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 and will they still be experienced viscerally and virtually? What will human communication sound like and what thoughts will be shared?

As an extension of the upcoming eponymous exhibition at PYLON-Lab, HYPERTENSION presents projects by artists Katrin Niedermeier and Johanna Bruckner that evolve around these questions.

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.

“reality island is elsewhere” (2019) @ Katrin Niedermeier

An important starting point of the selected artistic positions is the ability of digital image production to re-imagine the material world in a radically dematerialized way. The artists develop a multi-layered, both deeply figurative and abstract discourse that deals with the impossibilities of a sufficient representation of the physical, the corporeal of the human body.

If the image is traditionally regarded as the representation of a remote presence in time or space, of a past state, and is thus considered an absent presence, the virtual image is the representation of an absence, since nothing has been except an absence that, once the distance between the image and the model has been removed, is always present: a hyper-image, a self-referential image that cannot imagine reality because it coincides with it.

The virtual emerges as a multiple, potential and dynamic structure, which in the incessant timeline reveals points of reality that are not limited at the limit of specification, but are matrices of continuous differentiation, without any original reference model.

Through their work, both Katrin Niedermeier and Johanna Bruckner disclose a world of the hyper-human and non-human at the same time, opening up places of longing of the human soul, which are filled with hope, yet above which a haze of uncertainty seems to lie. Questioning if human impulses and experiences go beyond the restraints of our organic being attached to the analogue space.

“How will I remember your embrace” (2020) @ Johanna Bruckner

Is an organic evolution of human existence long overdue, or environmentally unavoidable, or is the transformation of our bodies only the inevitable consequence of technological revolutions of the last century.
How will our new, synthetic bodies move and explore their environment? What thoughts and emotions will they harbor?
The artists’ works imagine and question possible current and future scenarios of human expression, intimacy and body related issues in the virtual and the analogue space, by means of video, animation, text and augmented reality.

For HYPERTENSION, PYLON will present artworks and content on AOS that is not only the framework, but an integral part of the individual artistic projects. Over the course of the next two months, PYLON will present streams of the artists’ multi-layered projects, including the full-length video-animation and textbook of „reality island is elsewhere“ by Katrin Niedermeier and the 6-part video and poetry web series by Johanna Bruckner.
HYPERTENSION serves not only as a prologue to the upcoming exhibition at PYLON-Lab, but will be its digital extension and reader, complementing the encounter with the artworks and helping to immerse in the content on both a notional and reciprocal level.