Johannes Grenzfurthner

Grenzfurthner's name was one of 200 activists, politicians, and artists from Germany, Switzerland and Austria (only one of a total of 10 Austrian names) that were published on an ultra-right doxing list distributed on a variety of online platforms in December 2018 and January 2019. The list's extremist creators threatened "#wirkriegeneuchallee" (sic!) - "We will get you all". Grenzfurthner openly addressed this on online platforms and in lectures.

Grenzfurthner has taken a comedic turn and performed at various venues, e.g. Vienna's Rabenhof Theater. Parts of his comedy show "Schicksalsjahre eines Nerds" form the basis of his documentary film Traceroute (2016). Grenzfurther is a presenter and emcee for various industry events, and guest performer at events like Goldenes Brett. Grenzfurthner has had supporting and lead parts in several theater plays. He performs in Andi Haller's feature film Zero Crash and Michael J. Epstein's and Sophia Cacciola's feature film Clickbait. He portrays one of the two lead charactes in his own film Je Suis Auto.

Grenzfurthner is head of Hedonistika, a festival for artistic food tech. The first installment was presented in Montréal at the 2014 'Biennale internationale d'art numérique'. The second installment was presented in Holon, near Tel Aviv, at 'Print Screen Festival'.

The first feature film he directed 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).

Grenzfurthner lives and works in Vienna. Grenzfurther grew up in Stockerau in rural Lower Austria and talks about it in his stand-up comedy "Schicksalsjahre eines Nerds" (2014) and his semi-autobiographical documentary film Traceroute (2016).

Grenzfurthner published the much debated pamphlet "Hacking the Spaces", that dealt with exclusionist tendencies in the hackerspaces movement. Grenzfurther extended his critique through lectures at the 2012 and 2014 Hackers on Planet Earth conferences in New York City.

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."

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.

Johannes Grenzfurthner (German: [joˈhanəs ˈgrɛntsfʊɐ̯tnɐ] ; 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. Most of his artworks are labelled 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'.

As a child, Grenzfurthner spent a lot of time at his grandparents' farm in the small village of Unterzögersdorf (a cadastral municipality of Stockerau). His grandparents' stories about Nazism, World War II and the Soviet occupation in allied-occupied Austria (1945-1955) influenced monochrom's long-term project Soviet Unterzoegersdorf.