Johannes Grenzfurthner

Johannes Grenzfurthner (; born 1975 in Vienna) is an Austrian artist, filmmaker, writer, actor, curator, theatre director, performer and lecturer. Grenzfurthner is the founder, conceiver and artistic director of '' monochrom'', an international art and theory group and film production company. Most of his artworks are labeled ''monochrom''.

Grenzfurthner is an outspoken researcher in subversive and underground culture, for example the field of sexuality and technology, and one of the founders of "techno-hedonism".

Boing Boing magazine referred to Grenzfurthner as ''leitnerd'', a wordplay with the German term Leitkultur that ironically hints at Grenzfurthner's role in nerd/hacker/art culture.

Career

In the early 1990s, Grenzfurthner was a member of several BBS message boards. Grenzfurther used his online connections to create ''monochrom'', a zine or alternative magazine that dealt with art, technology and subversive cultures. His motivation was to react to the emerging conservativism in cyber-cultures of the early 1990s, and to combine his political background in the Austrian punk and antifa movement with discussion of new technologies and the cultures they create. The publication featured interviews and essays, by e.g. Bruce Sterling, HR Giger, Eric Drexler, Terry Pratchett and Bob Black, in its experimental layout style. In 1995 the group decided to cover new artistic practices and started experimenting with different media: computer games, robots, puppet theater, musical, short films, pranks, conferences, online activism, which Grenzfurthner calls 'Urban Hacking' or more specific: 'Context hacking', a term that Grenzfurthner coined.

:Context hacking transfers the hackers' objectives and methods to the network of social relationships in which artistic production occurs, and upon which it is dependent. In a metaphoric sense, these relationships also have a source code. Programs run in them, and our interaction with them is structured by a user interface. When we know how a space, a niche, a scene, a subculture or a media or political practice functions, we can change it and "recode" it, deconstructing its power relationships and emancipating ourselves from its compulsions and packaging guidelines.

The group is known for working with different media, art and entertainment formats. Grenzfurthner calls this "looking for the best weapon of mass distribution of an idea".

Conferences and festivals

Grenzfurthner is head of the Arse Elektronika festival in San Francisco (2007), an annual academic and artistic conference and anthology series that focusses on sexuality and technology. The first conference was curated by Grenzfurthner in 2007 to answer questions about the impact of sexuality on technological innovation and adoption.

Grenzfurthner is hosting Roboexotica, the international Festival for Cocktail-Robotics (2002–) which invites researchers and artists to build machines that serve or mix cocktails. V. Vale calls Roboexotica "an ironic attempt to criticize techno-triumphalism and to dissect technological hypes."

Grenzfurthner is head of ''Hedonistika'', a festival for artistic food tech and robotic indulgement. The festival took place in Montréal at the 2014 'Biennale internationale d'art numérique', in Holon, near Tel Aviv at 'Print Screen Festival', and in Linz at Ars Electronica 2022.

Theatre work, performance art

Grenzfurthner wrote and directed theatre plays and pieces of performance (e.g. Eignblunzn) and interventionist art.

Film

Grenzfurther is the CEO of film production company ''monochrom Propulsion Systems''. He is member of the Austrian Director's Guild and the Association of Austrian Documentary Filmmakers.

He wrote and directed shorts and feature films. His first feature film was the independent fantasy-comedy Die Gstettensaga: The Rise of Echsenfriedl (2014). Grenzfurther first feature documentary was ''Traceroute'' (2016), followed by ''Glossary of Broken Dreams'' (2018).
His horror feature '' Masking Threshold'' was premiered at Fantastic Fest in September 2021 and was released by Drafthouse Films.

His horror film ''Razzennest'' had its premiere at Fantastic Fest 2022.

Grenzfurther is developing several feature films, for example, his documentary feature ''Hacking at Leaves''.

Grenzfurthner teamed up with Juliana Neuhuber to co-directing the sci-fi feature comedy ''Je Suis Auto'' (featuring Chase Masterson

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