About

Artist Statement

Johannes Thiel (*1999, Germany) works across media – ranging from digital works in the form of graphics and renderings to sculptures and object constellations whose visual language is shaped by mechanical systems, industrial production, and digital form-generating processes. They evoke functional devices, biomechanical prototypes, prosthetic body fragments, or architectural interfaces. Forms reminiscent of exoskeletons or so-called “shields” keep reappearing – outer shells, protective armor, or modular coverings that resemble technical limbs.

His works negotiate the apparent contradiction between technology and organism – not as a binary opposition, but as permeable, overlapping domains. Impulses of construction are transformed into holistic systems. The result is technoid objects: sterile sketches of industrial logic, pseudo-technologies with an emergent-organic, almost creature-like appearance. These hybrid objects are not static but conceived as transformable systems that continuously allow for new constellations and arrangements. They suggest a functionality that ultimately runs into the void – unreadable, almost fictional, revealing pseudo-codings and control logics in the form of movements, signals, and patterns. There seems to be life within them: they tremble, stretch, shift in form or posture, acting like robots on standby – too precise to appear natural, too ambiguous to be read as machines. Their titles exaggerate technical terminology to the point of parody.

Through automated manufacturing processes such as 3D printing, laser cutting, or CNC milling, the digital, generative designs are translated into physical objects. In their formal logic, they intersect with the fields of biomimetics, morphogenesis, and digital parametric design. The resulting structures appear not built, but grown – shaped by industrial protocols, by an algorithmic language whose grammar consists of repetition, mutation, and deviation. Their surfaces are smooth, sealed, sterile, and formally as well as aesthetically devoid of any visible trace of authorship. The human fingerprint vanishes in the depersonalized production processes, leaving behind cold, anonymous entities – bodies without origin, extracted from a world where evolution and technological advancement merge, and a form of corporeality emerges that exists without the human.

The works formulate an imagination of a future archaeology: artifacts of an over-aestheticized technosphere – organic apparatuses oscillating between prototype, fossil, and fiction, interfaces that appear as components of a not fully understood system. They negotiate a posthuman future not as an ideal utopia or dystopian forecast, but as a discourse already taking place in the present and being shaped through contemporary means and technologies. The otherness inherent in these objects is merely a reflection of the now – a present that has long since become futuristic.

Johannes Thiel is currently studying Fine Arts at the UDK Berlin under Prof. Karsten Konrad, he lives and works in Berlin.

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