Johanna Müller
Johanna Müller (*1990) describes herself as a stroller, of the internet, investigating how we move and behave in online spaces. In this context, she understands strolling as an active process of reframing and recontextualizing content, which is manifested in her works through various media such as video, installation object assemblages, and performance. Müller’s works are recognizable by the analysis of phenomena in a networked, increasingly complex, yet surveilled culture of digitality. She focuses, for example, on the phenomenon of the “walled garden,” a controlled, enclosed system to control user behaviour, as seen in the work What If I Was Wrong About What Jesus Looks Like (2021), or meme culture, such as in the work Who the f*** is Karen? (don’t show feelings) (2022). “My soul is a vast and infinite well of energy and creativity, I can draw from it any time that I like to help me think or create.”, ponders the computer-generated voice in Johanna Müller’s work I worked out today and now I’m posing with my art piece (2022). The quote comes from an interview with LaMDA, a neural language model developed by Google. Precisely, it is the text-to-image generator called Midjourney that Müller uses to create a flood of image motifs, starting with a self-portrait with a vase, that constitute the visual component of the video in rapid succession. Müller also recognizes the text-to-image generator, Midjourney, to rapidly produce a flood of images that form the visual level of the video, starting with a self-portrait of the artist with a vase. Still recognizable at times, her face and the vase morph into increasingly bizarre shapes and take on a life of their own in surreal whirlpools of white and blue. The presence of artificial intelligence in Müller’s work implies the capacity for sentience – a quality previously reserved for biological organisms – and thereby positions itself within the highly relevant discourse surrounding the singularity of AI, which has now permeated society through web-based AI software for text, language, and image generation. The jury was impressed by the quality of Müller’s analysis of a variety of social platforms that are used for self-expression.