its compulsions and packaging guidelines.The group is known for working with different media, art and entertainment formats. Johannes Grenzfurthner calls this "looking for the best weapon of mass distribution of an idea".
Grenzfurthner is the group's artistic director.
Conferences and festivals
Grenzfurthner is head of Arse Elektronika festival in San Francisco (2007 – ), an annual academic and artistic conference and anthology series that focusses on sexuality and technology. The first conference was curated by Grenzfurthner in 2007 to answer questions about the impact of sexuality on technological innovation and adoption.
Grenzfurthner is hosting Roboexotica, the international Festival for Cocktail-Robotics (2002–) which invites researchers and artists to build machines that serve or mix cocktails. V. Vale calls Roboexotica "an ironic attempt to criticize techno-triumphalism and to dissect technological hypes."
Grenzfurthner is head of Hedonistika, a "smorgastic Festival for Gastrobots, Culinatronics, Advanced Snackhacks and Nutritional Mayhem", an event dedicated to approaches in gastronomical robots, cooking machines, molecular cuisine and experimental food performances. The first installment was presented in Montréal at the 2014 'Biennale internationale d'art numérique'. The second installment was presented in Holon, near Tel Aviv, at 'Print Screen Festival'.
Director, film producer
Grenzfurthner wrote and directed a range of theatre plays, street theatre performances and short films, but also works as a movie producer.
His first feature film as a director was the independent fantasy comedy Die Gstettensaga: The Rise of Echsenfriedl (2014). His first feature documentary is Traceroute (2016). He is working on several feature films (e.g. Sierra Zulu,, but his current main projects are the documentary Glossary of Broken Dreams and Tycho, a farcical film musical about the life and times of eccentric astronomer Tycho Brahe.
Academia, writing, lecturing
Grenzfurthner lectures at different universities in Austria (e.g. University of Applied Sciences, Graz, Austria; University of Arts and Industrial Design, Linz, Austria), Germany (Institute of Culture and Aesthetics of Digital Media at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg) and in the United States. He works as a thesis advisor, for example for Georg Mir's ethical tabletop roleplaying game Michtim: Fluffy Adventures.
He has published numerous books, essays and articles on contemporary art, communication processes and philosophy including Mind and Matter: Comparative Approaches Towards Complexity, Do androids sleep with electric sheep?, Of Intercourse and Intracourse: Sexuality, Biomodification and the Techno-Social Sphere and Pr0nnovation?: Pornography and Technological Innovation.
Grenzfurthner published the much debated pamphlet "Hacking the Spaces", that dealt with exclusionist tendencies in the hackerspaces movement. He extended his critique through lectures at the 2012 and 2014 Hackers on Planet Earth conferences in New York City.
He worked for various online/print magazines and radio stations (e.g. ORF, Telepolis, Boing Boing).
Entertainment and acting
Grenzfurthner is a comedian and performs at various venues, e.g. Vienna's Rabenhof Theater. Parts of his comedy show "Schicksalsjahre eines Nerds" form the basis of his documentary film Traceroute (2016).
He is a presenter and emcee for various events.
Grenzfurthner is acting in theater plays and films, for example Andi Haller's feature film Zero Crash.
Community work
Grenzfurthner sees monochrom as a community and social incubator of critical and subversive thinkers. An example is Bre Pettis of MakerBot Industries, who got inspired to create 3d printers during an art residency with Grenzfurthner at monochrom in 2007. Pettis wanted to create a robot that could print shot glasses for the event Roboexotica and did research about the RepRap project at the Vienna hackerspace Metalab. Shot glasses remained a theme throughout the history of MakerBot.
Grenzfurthner was one of the core team members in the development process of netznetz, a new kind of community-based funding system for net culture and net art together with the culture department of the city government of Vienna.
He started the "Hackbus" community, a platform and movement for mobile hackerspaces.
Together with Florian Hufsky, Leo Findeisen and Juxi Leitner, Grenzfurthner co-organized the first international conference of the pirate parties.
He is frequently invited as a jury member for festivals and cons.
Commercial work
Grenzfurthner is a professional creative consultant and offers coaching sessions for individuals and companies.
He was behind an acclaimed series of viral marketing videos for Boing Boing Video, dealing with a mysterious packages full of Cheetos. The series is set in the alternative universe of Soviet Unterzoegersdorf.
He conceptualized and co-built a robot installation to promote the products of sex toy company Bad Dragon.
Personal life
Johannes Grenzfurthner lives and works in Vienna and Durango, Colorado.
He grew up in Stockerau in rural Lower Austria and talks about it in his stand-up comedy "Schicksalsjahre eines Nerds" (2014) and his semi-autobiographical documentary film Traceroute (2016).
If I had not grown up in Stockerau, in the boonies of Lower Austria, than I would not be what I am now. The germ cell of burgeoning nerdism is difference. The yearning to be understood, to find opportunities to share experiences, to not be left alone with one's bizarre interest. At the same time one derives an almost perverse pleasure from wallowing in this deficit. Nerds love deficiency: that of the other, but also their own. Nerds are eager explorers, who enjoy measuring themselves against one another and also compete aggressively. And yet the nerd's existence also comprises an element of the occult, of mystery. The way in which this power is expressed or focused is very important.Grenzfurthner uses his personal life as an inspiration for his art and activism. On his personal website he states that he deals with his claustrophobic tendencies by "occasionally burying people alive."
As a kid and teenager, Grenzfurthner spent a lot of time at his grandparents' farm in the small village of Unterzögersdorf (a cadastral municipality of Stockerau). His grandparents' stories about Naziism, World War II and the Soviet occupation in allied-occupied Austria (1945-1955) influenced monochrom's long-term project Soviet Unterzoegersdorf.
He identifies as a leftist and atheist.
He is married to filmmaker Anna Grenzfurthner.