# Episode 6

Atmospheric Drafts of Love

Plastic chiral assemblies are shaken stochastically into final form
to simulate bonding activation energy.
Atmospheric shocks unsettle our existence.
Atmospheric shocks form meteoritic fall-in;
lightning, UV radiation nurture our being.
Through solar interactions with the magnetosphere;
the crystallinity of the soft segments in the polyurethanes
causes
Atomic shocks
Atmospheric shocks.
Molecular dissociation energy.
the excess energy is carried away by
the electron.
The energy released is distributed among the vibrational, rotational,
and translational modes.
Into an orbit vibrational ground state.

Our prosthetics mimics a sea horse’s tail.
The metaphor of the undersea world
inspired the design of a body extension for the orbit.
The analysis of the unique seahorse’s tail structure
became the insight into the overall biomimetic design.
In fact, a seahorse tail enables movement,
gripping and protection to the seahorse while floating.

But, seahorses are aleatory beings using tails to grasp objects in their environment
while they camouflage to hide from predators.
Our prosthetics is a network of fabric-covered cables and ball joints
that lock the bodies upper torso to a system of handrails,
while tail sections are inflated and exhausted in sequences to create organic movement.
Floating as a weaponized seahorse.

This is a world of another temporality.
Elastic seahorse tail temporality rubbing against the past
displaying continuity between the past and ongoing injustice
and futurities to be mindful of our grammars, vocabularies,
visions emerging from movements
that are grappling with the ongoing apocalypse of particular bodies.
We argue for an expanded time-frame of the present.
A polymorphic time.
That opens to the duration of the extracorporeal synthetic body postures of millions of years.
Where we glimpse the ephemerality of that bodies
as a micro politics of particular matter.

Interstellar non/human performance tells us that
justice cannot unfold in an ubiquitous web of entanglement;
when everything universally serves one another.
How can aleatory agencies of the present unfold
when the excluded ones are not accounted for;
those relations for which the inclusiveness of planetary entanglement
doesn’t have signals, codes and languages for?
The ultraviolet light of the Sun intensifies matter in particularities.

If we care for each other we act from in-between,
in a world of more than betweens
that installs support systems
that hyperbolically respond,
while providing the conditions to re-entangle
within the particular immersive.

The explosive synthetic wolds of the orbit of the conceive of
the cared-for/caring-bodies,
the cared-for/caring-situations,
the cared-for/caring-void and virtual,
as a complex web of toxic gaseous vibrant matter,
as particular assemblages and textures of poss-ability.
It remains to be seen
how a particular form of polymorphous care,
that intensifies particular relations,
in macromolecular formations,
can un-fold, under-fold, de-fold, re-fold and poly-fold.
As oscillators of sub-sensory experiences
reorganizing present politics as orbitary agency
of queer human and more-than human-ness.
Of synthetic embrace.
Will I remember your embrace?

– 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.