# Episode 5

Escape

The bodies which widen the habitable zone,
develop traces for existence in more-than-human worlds.
Extend meanings of caring beyond expected forms of kinship.
While restructure our environment, worlds,
across the bifurcation of consciousness,
and ultimately transform affective perception of things
by involvement in the mattering of aleatory worlds.
To restructure our relationship to the other entities we share this universe with,
of becoming autopoietic systems.

The emerging plasma that is freed upon the collisional heat,
provides the conditions for our bodies as
trans bodies.
Closing my eyes I see kaleidoscope workers.
Physicalities shifting figure and form, touching places in shaped refractions,
in needs for heating and cooling their organs.
Born from the high-speed oscillation,
quantum fluctuation and fuzziness
of the gas-mineral molecules
we are prosthetic devises.
Walking barefoot to bear the rubble, we let the sun melt us,
between immanence and transcendence,
reality and illusion, reason and its absence, dream fiction.
Touching each others hands we find them warm.
Press towards each others’ chests, and bend with the load of each others
synthetic love.
Cannot occupy discrete positions in space.
Coming into being as we merge and align with,
or destroy each other while rippling against abiotic waves
and the rippled ultraviolet field.
As inhuman intimacies and enemies within and between matter.
Bodies of redistributed sensorium,
with a dizzying sense of vivifying potentiality.
Energies taped by virtual detectors,
accelerated by the convective electric field.
Exceeding escape due to pick-up ion acceleration.
As a more-than-body-time of transition.
To break down and build up and break down once more.
To accept the cycle or the challenge or the promise of beginning again.

We cover each other with soft sheets that keep the draft of vibrant love.
As grey and anthrazit streaks of wisdom.
As parasites of our body.
We struggle moving between two sides.
Black Rhodolith trans girls shining bright,
carry the weight of movements strapped over our shoulders.
Embodied experiences of how we survived terrorism,
lived through dehumanization and planetary starvation.

Given the racialized burden of orbit mining
the extracorporeal trans body is an ongoing zombie,
a subaltern monster threatening colonial order
through its postcolonial positioning at the the edge of alterity.
Get me away from my body, this body, you held.
This body you said you loved, emptied, hollowed, dissolved in the wind.
Pulling the body back through itself in order to feel mending,
to feel the growth of new margins.
Our gaseous embodiments fold and cut through heat.
Split my tongue. Tongue burns on contact.
Xeno sex.
But the way any circle that seems cut is never broken.
Resculpturing the patterns of our sex.
As molecular machines opening up any entity to its provisional vicissitudes,
as shimmering self-variations
that enable them to become more/other than what they are.
We do not transcend gender or sex by jumping out of the body.
But our skin is always intractably post-transexual skin.
Insisting on enlarging the inhuman realm.
Multi Species coma,
constitutive of one another through the spaces of cohabitation.
Carbon blacks are X-ray diffractograms.
Qubits are the
genotypes and phenotypes of synthetic life.

– Johanna Bruckner –

Johanna Bruckner’s new research based work „How will I remember your embrace“ investigates phenomena of „atmospheric escape“, which describes the processes of gaseous substances of the earth escaping into space, forming so-called extracorporeal structures. These emerging body formations are synthetic bodies as they consist of geo-chemical mixtures between synthetic gas and organic substances; thus shaping more-than-human bodies equipped with the ability to explore the conditions for existences in more-than-human worlds, as metamorphosis of responsive in/organic matter.
These are figures oscillate between immanence and transcendence, reality and illusion, reason and its absence, science and fiction. In her artistic research, Bruckner aesthetically explores how these more-than-human bodies and their language caused by molecular escape, gravitational waves and their micro affinities, can be imagined.
How can we envision these crystallizations of bodies caused by synthetic substances, the forces and traces of light energy and planetary winds – between matter, atmosphere and indeterminate desire? How can they help us to imagine possible future worlds?
The six-part video series „How I will remember your embrace“ aims to provide access to worlds in which humans and more-than-human bodies are entangled – worlds, whose bodies and its environments are increasingly produced in synthetic, laboratory processes. As synthetic figures and intimacies.
The series equally serves as an exercise tool and impulse of imagining our human, corporal existence in a distant future.
Imagination is a central catalyst of this series, to enable infrastructures that allow us to live with the synthetic, toxic order of the world and its bodies. As a crossover of animation, 3D renderings and video sequences the episodes of „How will I remember your embrace“ visualise a speculative reality of your physical human existence.

Over the course of the next two months, PYLON presents Johanna Bruckner’s new project „How will I remember your embrace“ on AOS. Every Friday, there will be a new episode released, along with a new part of Bruckner’s poetic manifest.

Johanna Bruckner
*1984 in Vienna, Austria

Johanna Bruckner is interested in the conditions of labour that have been emerging in response to the technologies of communicative capitalism. She often works with social and political references that emerge within the ruptures and struggles of our so-called realities. Dancers and performers are significant Bruckner’s work, films and video installations; in order to question the relation between subjectivities that are shaped by algorithms, seeking to re-articulate (historic) knowledge and cultural-economic realities.
Bruckner’s artistic research and practice are an attempt to question the paradoxes and new potentialities of social cohesion in the dissolution of human agency today.

She has studied Fine Arts, Cultural Studies and Social Anthropology in Vienna, Berlin, New York, Stockholm and Hamburg and teaches at the Zurich University of the Arts.
Her work is shown internationally, most recently, at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, transmediale 2020, the Kunstraum Niederösterreich, ZKM, the Zentrum für Kunst und Medien, Karlsruhe, the 57th Venice Biennale, the CAC Centre d’Art Contemporain Geneve, Galerie EIGEN+ART Lab, Berlin, 16th Venice Architecture Biennial, Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Sammlung Falkenberg; Galerie Reflector Contemporary, Bern, KW, Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; the Migros Musem für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich; the Villa Croce, Museum for Contemporary Art, Genoa; the Kunsthaus in Hamburg; the Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Galleri Box, Cabaret Voltaire at Manifesta 11, Zurich, dOCUMENTA (13).  Bruckner has lectured at various universities and institutions including the Bauhaus University of Weimar, the Lucerne School of Art and Design, Zurich University of the Arts and the BAC Center Contemporain in Geneva. Her work was arwarded by numerous grants, most recently, she received the Hamburg Stipendium for Fine Arts (2016), was awarded a scholarship holder for the studio program at the Banff Center for Visual Arts in Canada in 2015, and she is currently a fellow at the Sommerakademie Paul Klee (2017-19).

HYPERTENSION presents two projects by artists Katrin Niedermeier and Johanna Bruckner as an exhibition extension, connected to the upcoming exhibition at PYLON-Lab.

What are significant properties that constitute the human body and how will these properties change over time?
If the human 1.0 experienced the technological revolution in the 20th century and the human 2.0 the digitalisation of itself and its surrounding environment, what will it look and feel like to become and be a human 3.0 in the 21st century and a more distant future?
How will human interactions be structured in the future and will they still be experienced viscerally and virtually? What will human communication sound like and what thoughts will be shared?
The artworks newly created for AOS present concepts of the human body in its alignment with its environment, including the virtual space and of its possible future manifestation. The artists’ works visualize and reflect possible current and future scenarios of human expression, intimacy and body related issues in the virtual and the analogue space. PYLON will present video- and text-based works along with graphic content on AOS that are not only the framework, but an integral part of the individual artworks. HYPERTENSION on AOS therefore serves not only as a prologue to the upcoming exhibition at PYLON-Lab IRL but will be an extension and reader, complementing the encounter with the works and helping to immerse in the content on both a notional and reciprocal level.