Biography

Johannes Grenzfurthner is a filmmaker, writer, artist, and performer.

He is the founder and artistic director of monochrom, an internationally-acting art and theory group. He is founder of movie production company monochrom Propulsion Systems.

His films deal with subversion, technology, nerd culture, politics, and the overall problems of life in 21st century capitalism -- for example his documentary features "Traceroute" (2016) and "Glossary of Broken Dreams" (2018) and his horror films "Masking Threshold" (2021) and "Razzennest" (2022).

He is one of the most outspoken researchers in the field of sexuality and technology, and one of the founders of 'techno-hedonism'. He is head of "Arse Elektronika" (sex and tech festival) in San Francisco, "Hedonistika" (food tech festival in Montréal and Tel Aviv) and host of "Roboexotica" (Festival for Cocktail-Robotics) in Vienna.

He gave talks at Fantastic Fest, SXSWi, O'Reilly ETech, FooCamp, Maker Faire, HOPE, Chaos Communication Congress, Google (Tech Talks), ROFLCon, Ars Electronica, Transmediale, Influencers, Mozilla Drumbeat Barcelona, Neoteny Camp Singapore, Columbia University, Carnegie Mellon University...

He and his projects have been featured in The New York Times, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Liberation, Spiegel, San Francisco Chronicle, CNN, Reuters, Slashdot, Playboy, Boing Boing, New Scientist, The Edge, the Los Angeles Times, NPR, ZDF, Gizmodo, io9, Wired, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, CNet, Toronto Star...

Johannes' artistic and textual work are contemporary art, activism, performance, humor, philosophy, postmodernism, media theory, cultural studies, sex tech, popular culture studies, subversion, science fiction and the debate about copyright and intellectual property.
- IMDb mini biography by: monochrom

Likes to wear trucker hats with nerdy references.

I think that Man in creating God somewhat overestimated his abilities.

In a media-based society (and of course there is no such thing as a non-media-based society consisting of more than one person) it is the signs and significants, the meanings and habits and conventions of speaking and thinking, the images and stereotypes which control everything. It is important to analyze how it is represented and of course what is not represented or how it lacks representation. It's not so much Rupert Murdoch - whose assholeness I will not dispute - that we should attack, but rather something I would call the cultural grammar of the public space. Power is formed within such a grammar. Access and non-access to each and every thing is regulated in its realm. Meanings are negotiated there.

Imagination is an abuse of power.

I blame society for Zack Snyder's career.

The human is a narrative being. We construct emotional machines, so-called "stories", to communicate, to share the world in which we live and make it collectively experienceable. And we are pretty good at doing that. Since the primordial soup at some point mendelized into primate brains, we have either been fleeing from big cats or telling others about our escapes from the clutches of big cats. Sitting around the campfire, interpreting and breaking down the world, charging it with aura. Initially this was all very mythopoeic, and slowly it became more differentiated. But even in the post-Enlightenment age, world interpretations are not necessarily particularly rational. Good stories sell well, and the best stories are the ones that hit you in the gut, regardless of whether they would hold up to a Wikipedia check or not.