‘By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorised and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism—in short, cyborgs.’

—Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto

Christiane Peschek was born in 1984, less than a year before Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto was published. It’s a loose coincidence that might have gone unobserved if it wasn’t for the emergency cardiac surgery Peschek underwent a few months ago. Waking up with an ICD implant in her chest to regulate her heartbeat, Peschek realised that she was now the epitome of the chimera that Haraway had imagined, a fabricated hybrid of machine and organism—in short, a cyborg. In Haraway’s text, the cyborg is a symbol of liberation, a chance to counter the binary thinking—nature/culture, man/woman, civilised/primitive—that has been traditionally used to justify inequality and discrimination. For Peschek, however, the reality was somewhat more ambivalent. Rereading A Cyborg Manifesto during her recovery, the artist realised that the utopian promise of the essay didn’t allow for the fear and uncertainty she felt about a future that is 100 percent dependent on a technological device.

It’s become a cliché to say that an artist works at the intersection of art and technology, but what of the creative whose own body sits at this junction? In SOFT TISSUE, Peschek’s first solo exhibition at Galerie Droste, Düsseldorf, the artist wrestles with the physical, spiritual and emotional implications of entering this new state of being. Undercutting the romanticism of trans and post-humanist theory, the two bodies of work Peschek has created for the show are an attempt to measure the separation between the fantasy and reality of living a hybrid existence.

The sound piece SKINS ON SKINS, 2024 for instance, is an intimate portrait of the artist’s transition in poetic form. Read by Peschek, it equates her operation with a loss of humanity (I’m signals / algorithmic heartbeat / imitating the pace / of my soul), while also simultaneously insisting on this humanity as a means for survival (I still contain of human source / I’m living in co-evolution with technology / a hybrid romance). Presented in the back area of the gallery, which has been shut off from the outside world, the audio envelopes the listener in the artist’s softly spoken words, creating an intimate relationship between them that continues no matter where they are in the space.

Although Peschek is no stranger to self-portraiture, the inclusion of her own biography is a new direction for the artist who previously used her own likeness to comment on wider societal trends, such as the effect of social media on self-image. Several new works on this topic make up the rest of the exhibition, continuing the artist’s long-running series of dye and pastel on polar fleece. Manipulated using filters readily available on smartphones, her selfies mimic the obsessive creation and pursuit of images of youth and beauty on Instagram, and are themselves inspired by the artist’s own feed. Post transition, these pieces have gained new meaning for Peschek, with symbols like the hearts in PRE-TRANSITION 2, 2024 and the splitting of the iris in TRANSITION 1, 2024 coming to signal her new double consciousness. These images, to quote the artist, are ‘a conservation of a very youthful existence’, a way of approaching the topic of aging. But how does this process change for someone implanted with a platinum shell that could last for generations? Afterall, Haraway argues that the cyborg offers a split from our traditional (Western) understandings of life and death. ‘It is not made of mud’ she writes, ‘and cannot dream of returning to dust.’

Imagine entering a space that feels like the inside one’s own body — warm, higher than room temperature with a sonic environment that is akin to hearing under water — a single tone drawn out and distorted. Perhaps it’s the cocooned, garbled sensation of being inside a womb, except there’s no moistness. For the artist Christiane Peschek, the exhibition Fever is the sensation — and fiction — of being in a fever dream; of heat rising from within; the desert as a feeling. The prompt is to imagine one’s own dissolution urged by a feverish hallucination, a place between sickness and desire. The prompt is to contain a barren landscape within.

Mirroring rising temperatures due to now-irreversible climate change that is felt in our bodies, Peschek was inspired by their field research in the Liwa Desert southwest of Abu Dhabi, which borders Saudi Arabia and the Empty Quarter. Glazing NIKA Project Space’s windows is a burnt orange the color of UAE sunsets, evoking a thin membrane that delineates the inside from the outside, indexing a porousness with our surroundings. The gallery walls are also lined with this color rising from the bottom like wind-flattened dunes.

Here seven organisms come into being as fictional figures titled according to tarot card icons Peschek created. Think The Lovers, The Gatekeeper and The Ghost, among others. Supplemented by a 33-card deck, these apparitions come into being in a cloudy white-on-grey as works on silk, digitally manipulated from AI-generated imagery. They conjure the sense of a fossilized past and a hazy future, constantly refashioned and folding like embryos and spines.  More specifically, they reference the ancient Greek and Egyptian symbol of the ouroboros swallowing its own tail in a timeless loop of self-annihilation and rebirth. Taking on an oracular connotation, there is some unspoken wisdom or myth that they bestow. Juxtaposed with three sleek sculptures of an elongated snake tooth, one of which hangs from the ceiling like a hook, dripping an orange venom, this is an otherworldly atmosphere of unknown tools and prophesies. In Peschek’s universe, the snake is the guard and keeper of the desert.

Ancient scroll

Primal hush

This one is dedicated to the ghosts.

Upstairs, an ASMR voice accompanies the viewer on a loop, drawing out this world in soothing tones. Peschek’s ouroboros  morphs, ingesting its venom gland in three Gothic sword-like forms, where an ASMR voice invites you. The gland, a handblown glass vessel encased in a 3D-printed rib cage, symbolizes a defense and anti-aging system turned toxic and self-destructive — a powerful analogy of the autoimmune body attacking itself, as well as the poisoning of Gaia, our planetary home.

Peschek’s practice is concerned with creating tech-accentuated, sensorial spaces for hybrid bodies with ritualized practices that counteract environmental and corporeal damage. Within this idea is an understanding of health – both digital and unmediated – sourced from mystical traditions, alchemy and immersion.

The performative tarot reading which takes place at the exhibition opening is partly dependent on the luck of the draw and partly on magic. Concepts of renewal and the poison as the cure repeat underneath the tarot deck’s undulating grey forms. Bearing AI interpretations that are based on Peschek’s words, the deck presents a utopian vision of interconnected co-existence.

As part of Peschek’s scripting of Gaia — broken down into earth, water, air and fire as separate art installations — this staging of fire proposes a world that  is ready for desertification, fittingly in a country that is 80% desert. Dressed for climate disaster, Fever’s performers each wear a tech-inspired kimono and a down coat embedded with cooling gel packs. Is this a world without humans? No, but as The World card posits, it marks the ending of the cycle of human dominance: “The World is no longer defined by human triumph, but by the Earth‘s quiet reclamation.”

Constructing futures with the help of an Other, Peschek crafts learnings that draw from the body’s knowledge, tech-oracles and a bit of fiction. As Ursula K. Le Guin put it, “My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.”

One of the Girls by Alice Bucknell

“The entire world has been turned into a well-fitted mask for the human face,” reflects theorist Carl Olsson in his essay “Peak Face” (2023). “The world is a Facehugger.” From the Cambrian Explosion to deepfakes, Olson analyses the history and seeming end of the face as the ultimate interface, given the ease with which this platform can be co-opted, manipulated and artificed through digital technologies. From this POV, it’s as if the ultimate paradigm of our individuality—our face—has been stripped of any currency at all. But perhaps there’s something else of value in the anonymous swarm intelligence of a post-facial future? At Annka Kultys Gallery in London, Austrian artist Christiane Peschek presents The Girls Club, a suite of digitally-manipulated selfies that reflect the uncanny powers of a femme face that refuses recognition. Thirteen meticulously-crafted hand-dyed silk works mounted to aluminum frames are enshrined by a black vinyl wall installation that bears the phrase “The Girls Club”. The images, which are all characterized by deep-fried edits to a series of self-portraits taken on the artist’s iPhone, collapse the face into an abstract field of material data, one that can refuse the superstructures of capital and identity that augured it. “Using silk as a carrier for my images is a reference to the human skin,” Peschek explains in an interview. “Its fragile and delicate characteristic is a beautiful contrast to the hard surface of the touchscreen.” With a background in advertising, the artist has a keen understanding of material-driven affect, even while her work takes aim at larger social, cultural, and technological systems that underpin the consumption of images online. With The Girls Club, an ongoing project since 2019, Peschek focuses on the eternal quest for self-presentation within virtual social environments. Drawing on photo editing and retouching tools, Peschek merges her own selfies with an ever-expanding archive of imagery culled from various social media feeds. Like many synthetic intelligence models including the generative adversarial networks (GANs) utilised to generate deepfakes—a digitally manipulated media that replaces one person with the likeness of another—Peschek’s girls are iterative, emerging from a source image that has been modified hundreds of times. The source image in question is the selfie; yet blurred beyond recognition, identity fractures and splits into multitudes. In Peschek’s hands, the selfie becomes less a projection of the self than an abstracted “internet gaze” and a critique of the algorithmic beauty systems that undergird it. Aesthetically, Peschek’s work is something of a paradox: the soft and gauzy imagery belies the aggressive bordering on obsessive treatment of the image, often spawned from pushing an editing tool to its extreme by reapplying it up to a hundred times. In this militant spiral, a popular blurring filter—typically used to conceal blemishes and other imperfections—first enhances the beauty of the face before annihilating it altogether in a wash of abstraction. Here faces are atmospheres, split into their melted composite parts. Mouths appear as gargantuan grimacing slashes: Cheshire cat-like, sinister. Eyes are always shut and often flattened. Very rarely does a baseball hat or some other accessory enter the scene. The rest of the face evades perception, becoming landscape. Enshrined by these digitally-rendered mutations and variations of the self, Peschek’s girls club is partially a series of self-portraits; equally depersonalised, the girl in question here is also all of us. This ideology echoes the argument of theorist Alex Quicho, whose essay “Everyone is a girl online” charts a new politics of “being girl”. Here, girl as collective consciousness (colloquially known as ‘girlswarm’) is both a recognition of the interlocking axes of power, desire, and capital laminated onto all of us (cis men, too, you’re also girls), and a polyvocal war cry for something beyond. Within her practice, Peschek talks about the phenomenon of “becoming image”—this notion follows Quicho’s girlstack, where one may sub for the techno-armageddon in order to collapse the system from inside it. Returning to Olsson’s peak face, the author suggests that perhaps “defacing” the world may be a chance to rescue ourselves from the financialized weapon suite of the facial platform. Likewise, with the infinitely expanding swarm intelligence of Peschek’s The Girls Club—flattened icons who evade their own humanness as much as they reject the financialization of e-femininity—we see a similar spirit of refusal. “Soon, we might be able to look in the mirror and ask ourselves, earnestly, ‘Do we really need this?” Olsson proclaims his vision of a post-facial future. Peschek’s girls critically anticipate that mirror stage; these “supra-individual” portraits refuse the notion of the bounded self as much as they reject the genre of portraiture, ultimately delivering an exit strategy from the superstructures that got us here in the first place. To become unrecognizable is also to become ungovernable; to become girl, in Peschek’s distorted photographic image, is to become an edgeless swarm that critiques its confines while imagining worlds beyond representation.

Liminal Ghosts: Fluid Identities on the Threshold 

Liminality has a quality of ambiguity, it describes a situation where our previous identity structuring stands in ‘between and betwixt’ towards a new way of understanding. A liminal space comes with its uncertainties, it welcomes us to the unknown. Peschek’s exploration of liminality resides at the intersection of reality and the virtual realm, while also pondering the potential for eternity. The desire of disembodiment and liminality has a gnostic history: escaping the body, finding immortality through an afterlife, transcending the body, finding heaven. Some might say the internet has become the new religion, and cyberspace is the new heaven.* This raises the question of how we navigate these virtual heavens. And

 what of our physical bodies? How do they coexist within this threshold?

In Liminal Ghosts, Christiane Peschek examines our transitioning state, she stands in the threshold of reality and virtual as her physicality is in suspense. Christiane Peschek’s artistic practice has a long history of treating virtuality as an extension of ourselves with its possibilities. She focuses on liminal spaces of the internet to research the bodies in transition. Instagram appears as one of these liminal spaces where humans transition from their physicality to hyper-potent and hybrid versions of themselves. The platform, with its curated feeds, serves as an intriguing microcosm of our obsession with self-representation and identity construction. Peschek treats Instagram feeds as archival libraries showcasing a glimpse into our eternal quest for self-presentation, creating an afterlife-like eternity where virtual bodies float in an endless sea of images.

The fluidity of visual possibilities of the internet is shifting by the overstimulation and algorithmic impacts on the visual representations of bodies. The current state of virtual bodies follows a pattern of similar editorial approaches. Christiane Peschek creates folders with images of gendered bodies of the internet and retouches them to reclaim their once fluid existence. Ghost like approach of her portraits transforms the identities to smoothened surfaces. Using retouch as a tool, Peschek positions herself as a caretaker for images, with every stroke, hardened physicality loses its cells into the liquified virtuality. In betweenness of her research shows itself also in the material choices of her work. Retouched images use fleece material as a nest, intriguing viewers for an intimate physical touch. She also applies ink on top of the fleece, adding another layer of liminal exploration of the material. Gallery space transforms into a digital sanctuary with the light reflective elements installed on the walls indicating crosspoints of a grid. 

Liminal Ghosts is an attempt to build a temple where the identity fatigue of the internet is present with its out of the binary existence. Peschek examines the interexistence of transitional bodies, and finds them a fluid presence through her retouches. The exhibition allows us to question self-representation in the times of over stimulation of an internet-driven society. 

* This part of the text builds on the ideas introduced in Be Magazine’s 4th edition Holodecks, published by Künstlerhaus Bethanien Berlin in October 1996.

„The erotic alone is capable of opening us to the continuity of being; it alone opens us to the dazzling play of being.“ 

Georges Bataille

Christiane Peschek invents strange, inviting landscapes: a gentle valley of cells, damp, grayish-yellow hills, porous mountains of skin, yielding walls glowing in pink, waves of hair.

Yet there is nothing in these landscapes that can be clearly located, assigned, or described; nothing that we can clearly recognize. Do we see macro-images of human skin? Microscopic studies? Dream visions? Generative images developed from data collections of artificial intelligence?

Born in Austria in 1984, artist Christiane Peschek works on a comprehensive sensorium and genre-spanning vocabulary to evoke somatic, ephemeral states. Peschek’s intuitive imagery represents awareness of the body prior to cognition, which is why she reverts to the fluid, oozing, unformed, amorphous to evoke indescribable, pre-linguistic, „oceanic“ feelings and states of being. Separation, isolation, and limitation dissolve in a transgressive fusion of all things and bodily states, opening itself to radical simultaneity and ecstatic boundlessness.

Christiane Peschek expands the semantic space of art into the infinite and eternal; yet she always has the body’s unalterable mortality in mind. Transformation and decay as basic principles of human existence bound to the physical form the subtext of this exhibition. What can be represented, said, known, when all things melt, evaporate, congeal? What remains of human beings, of human physique and of human consciousness after the human being? Will the human form survive? How? And why? Where might new forms of human existence emerge between digitality and immediate physical reality that might outlast the end of the Anthropocene? Can the digitally generated image; can generative existence be a redemption from mortality or is it rather the next, logical stage of a coming existence?

Freezing and liquefying, melting and evaporating are transitory elements that correspond most closely to unconscious, dreamlike and prelingual states. Christiane Peschek connects such highly speculative, utopian ideas to experiences of digital space and real space. She uses silk as an image carrier – soft, shiny, translucent- as well as ice, water, mirror surfaces, sound, video, and screens.

Growing, expanding, evaporating, freezing, proliferating, flowing: very possible state of the human body resonates in the different materialities in the exhibition space. In them, the artist stages numerous possibilities for reflection and interaction. Renewal and destruction are the simultaneously existing parameters of human experience. The possibility of having the word „Forever“ tattooed on one’s skin in the exhibition plays with this knowledge.

Christiane Peschek’s work facilitates complete immersion in an experience that mirrors all aggregates of the body, and asks about the past and a possible future of human nature. The installation enables us to get in touch with a utopian, ephemeral, omnipotent corporeality that exists beyond birth and decay, beyond binarity and evaluation, beyond young or old. The artist designs a future body that appears at once needy, vulnerable and supernatural.

Christiane Peschek’s idea of the „generative body,“ which emerges from a process of fused, digitally generated, and modified images, supersedes the idea of the transplanted or cloned body that fascinated science, technology, and art in the 1990s and 2000s. It creates a distinctive form of a loving genesis of future bodies directed towards care and community that is at once utopian, artificial, and not least ecstatic. The erotic component of this kind of artistic, transgressive corporeality, which Christiane Peschek focuses on at the core of her oeuvre, is palpable in all aspects of her work, extending into installation, sculpture, and performance.

Christiane Peschek’s first solo exhibition at Kunst und & Denker Contemporary brings together digital prints on Polarflies (Avatar 1-5, all works 2022), new works by the artist whose „bluriness“ situates them between photography and painting. Portraits with missing eyes, puffy, partially painted lips, and flushed cheeks, framed by different hair colors, lengths, and hairstyles, blur on the tactile image surfaces into softly drawn body landscapes. But what lies hidden behind these blurred compositions? As avatars of the artist, the highly manipulated photographs circulate around autobiographical and fictional identities of youth and retrospectively engage with past body trends, as well as normative sex and gender roles that to this day reproduce generic narratives of femininity in particular.

„I claim my right to be blurry“ is how Peschek describes the use of blur in her self-portraits, which – in times of high-resolution screens, pore-deep close-ups, and categorization through hashtags on social media – becomes a political statement that challenges our algorithmized seeing off and online. Since 1996, the artist has maintained an archive of self-portraits and selfies-which she archived in various publications (Hyperia, years consecutively)-that can be understood as the backbone of all her work. These image templates serve her as a starting point for a digital retouching and optimization process on her smartphone, in which she works on the original image material by touching the screen. Peschek is interested in what happens when the self-optimization process becomes a fetish, and when pixels – similar to the pigment on the canvas – follow hand movements and partially liquefy into distorted compositions. Her longstanding engagement with image editing processes and representations of the digital self is based, on the one hand, on a fascination with the digital as a source of infinite fragments of identity, and, on the other, casts a critical eye on the mirages of these online representations. For the accessibility of body-altering, digital tools and filters in social networks enables today’s users not only to edit their physical appearance with a touch (a „swipe“), but also to come closer to an idealized place of longing for youth and perfection, which is up for negotiation in BLUSH TALES.

Those highly manipulated notions of the ego contrast, especially among adolescents, with the emotional and vulnerable aspects of adolescence, which are often left no room for in digital self-designs. At the same time, for example, notions of innocence, purity, beauty, and virginity are often associated not only with youth but also with femininity, and often serve to justify the protectiveness of young women and deprive them of agency, according to Sianne Ngai in Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (2012). In this sense, the soft tile in Avatar 1-5 of the BLUSH TALES series not only contrasts with the flat, slick production site of the digital screen, but also plays with the aesthetic category of the soft/cute, which, according to Ngai, not only represents an aestheticization of powerlessness, but is also usually „deeply connected to the childlike and the feminine.“ As the title of the exhibition suggests, Peschek observes her (post-)body, located on both sides of the screen, within these seemingly innocuous, soft „tales“ of youth, thereby drawing attention to those fractures that lie hidden behind the blurred gaze of this era and its edgeless facades.

At the biennial „düsseldorf photo+“ on May 31, 2022, Wolfgang Ullrich gave a lecture on what consequences the character and functions of images in the digital space have for photographic art. To what extent is it a danger for them that images in social media are addressed, appropriating, designed for reaction? And how can specifically artistic methods be used to set important counter-accents and thus help photo art to gain all the more legitimacy? – These questions are addressed in the lecture (reproduced here again and somewhat abridged), which also refers to positions exhibited at „düsseldorf photo+“ – to Christiane Peschek as well as Adam Broomberg.

Detsuki stood before the emblazoned, pacifying font of “Oasis”, the title of a solo show by Vienna-based Christiane Peschek, her first in Turkey. Inspired by premodern hamam culture and a perfectly exotic venture into post-Internet, body-positive virtuality, her art embraces the notion that, in the 21st century, the digital and corporal need not be separated any longer. It is a most sensual invitation, as Oasis is filled with textures and aromas, an absolutely site-specific exhibition in which everyone’s presence is as important as the works that make up the radically imaginative series of sculptural installations that transformed Sanatorium’s interior.

With a white-on-white aesthetic, reaching for external forms of purification, down to the salt that is both doused in healing baths, and left over from dead bodies, a wall text offers a comforting greeting, all-inclusive. “The human being in their digitally expanded existence is polymorphically changing shapes and spirits […] they require a care beyond physical sensation […] a sanctuary for their non-binary corporeality to become […] A source where both, the body and mind, can prepare for the sensuality of virtuality.”

Christiane Peschek’s OASIS stands at the intersection of queer political resistance of separatist utopian approach dividing two realities and cultural rewriting. This utopian approach separates virtual from physical and positions a non-binary structure of virtuality (that gives us an opportunity to find anonymous (un)bodies) as a utopia for queer+ beings. In this sense, exfoliation becomes a metaphor to understand the core process and the pre-stage of the fluid virtuality where queer bodies [and (un)bodies] can flow freely under anonymity.

For Austrian weekly newspaper FALTER’s series of Artist Studio Visits, Nicole Scheyerer visited me in my Studio in Vienna. We talked about retouches, softness and virtual eternity. The article in german can be read here:

WDR visited the exhibition LOOK! at Museum MARTA Herford to talk with Christiane Peschek about her installation KYOKO DREAMING and the idea of retouching the self.

Virginia Bianchi Gallery is delighted to present GYM, the online solo show of Austrian artist Christiane Peschek. Transcending the virtual limits of the exhibition, the show consists of an all-round experience that aims to create a journey of intimacy into the visitor’s physical and virtual consciousness.

The artistic practice of Christiane Peschek lives in between the physical and the digital, reality and the cloud. With a strong focus on fluid identity, self-sacralisation and body-screen relationship, Peschek questions and reinterprets our on- and offline identities. Creating elaborate, intimate experiences at the intersection of analog and digital, Peschek’s practice involves extended research into humans’ interaction with near-body technologies, such as smartphones and iPads, often transcending the artistic dimension to touch our most recondite essence.

In GYM, the artist’s first solo show at Virginia Bianchi Gallery, Peschek argues that body-optimising spaces like gyms, fitness clubs and yoga studios have come to replace temples and religious locations: they represent new places of devotion – from an all-mighty God to a self-worship culture.

Moreover, blurring the distinctions between virtual space and corporeal presence, Peschek focused her research on the current wave of fitness and wellness apps, online platforms and mindful retreats we have found ourselves to be absorbed by due to the constrained passiveness of the pandemic. We have grown accustomed to practicing yoga in front of a screen, meditating through a dedicated app or following promising video workouts from Youtube, in continuous research for a godlike state of body and mind.

In this newly created interdependence between virtual spaces, physical body enhancement and mindful living, GYM gives the opportunity to enter in contact with one’s extended digital body and to reach complete physical and spiritual awareness.

The show consists of a virtual, 10-minute workout visitors are invited to experience repeatedly, as a ritual. Conceived as a minimally designed space with multi-sensory elements, the exhibition space has been built to stimulate the visitors to extend their physical bodies and be reshaped in the virtual realm. Similarly, the multilayered design mirrors a deepening of the visitors’ personal experience in the space: on an ethereal, mystical background, the glowing circles hide additional elements that float in the virtual space and enhance the journey into the online present. Once the 10-minute experience has come to an end, we highly encourage you to continue the journey by scanning the QR code: it will give access to EDEN, Peschek smartphone retreat.

The experience of GYM also includes a series of online sessions visitors are invited to attend: increasing in complexity and spiritual depth, the three events will provide you with an interactive demonstration of how to make use and engage with the space of the exhibition.

An interview between myself and curator Jan Gustav Fiedler. The conversation is about our joint work from last year, as well as the significance of digitality, especially through the effects of the Corona pandemic. In the conversation, we deepen themes of transhumanism and the idea of digital devices as extensions of one’s own body, as well as themes of spirituality and intimacy and their compatibility with virtuality. We also take a deeper look at the influence of AI on art and its impact on the world of human emotions.

Seen through dreamy eyes, re-touched by emotions, the current series of Christiane Peschek and Mohamad Abdouni merges analogue aesthetics with intimate screen touches forming genderless body representations.

Beyond the periphery of the skin also means beyond the definition of gender, visioning an Internet based identity that fluidly moves between gender, culture and any kind of normative thinking. As bodies and worlds are drifting apart, the idea of rethinking the body surface lead the two artists to a cooperation that plays with the limits of the screen based image.

The portrait no longer works as a visual information but the inside-out of a mood or emotion remaking our bodies in a way that individually represents what lies beyond the limits of our physical surface:

Imagine the photograph as a non-static image that reacts to the physical touch one applies on it. In that context “re-touching” photographic material means to achieve images that unravel the potential of a touch-based body culture. This reactive “interaction” made possible by the invention of touch screens, creates new relationships between body and image, between body and screen. Also this process evokes the question of what it means to exist in the “extreme” present.

What is authenticity in times of virtual staging? Our society is destined to act. Acting our everyday life became an essential practice of our reality. It’s a need for typification and pointing. Let’s try to stay as fluid as possible. The huge potential of online spaces is the non-existence of physical body type or gender. We all have hundreds of different identities, many different genders, let’s understand our evolution all the direction the virtual space leads us. The digital now is so vulnerable to manipulation.

Our consciousness is increasingly caught on the surface of our touchscreens. Postproduction and manipulation of photographs erase the error and negate the fallibility. Let’s take that chance as a tool for expression beyond the elimination of what we dislike on our physical appearance. From that angle, looking at the portraits of this series, they offer an invitation to rethink our identity in a moment of constant transition in a world that is as fluid as our self.

The article, in French, is a short review about the group exhibition Stormy Weather at Centre Culturel Suisse in Paris. The text reflects on the works of the exhibiting artists, including my site-specific work “Velvet fields”. The text is mainly concerned with a reflexive approach to the concept of the cloud and its significance for the present and the art that springs from it.

In an email interview, I talk with curator Jing Yi Teo about the genesis of EDEN, a virtual retreat designed for smartphones. In this context, we discuss the tensions between body and device in reference to spiritual themes and the connection between religiosity and self-optimization trends of the present. I offer insights into the creation process of EDEN, regarding the collaboration with other artists in the field of sound design and animation, and describe how EDEN has shaped and expanded my artistic practice.

Turkish Translation of an Interview between myself  and the curator Jing Yi Teo.

In the interview we talk about the genesis of EDEN, a virtual retreat designed for smartphones. In this context, we discuss the tensions between body and device in reference to spiritual themes and the connection between religiosity and self-optimization trends of the present. I offer insights into the creation process of EDEN, regarding the collaboration with other artists in the field of sound design and animation, and describe how EDEN has shaped and expanded my artistic practice.

This article describes the conception of my smartphone retreat EDEN. It discusses the virtual design of the space and puts it in relation to modern digitalization practices of the wellness industry and the establishment of spirituality in the smartphone. The article also provides insights into my artistic work and aesthetics.

There is only one way that leads to Eden. This is clearly indicated: „Reboot is not an option“ is written before the path to reflection begins. It is not lived a second time in the art of Christiane Peschek. The native of Salzburg came up with „Eden“ as an app for the smartphone. In contrast to the permanent rotation and permanent sound that the digital world otherwise provides, „Eden“ is an exception. Anyone who embarks on the journey to Eden, in a kind of search for meaning, cannot repeat anything. „You can only have this experience once,“ says Peschek, who works in Vienna. This parallel to real earthly existence happens on purpose. Anyone who sets out into their Eden is confronted with their own existence – and also with their relationship to the smartphone. Peschek’s art questions our handling of digitality, the promises of salvation that are made there, and also the new, virus-induced flight of art into the digital.

In the months of lockdown, digitization in art means that what is familiar is simply displayed on the Internet. Instead of surfing on the walls in closed museums, you surf through worlds of images on the sofa. Literature houses stream readings. In empty opera houses and theaters people sing and play for the living room world. Peschek does it differently. It uses the digital world and its most popular device not only as a screen and surface. „Eden“ is digital art through and through and at the same time manages to put the charms of this world to the test. That’s because of the time you have to take. Nothing goes with click & swipe & zap & away. The way to Eden takes 40 minutes. 40 minutes in close connection with the smartphone to penetrate unexpected rooms.

„Eden“ is a journey into vast worlds of thought, a spiritual adventure. Anyone who sets out has to make various decisions. In the end, this results in a very individual version of „Eden“ for each user, a „Contemplation Room“, which can also be bought in a limited edition 360-degree version in the „Eden“ shop. For full enjoyment, it is recommended to enter it with VR glasses. This is not necessary for the app trip.

This journey is about instincts, desires, daydreams – and it is about deeply engaging with streams of consciousness. „Small thoughts are implanted which can then be formulated in the user’s own head,“ says Peschek.

A gentle angelic voice and floating sounds guide you. „Feel the power of the breath as evidence of your physical presence,“ they hear. There is no clutter. All of the rooms that you cross on the smartphone display on the way to Eden are simple and designed in restrained colors. Seascapes and mysterious pyramids appear. You dive into an underwater world. Some of them are visually reminiscent of record covers by prog rock bands from the 1970s, others of esoteric miracle worlds guides or yoga instructions. At one point you have to choose between „breathing out“ and „breathing in“. And then the accompanying angel says that the key is „contemplation, belief and trust“. In the lockdown, this has turned into a huge online lifestyle business. It is no coincidence that one feels reminded of work-out and meditation applications and digital tools of the wellness industry. „Eden“ exaggerates this search for redemption, this expectation of a power within that guides us and only needs to be awakened with a click and app.

This is where the sophistication of Peschek’s project lies. „Eden“ is an attack on the penetrance and speed of the digital and also on its rituals – but this attack happens right in the middle of the digital and with its most important device, the smartphone.

„I’m interested in people’s desire to search for a kind of perfect state of mind and body,“ says Peschek. This interest has already driven her in earlier work. She studied photography. But for a long time your camera has only been your smartphone. It has long been more than just an instrument or a tool that records our lives. It is a toy and at the same time a compass through messages and appointments.

The smartphone became an extension of body and mind. Peschek makes this clear and plays with it in „Eden“ at the same time. And to make the relationship with the device even better, a „Scared Contact Gel“ is also offered in the shop at the end of the trip. It promises a „deeper sensual contact to your device“. Should you actually use it? After all, it is a work of art.

Can be found online here: www.enter-eden.net

ART MELANGE Studio Talk with Julia Moebus-Puck about my virtual smartphone retreat EDEN and the performative quality of the project and virtual spaces in general. During the conversation, the individual experiences of the users and the possibility of bodily expansion through Eden is discussed as well as the influences digitality has on body and space relations.

I’m excited to present one of my latest work “Kyoko dreaming” for JAPAN REVISITED at the Austrian Cultural Forum Japan. The project was created initially for this show and deals with the idea of post-internet dreaming after a digital lockdown travel to japan. The connection between my Japanese alter-ego Kyoko and the work’s etherisation, which is based on retouching techniques that correspond to Japanese social media trends is part of the concept for this installation.

405_Gallery is proud to present My History Becomes Data, an exhibition featuring works by artist Christiane Peschek. She has a long exhibition record, and has shown her work both in her native Austria as well as abroad. She has received multiple awards for her work, and has been included in many publications.

This exhibition brings together a number of works drawn from several projects undertaken by the artist over the course of her career. The works demonstrate Christiane Peschek’ understanding of the historic representation of human bodies, and a vision of how the future might interpret the way we represent ourselves today.

Peschek’s practice moves seamlessly between photography, painting, installation, sculpture, and bookmaking. She utilizes this interdisciplinary approach to analyze the history of representation of human (often times, but not exclusively, female) bodies. Her scope ranges from prehistoric fertility idols, Greek and Roman sculpture, to the history of portraiture painting—all the way to the present-day all too popular selfie.

The images that Peschek uses in her work are drawn from a large archive of photographs which spans years. Even though they depict bodies, these images are not portraits: she manipulates the photographs through the use of digital software and analog techniques, to the point where the subject depicted is no longer recognizable. This results in mesmerizing compositions which exist somewhere inbetween the uncanny, the humorous, and the melancholic.

Peschek’s work proposes that photographs are not static images, as illustrated through their digital manipulation. This brings up questions about the relationship between individuals and the realm of the digital, and asks: where do the boundaries between the two exist? Are these boundaries fixed? Is our culture headed towards a Post-Human reality where technology and humanity are no longer distinguishable—and is this a cause for acclaim or concern?

Furthermore, this critical approach to her practice is framed through the view of an “Archeology of the Future”. She invites the viewer to consider the conceptual structures that we use to analyze historical representations of ourselves—and most importantly, how the future might understand who we are now, based on the images we leave for posterity.

Peschek’s theoretical reach is expansive, and the material aspect of her practice is innovative. Most importantly, however, she demonstrates a keen sensibility about what it means to be human in a hyperconnected world—with all its perils, promises, and opportunities.

A short review about the exhibition Stormy Weather that deals with the phenomenon of cloud-based data storage and how people deal with this technology that is still quite intangible and incomprehensible for many. The Stormy Weather exhibition features artistic works that explore the metaphorical concept of the ephemeral cloud in contrast to its real-life implications.

In her ongoing work series Velvet Fields (since 2017) Christiane Peschek explores the ambivalences in digital imagery. By creating perfectly romantic, almost natural cloud and sky images with Photoshop, and at the same time revealing their constructed nature, she demonstrates how human-made digital natural phenomena can also become carriers of affects. The image of a romantic evening sky with cotton candy coloured clouds is touching; it reminds us of a mild summer evening on a vacation, even though all elements are just digital imitations and lack any connection with our natural surroundings.

The apparent optimisation of digital images has been problematised in the media, especially concerning the digital retouching of human bodies, which produces unrealistic beauty ideals and societal norms. The debate illustrates that the constructed nature of digital images creates a new frame of reference, when not a new reality: not only for bodies, but also in terms of our natural environment. For example, Christiane Peschek reveals the Photoshop masks behind these perfect images and uncovers the traces of her interventions.

In conversation with Les Nouveaux Riches magazine, I talk about my artistic practice in the context of the phenomenon of self-sacralization on social media platforms and the underlying relationship between near-body technologies and physical bodies. I explain how my digital reality influences my thinking and therefore inevitably the creation of my artworks.

A short review of my solo show „Hyperia“ at the Sophia Vonier Gallery in Salzburg. The text summarizes my work in context of the exhibition at the gallery and provides a general overview of my working methods and creative aesthetics compared with fellow artists Francesca Woodman and Louisa Clement.

THE HUMAN FACE — A MIRROR OF CHANGE

Born in 1984, the artist is interested in the traditional genre of portraiture. In the history of art, portrait painting since the 15th century stands for the struggle for individuality and uniqueness: each person has a unique face, facial expressions, individual appearance. Even in Impressionism, in Art Nouveau, up to the art of the post-war period, the portrait was still a mirror and image of personality. Now, however, new parameters come into play: in times of uncertainty and collective patterns of action, perception changes. Christiane Peschek creates a series of portraits from smartphone photos of her own face, from a series of blurred selfies: her club of girlfriends, her „Girls Club“. Surrounded by mutations and variations of her own self, she is part of a series of portraits that always start from her own likeness.

EIKON AND TÉCHNE

Christiane Peschek applies here not only an iconic alteration program in terms of content, but also a transfer of technique: the digital images are transferred to the finest silk fabric in a special printing process and stretched, as it were, like a canvas painting on stretcher frames. The image (Eikon) bears the traces of transformation and processing (Téchne) and becomes something entirely new: although the printing process, similar to a serigraph, starts from the photographic, here it is merely immaterial data that serves as the basis; only the precious, silky-matte fabric, which comes from the Orient, lends the transformed image visibility.

THE TILLER GIRLS

The media scientist Siegfried Kracauer took the revue troupe of the „Tiller Girls,“ famous in the 1920s, as an example for his theory of the dissolution of the individual. For him, the performances of the dancers, who are not mentioned by name, were „a thoroughly rationalized conglomerate of ornamentally arranged body parts.“ Thus he sees an image that does not strive for individual recognizability, but is interested in image organization per se – just as Christiane Peschek’s „supra-individual“ portraits appear as abstract painting, as it were.