Johanna Hedva
(videogame playthrough videos in accessibility ; immersive installation at HKW Berlin here )
“Many years ago, I went to a witch who guided me through a shamanic trance to find my inner temple and sacred weapons. When I got there it was a cave of black water on a distant moon and my ‘weapons’ were a strand of bowel, a tumor with hair, blood clots, and bits of brain. It’s always made me laugh. Years later Amazon recommended my own book to me. These two events are of the most mystically uncanny of my life. I don’t think we can talk about the mystical only in terms of transcendence. More often it’s a
GLUT (a superabundance of nothing) , by Johanna Hedva, is an inquiry into the knowings and unknowings of embodiment. It is a sound work composed with divination and AI, which manifests as both an immersive physical installation and videogame. The core of GLUT is a sound composition made entirely of Hedva’s voice, ranging from its rawest expression of screams, to two AI vocal clones that, in order to trick the surveillance tactics embedded in AI, have been manipulated to sound ever more de-human.
Johanna Hedva