# Episode 2

Phylum Lava

We are a collection of centuries of molecular agreements
of screaming about ways to live.
Centuries of holding breath,
drawn to the outer shores of the sky.

Charged by the ring particles
while modifying
the spatial distribution of ions.
We cut in the middle, whirl-winding cells,
opening out into terrestrial chorus,
of accelerated coal.

Beyond the social relations with fossil fuels
and human being
as geologically composed.
As preemptive nano machines
of quantum solar matter
amplifying and distributing the impact of atomic sexes.
In a redistributed sensorium –
suggesting a dizzying sense of vivifying
potentiality.

Turn to the occupied space beyond the Earth,
reclaim its implicit alien-ness,
recall the presence of these recent pasts,
the objectification of indigenous knowledge.
Geology,
a spawn of the colonial capitalist assemblage
rapidly transforming the planet.

The determined alignment
with the molecular materialization of space
signals a mode of decolonization,
along with the strength
of its macromolecular body formations.
Erasing the unevenness of ecological and orbit violence.
Elastic temporality rubbing against the past.

Carbon, xenon, volcanic emissions and mercury of fossil fuels
escape as gaseous toxicity,
as synthetic toxicity,
into the exosphere
and form extracorporeal bodies.
As a result of ecological emergency,
a geological marker of human agency and culpability.

As processes that ignite us think of a world more capacious
than the small ones we too often think we only inhabit.

These extracorporeal bodies,
the toxic and nonhuman agents of escaping nuclear cataclysms,
pose ecological questions not without political ones.
Embodied scenarios of the apocalypse,
render visible the exploitable components of orbit mining.
Human-technological encounter and its synthetic waste,
whose magnetopauses of power
de-tract and exclude.
Left by powers of gravity,
geo- and biopolitics reach far into space.

Escape exposes living systems to a novel aggregation of atoms
opening the inorganic past of the atmo/biosphere to new
present-futurity.
The unseen and the unbearable
doesn’t need a landing place,
Its fossil fuels are its driving monsters,
stars burning out,
making the water flammable,
turning it into gaseous rock.

– 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.