During her residency at iMAL Johanna Bruckner will be developing her new project “Autoclonography“ which examines the influences of AI on moments of desire (human and more-than-human) and aesthetically explores what options for agencies can be developed from them. It asks questions such as: What are the images of machine learning used for, transformed into, and what traces do they leave behind? Which bodies do they, as prosthetic images, produce? How do people encounter these images and their (failed) promises? With reference to moments of desire, pleasure, sexuality and imagination in social media, found- and self-produced footage as well as sequences from filmic works – the video installation will reflect on the fragile threshold between imagination, affirmation, and frustration of technology as an interface of embodied experience.

Articulated as a polyphonic installation, this work will reflect upon technological transformations beyond binary regimes of gender, agency and utopia. The question of how technological advancements give us the possibility of testing new agencies, mutual encounters and forms of coexistence is at the core of my artistic practice.

Johanna Bruckner's work is characterised by a multimedia approach in which the performance of the human body plays a predominant role. In her installations that formally present a combination of technological machinery and organic bodies, videos generated with computer graphic software regularly appear accompanied by sound compositions. The artist deals with themes related to biopolitics, feminism, queer cultures, and posthumanism. Collaborating with dancers and performers was initially a way for Bruckner to explore issues related to the working body, work as performativity and social construct, developing hypotheses to imagine alternatives to social norms. In her more recent works, the artist further develops her experiments with social bonds, including imagery associated with queer intimacy and intra-species relations. Inspired by molecular biology, quantum physics, and studies of hybrid life forms, Bruckner contributes through her works to a discourse that seeks to promote an ecology of care and trust, to help build a world in which human and non-human beings cohabit more positively with the environment and the technologies that inhabit it beyond binary regimes. Her work asks how the indeterminacy of being, today, might inform hybrid temporalities better tooled to deal with current technological, political and ecological changes.

Bruckner was born in Vienna (Austria) in 1984. She studied fine arts, cultural studies and social anthropology in Vienna, Berlin, New York, Stockholm and Hamburg. Her works have been shown internationally at House of Electronic Arts Basel (HEK), the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, the 57th Venice Biennale, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, the transmediale, the ZKM, Zentrum für Kunst und Medien, Karlsruhe, Deichtorhallen Hamburg and the CAC Centre d'Art Contemporain Geneva, among others. She currently holds the CERN fellowship at Arts at CERN. She received the Recognition Award for Fine Arts of Lower Austria, 2020, the re:humanism Prize for Art & Artificial Intelligence, 2021, and most recently, the Pax Art Award, the Erste Bank MehrWERT Kunstpreis, and the Medienkunstpreis der Stadt Wien, 2022. She has taught at various universities.

With the support of Creative Europe Programme of the European Union, through the European Media Art Platform.

Disclaimer:
This work was produced with the financial assistance of the European Union. The views expressed herein can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Union

Credits video images: Autoclonography, production still, 2024, Johanna Bruckner