Johannes Grenzfurthner

Artist, Filmmaker, and Consultant in Vienna, Austria

Johannes Grenzfurthner

Artist, Filmmaker, and Consultant in Vienna, Austria

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Johannes manipulates people to positively respond to his lies and made-up realities, and he feeds off these emotions. He is an award-winning artist, filmmaker, author, and performer.
He lives and works in Vienna, Austria.

He is the founder and artistic director of monochrom, an internationally acting art and theory group and film-production company. Boing Boing referred to him as a leitnerd, a wordplay that ironically hints at his role in nerd/hacker/art culture.

His last films were the feature-length documentaries 'Traceroute' (2016), 'Glossary of Broken Dreams' (2018), and the horror features 'Masking Threshold' (2021) and ‘Razzennest’ (2022). He's working on a couple of films, including the sci-fi comedy 'Je Suis Auto' and the documentary 'Hacking at Leaves'.

Johannes is a lecturer on transmedia arts at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria, and communication theory at Leuphana University, Lueneburg, Germany.

He is head of Arse Elektronika, a sex and tech festival in San Francisco, and organizer of Roboexotica, the Festival for Cocktail-Robotics in Vienna.

Johannes has presented 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, and more.

He and his projects have been featured in The New York Times, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Liberation, Der 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, the Toronto Star, and more.

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.

Johannes identifies as a leftist and atheist. He deals with his claustrophobic tendencies by occasionally burying people alive.