Annika Larsson, Prologue Technologies of Laughter, 2018 [26:18 min.]

The montage serves as audio-visual dialogue-partner and prologue to the work FEAR OF FLYING, which explores Virtual Reality and its relation to the control and rebellion of moving bodies and minds. The video is using contemporary and historic found footage to look into the double faced relations of control and loss of control that happens in the feedback loop between viewer, subject/object, recording device and image.

Annika Larsson is an artist and is professor of time-based media at the HFBK Hamburg. Her work examines the entangled relationship between power, knowledge, embodiment, affect, and visuality within our digital and physical worlds. It looks into conventions and affects that structure the way we perceive, experience, and understand the relationship between images, matter, bodies, systems, and the social world. Engaged with the potential of (human and nonhuman) queer performativity, her work is interested in gestures, affects, rituals, and actions, in patterns of behavior that obscure or challenge power structures. Her works have been widely shown internationally at institutions including Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel; Fundacion la Caixa, Barcelona; Le Magasin, Grenoble; Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Nuremberg; ICA-Institute of Contemporary Art, London; ZKM, Karlsruhe; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; S.M.A.K., Ghent; and Musac, Lyon. She has participated in biennials such as the 49th Venice Biennial, the 8th Istanbul Biennial, and the 6th Shanghai Biennial, among others. Larsson lives and works in Berlin. Since 2018 she has led the artistic research project “Non-knowledge, Laughter and the Moving Image,” funded by the Swedish Research Council and done in collaboration with the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and the HFBK Hamburg.